Page:The Yellow Book - 04.djvu/246

22O Thus Beyle is as far from being an artist as possible. He cares for the forms of the outer world, he spends his life in looking at beauty and listening to it, but only because he knows that that is the way to call up in himself the ideas, the sensations, the emotions that he loves almost with voluptuousness. The basis of genius, he says, in speaking of Michelangelo, is logic, and if this is true—as in the sense in which he used it, it probably is—Beyle's genius was mostly basis.

Merimée says that though Beyle was constantly appealing to logic, he reached his conclusions not by his reason but by his imagination. This is certainly making a false distinction. Beyle was not a logician in the sense that he got at conclusions indirectly by s. He did not forget his premisses in the interest of the inductive process. What he calls logic is an attitude or quality of the mind, and means really abstract coherence. Of what he himself calls ideology, with as much contempt as Zola could put into the word, he says that it is a science not only tiresome but impertinent. He means any constructive, deductive system of thought. He studied Kant and other German metaphysicians, and thought them shallow—superior men ingeniously building houses of cards. His feet seldom if ever got off the solid ground of observations into the region of formal, logical deduction. "Facts! facts!" he cried, and his love of facts at first hand, keeps him from some of the defects of the abstract mind. Every statement is independent of the preceding and the succeeding ones, each is examined by itself, each illustrated by anecdote, inexact enough, to be sure, but clear. There is no haze in his thought. When Merimée says that it is Beyle's imagination and not his logic that decides, he is right, in the sense that Beyle has no middle terms, that his vision is direct, that the a priori process is secondary and merely suggestive with him. "What should we