Page:The Yellow Book - 04.djvu/256

230 Of course the charm and the limitations that are everywhere in Beyle's art criticism are the same in his judgments of national traits, which form a large part of his work. Antipathy to the French is one of his fixed ideas, thorough Frenchman that he was; for his own vanity and distrust did not make him hate the less genuinely those weaknesses. Vanity is bourgeois, he thinks, and there is for him no more terrible word. It spoils the best things, too—conversation among others; for the French conversation is work. "The most tiresome defect in our present civilisation is the desire to produce effect." So with their bravery, their love, all is calculated, there is no abandonment. This annoys him particularly in the women, who are always the most important element to him. He gives them their due, but coldly: "France, however, is always the country where there are always the most passable women. They seduce by delicate pleasures made possible by their mode of dress, and these pleasures can be appreciated by the most passionless natures. Dry natures are afraid of Italian beauty." Of course this continual flinging at the French is only partly vanity, self-glorification in being able, almost alone of foreigners, to appreciate the Italians. It is partly contempt for his leading power, for mere intelligence. In his youth he spoke with half-regret of his being so reasonable that he would go to bed to save his health even when his head was crowded with ideas that he wanted to write. It was his desperate desire to be as Italian as he could, rather than any serene belief that he had thrown off much of his French nature, that made him leave orders to have inscribed on his tombstone:

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