Page:The Yellow Book - 04.djvu/257

Rh It comes dangerously near to a pose, perhaps, and yet there is genuineness enough in it to make it pathetic. He praises the Italians because they do not judge their happiness. He never ceased to judge his. Nowhere outside of Italy, he thinks, can one hear with a certain accent, "O Dio! com' e bello!" But the implication is quite unfair. I have heard a common French woman exclaim, under her breath, before an ugly peacock, "Dieu! comme c'est beau," with an intensity that was not less because it was restrained. But restraint was Beyle's bugbear. From his own economical, calculating nature he flew almost with worship to its opposite. He is speaking of Julien, and therefore of himself, when he says, in Le Rouge et le Noir: "Intellectual love has doubtless more cleverness than true love, but it has only moments of enthusiasm. It knows itself too well. It judges itself unceasingly. Far from driving away thought, it exists only by force of thought." He calls Julien mediocre, and he says of him: "This dry soul felt all of passion that is possible in a person raised in the midst of this excessive civilisation which Paris admires." Beyle saves Julien from contempt at the end (and doubtless he consoled himself with something similar) by causing him, while remaining a conscious hypocrite, to lose his life unhesitatingly, absurdly, perversely, for the sake of love. Once he has shown himself capable of the divine unreason, of exaltation, he is respectable. Where the enthusiasm is he is blinded; he cannot see the crudity and stupidity of passion. Before this mad enthusiasm the French fineness and proportion is insignificant. He loses his memory of the charm he has told so well. "Elsewhere there is no conception of this art of giving birth to the laugh of the mind, and of giving delicious joys by unexpected words."

As might be expected, Beyle is even more unfair to the