Of far more significance in the evolution of fiction is "Le Rouge et le noir," whose protagonist Julien Sorel is a great and typical creation. His career, though founded in fact,1 is a veritable breviary of hypocrisy that throws no little light on dark corners of Stendhal's own character. The energies that would have won Julien promotion and glory in the army of Napoleon. may not "fust in him unused," but find in the church. the only avenue of rapid promotion and social distinction. In his wider purpose to make his book a "chronicle of the nineteenth century," a realistic study of Parisian society, Stendhal failed because he had neither the knowledge nor the sympathy of Balzac. But in intent "Le Rouge et le noir" is a forerunner of the "Comédie humaine;" and if he did not give a true picture of society, he did render with the keenest analysis a state of mind common to the French youth of the Restoration, and in Julien he showed the world what he himself wished to be thought to be and in some measure was, the strangest mixture conceivable of originality, natural and acquired, of sincerity and pose, of clairvoyance and illusion, of dissimulation and recklessness." The very wrecking of the hypocrite's life at the close through the unconquerable impulse of passion is only an illustration of Stendhal's view that passion is, and ought to be, the supreme arbiter of destiny. Julien's execution is his apotheosis.

Though skilful in the dissection of motives, "Le Rouge et le noir" is careless in style and slovenly in construction. The action is constantly suspended or delayed, while the author belabors the brains of his characters, till the reader is in danger of a sympathetic headache.

1 It is based on facts brought out at the trial of a theological student, Berthelet of Besançon.

The modern psychological school, Bourget and his fellows, may find their method anticipated in the account of Julien's seminary life, and of his reflections in the condemned cell, which it is curious to contrast with Hugo's nearly contemporary "Dernier jour d'un condamné." The Naturalists see their process reflected in Julien's relations to Mathilde and her father, in which there are touches worthy of Flaubert. But as a whole the characters are too "different," as Stendhal would say, from ordinary mortals to suit the disciples of Zola; and Bourget justly sees in "Le Rouge et le noir," as well as in "La Chartreuse de Parme," forerunners of the new psychologic fiction.

But "La Chartreuse de Parme" is indeed all things to all men. Its best-known episode, the battle of Waterloo, strongly recalls the finest work of Zola. Bourget may discern his method once more in the development of the character of Fabrice, who is in many respects a retouching of Julien, essaying the church on the collapse of the empire, but ending his life of adventure in an archiepiscopal see; and both these elements are combined with a strong dose of Romantic passion and so-called "local color." Here the minute dissection of motive alternates with duels, dungeons, poisons, and hair-breadth 'scapes, that suggest without equalling Hugo or Dumas, and import into the Italy of Bonaparte the untamed passions of the Borgias. The characters are still "different;" but the author threw himself into his work with more sympathetic interest, and gave French fiction its first serious study of foreign life.

An unfinished fragment, "Le Chasseur vert," promised more than Stendhal had yet realized in fiction, though the general theme remains the same. Indeed,

it seems as though in his four novels the author had undertaken to project his own condition into four different environments. "What would Henri Beyle have become if he had been an aristocrat?" he asks in "Armance." "What if he had been a plebeian, or an Italian cadet?" he inquires of himself in "Le Rouge et le noir" and the "Chartreuse." And in his last novel he thinks himself of the aristocracy of wealth, the son of a banker, who for sheer ennui enters the army, though he knows it has little to offer save garrison routine. A realistic study of this life, with a faint background of clerical and political intrigue, is all that remains of "Le Chasseur vert."

It would be difficult to resume better the general impression that Stendhal leaves on the modern reader than is done at the close of Zola's striking essay. Stendhal, he says in effect, is great when his logic applies itself to incontestable facts of human nature, but he is only a dilettante of nature when he puts his superior and "different" characters on the rack. He introduced analysis into French fiction, and in it he was exquisite and unique, but he lacked the broad human sympathy of the great romancers. Life is more simple than he made it. Hence he founded no school, though his work was admired and studied by Balzac and Mérimée. The moment of his greatest influence on French letters was, as he had prophesied with curious foresight, in 1880, when the more thoughtful men of letters were beginning to turn from the false and dogmatic Naturalism of Zola, with his persistent mockery of "metaphysical jumping-jacks," of "the continuous and exclusive study of the functions of the cerebrum," and that cynical question, "What became of the nobility of the brain when the belly was sick?"

Men who shrank from these ethics of the dust saw in Stendhal the possibility of a psychological naturalism, and for a time Bourget and his most brilliant followers studied Stendhal, till they came to assimilate and reproduce his very phrases and characters.1

Far the greatest figure, however, in the fiction of this period is Honoré de Balzac,2 the tragic story of whose life is in some measure involved in any effort to measure his genius. He was three years older than Hugo, and was trained as a lawyer, but no discouragement could divert him from literature. To procure resources that might enable him to give himself wholly to letters, he embarked in speculations that left him in financial straits from which his improvidence never permitted him wholly to extricate himself. Determined to win his livelihood by his pen, he practised his hand in youthful romances with which he wisely refused to burden his future reputation, and at thirty began the great series of his "Comédie humaine," though that 1 Cp. Rod, Stendhal, p. 151.

2 Born 1799; died 1850. (Euvres, twenty-four or fifty-five volumes, beside two of correspondence and additional letters first published in "Revue de Paris," from February, 1894, to March, 1895. Of the fiftyfive volumes above, ten are occupied by youthful tales, three by the "Contes drolatiques," and two by dramas. The rest contain the "Comédie humaine," of which there is also an edition in forty-seven volumes with a valuable index to characters appended to each work. Bibliography: Louvenjoul, Histoire des Œuvres de H. de Balzac. Biography: Ferry, Balzac et ses amis; Wormeley, Memoir of Balzac; Lanson in Revue bleue," May, 1895. Criticism: Taine, Nouveaux essais de critique et d'histoire; Faguet, xix. siècle; Zola, Romanciers naturalistes; Flat, Essais sur Balzac, 2 vols.; Sainte-Beuve, Portraits contemporains, i. 432, and Causeries, v. 443. A convenient dictionary of characters is: Cerfbeer et Christophe, Répertoire de la Comédie humaine (reviewed in France, Vie littéraire, i. 145). Abstracts of plots may be found in the otherwise valueless Barrière, L'Euvre de Balzac. Louvenjoul, op. cit. p. 382, reprints an order for reading the novels suggested by Alphonse Boulé.

title was not given to it till 1843, nor the plan of connecting the novels at all conceived till the task was well advanced (1833).

Even this maturer work was produced under pressure, and often betrays the fact, though the Correspondence alone reveals the constant harassing under which his great genius labored, and shows how few bright rays came to lighten his life. He had not even the consolation of unchallenged recognition of his talent, for he had never been willing to crook the pregnant hinges of the knee to a venal press, and those who had praised "Les Chouans," his first acknowledged story, received with studied injustice far stronger works of an author who roused both their envy and their fear. This stung him to a scathing exhibition of the degradation of Parisian journalism, and after the appearance of "Les Illusions perdues" there was almost a conspiracy to hinder the wide circulation of his books and the general recognition of his talent. Yet Balzac was well paid according to the standards of the time. He could have discharged his debts and laughed at his detractors, but he never acquired habits of methodical economy, he travelled freely and even extravagantly, doubled the cost of his publishing by erratic methods of composition and correction, and so, largely by his own fault, lived and died in daily dread of the "privy paw" of the sheriff.

The fundamental materialism of his strongly developed character was stamped on features that are said. to have resembled those of Nero, and found still further expression in a huge frame that resisted for years anxieties and labors that seem almost incredible. At times he wrote eighteen hours a day, and usually twelve even when travelling. His letters to the Countess