ty with them. To annoy these further by opposing pedantry to
banality, one might say that the aseity is quintessential. There
never--to be a man of great power, almost genius, a commanding
influence, and something like the founder of a characteristic school of
literature--was such a _habitans in sicco_ as Beyle; indeed his
substance and his atmosphere are not so much dry as _desiccated_. The
dryness is not like that which was attributed in the last volume to
Hamilton, which is the dryness of wine: it is almost the dryness of
ashes. By bringing some humour of your own[126] you may confection a
sort of grim comedy out of parts of his work, but that is all. At the
same time, he has an astonishing command of such reality, and even
vitality, as will (one cannot say survive but) remain over the process
of desiccation.

That Beyle was not such a passionless person as he gave himself out to
be in his published works was of course always suspected, and more than
suspected, by readers with any knowledge of human nature. It was finally
proved by the autobiographic _Vie de Henri Brulard_, and the other
remains which were at last given to the world, nearly half a century
after the author's death, by M. Casimir Stryienski. But the great part
which he played in producing a new kind of novel is properly concerned
with the earlier and larger division of the work, though the posthumous
stuff reinforces this.

[Sidenote: _Armance._]

Some one, I believe, has said--many people may have said--that you never
get a much truer notion, though you may afterwards get a clearer and
fuller, of a writer than from his earliest work.[127] _Armance_, Beyle's
first published novel,[128] though by no means the one which has
received most attention, is certainly illuminating. Or rather, perhaps
one should say that it poses the puzzle which Beyle himself put briefly
in the words quoted by his editor and biographer: "Qu'ai-j'ete? que
suis-je? En verite je serais bien embarrasse de le dire." To tell equal
truth, it is but a dull book in itself, surcharged with a vague
political spite, containing no personage whom we are permitted to like
(it would be quite possible to like Armance de Zohiloff if we were only
told less _about_ her and allowed to see and hear more _of_ her), and
possessing, for a hero, one of the most obnoxious and foolish prigs that
I can remember in any novel. Octave de Malivert unites varieties of
detestableness in a way which might be i