e; and when he leaves her on finding out the
fraud, blows her brains out. In the other a Spanish lady, seduced and
maltreated by a creole circus-rider of the worst character, declares to
a more honourable lover her incurable passion for the scoundrel and
takes the veil. The rest are stories of the Italian Renaissance, grimy
and gory as usual. Vittoria Accoramboni herself figures, but there is no
evidence that Beyle (although he had some knowledge of English
literature[133]) knew at the time our glorious "White Devil," and his
story dwells little on her faults and much on the punishment of her
murderers. _L'Abbesse de Castro_ itself, _La Duchesse de Palliano_, _San
Francesco a Ripa_, _Vanina Vanini_ are all of the same type and all full
of the gloomier items seen by the Dreamer of Fair Women--

Scaffolds, still sheets of water, divers woes,
Ranges of glimmering vaults with iron grates,

and blood everywhere. And these unmerry tales are always recounted _ab
extra_; in fact, many of them are real or pretended abstracts from
chronicles of the very kind which furnished Browning with the matter of
_The Ring and the Book_. It is, however, more apt and more curious to
compare them with the scenes of Gerard's experiences with the princess
in _The Cloister and the Hearth_, as instances of different handling of
the same matter by two novelists of talent almost, if not quite,
reaching genius.

[Sidenote: _Le Rouge et le Noir._]

This singular aloofness, this separation of subject and spectator by a
vast and impenetrable though translucent wall, as in a museum or a
_morgue_, is characteristic of all Beyle's books more or less. In fact,
he somewhere confesses--the confession having, as always in persons of
anything like his stamp, the nature of a boast--that he cannot write
otherwise than in _recit_, that the broken conversational or dramatic
method is impossible to him. But an almost startling change--or perhaps
it would be more accurate to say reinforcement--of this method appears
in what seems to me by far the most remarkable and epoch-making of his
books, _Le Rouge et le Noir_. That there is a strong autobiographic
element in this, though vigorously and almost violently "transposed,"
must have been evident to any critical reader long ago. It became not
merely evident but _evidenced_ by the fresh matter published thirty
years since.

[Sidenote: Beyle's masterpiece, and why.]

The book is a long one; it drags in part