s (and most of all upon that best of them, _Le
Rouge et le Noir_) that Beyle could never have given us a thoroughly
hit-off novel.

[Sidenote: Beyle's place in the story.]

Still, there is always something unfair in making use of "Remains," and
for my part I do not think that, unless they are of extraordinary merit,
they should ever be published. "Death _should_ clear all scores" in this
way as in others. Yet no really critical person will think the worse of
Beyle's published work because of these _anecdota_, though they may, as
actually before us, be taken as throwing some light on what is not so
good in the _publicata_. There can be no doubt that Beyle occupies a
very important position in the history of the novel, and not of the
French novel only, as the first, or almost the first, analyst of the
ugly for fictitious purposes, and as showing singular power in his
analysis. Unfortunately his synthetic gifts were not equally great. He
had strange difficulty in making his stories _march_; he only now and
then got them to _run_; and though the real life of his characters has
been acknowledged, it is after all a sort of "Life-in-Death," a new
manifestation of the evil power of that mysterious entity whom
Coleridge, if he did not discover, first named and produced in
quasi-flesh, though he left us without any indication of more than one
tiny and accidental part of her dread kingdom.

He has thus the position of _pere de famille_, whether (to repeat the
old joke) of a _famille deplorable_ in the moral, not the sentimental,
sense, must, I suppose, be left matter of opinion. The plentiful crop of
monographs about him since M. Stryienski's Pompeian explorations and
publications is in a manner--if only in a manner--justified by the
numerous followers--not always or perhaps often conscious followers, and
so even more important--in his footsteps. Nobody can say that the
picaresque novelists, whether in their original country or when the
fashion had spread, were given to _berquinades_ or fairy-tales. Nobody
can say that the tale-writers who preceded and followed them were
apostles of virtue or painters of Golden-Age scenes. But, with some
exceptions (chiefly Italian) among the latter, they did not, unless
their aim were definitely tragical--an epithet which one could show, on
irrefragable Aristotelian principles, to be rarely if ever applicable to
Beyle and his school--they did not, as the common phrase goes, "take a
gloomy view