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 parts; and, long as it is, there is stuff in it for a much longer--indeed preferably for two or three. It is not only a _roman passionnel_, as Beyle understood passion, not only a collection of Parisian and Provincial scenes, but a romance of secret diplomacy, and one of Seminarist life, with constant side-excursions of Voltairianism, in religion, of the revolutionary element in politics which Voltaire did not ostensibly favour, however much he may have been responsible for it, of private cynicism, and above all and most consistently of all, of that psychological realism, which is perhaps a more different thing from psychological reality than our clever ones for two generations have been willing to admit, or, perhaps, able to perceive. That--to adopt a division which foolish folk have sneered at directly and indirectly, but which is valuable and almost necessary in the case of second-class literature--it is rather an unpleasant than a pleasant book, must be pretty well apparent from what has been already said of its author and itself. That it is a powerful one follows almost in the same way. But what has to be said, for the first, if not also the last, time in reference to Beyle's fiction, is that it is interesting. [Sidenote: Julien Sorel and Mathilde de la Mole.]