Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil, described Stendhal as "that remarkable man who, with a Napoleonic _tempo_, traversed _his_ Europe, in fact several centuries of the European soul, as a surveyor and discoverer thereof. It has required two generations to overtake him one way or other; to divine long afterward some of the riddles that perplexed and enraptured him--this strange Epicurean and man of interrogation, the last great psychologist of France." He also spoke of him as "Stendhal, who has, perhaps, had the most profound eyes and ears of any Frenchman of this century." Stendhal said that Shakespeare knew the human heart better than Racine; yet despite his English preferences, Stendhal is a psychologist of the _Racinien_ school. When an English company of players went to Paris in 1822, Stendhal defended them by pen and in person. He was chagrined that his fellow-countrymen should hiss Othello or The School for Scandal. He despised _chauvinisme_, he the ideal globe-trotter. And he was contradictory enough to have understood Tennyson's "That man's the best cosmopolite who loves his native country best." He scornfully remarked that in 1819 Parisian literary logic could be summed up thus: "This man does not agree with me, therefore he is a fool; he criticises my book, he is my enemy; therefore a thief, an assassin, a brigand, and forger." Narrow-mindedness must never be imputed to Stendhal. Nor was he a modest man--modesty that virtue of the mediocre. How much Tolstoy thought of the Frenchman may be found in his declaration that all he knew about war he learned first from Stendhal. "I will speak of him only as the author of the Chartreuse de Parme and Le Rouge et le Noir. These are two great, inimitable works of art. I am indebted for much to Stendhal. He taught me to understand war. Read once more in the Chartreuse de Parme his account of the battle of Waterloo. Who before him had so described war--that is, as it is in reality?" In 1854 they said Balzac and Hugo; in 1886, Balzac and Stendhal. Some day it may be Stendhal and Tolstoy. The Russian with his slow, patient amassing of little facts but follows Stendhal's chaplet of anecdotes. The latter said that the novel should be a mirror that moves along the highway; a novel, he writes elsewhere, is like a bow--the violin which gives out the sound is the soul of the reader. And Goncourt assimilated this method with surprising results. Stendhal first etched the soul of the new Superman, the exalted young man and woman--Julien Sorel and Matilde de la Môle. They are both immoralists. Exceptional souls, in real life they might have seen the inside of a prison. Stendhal is the original of the one; the other is the source of latter-day feminine souls in revolt, the souls of Ibsen and Strindberg. Laclos's Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Marivaux he has remoulded--Valmont is a prototype of Julien Sorel.