It is plain enough that in Beyle's case the final condition of happiness was understanding. The real aim and object of all his endeavour was a clear understanding of the state of his own mind, and insight into the mechanism of the human soul generally. He was of opinion that prosperity, happiness in love, happiness generally, clears the understanding and sharpens the critical faculty, but was equally convinced that nothing contributes so much to make a man unhappy as want of clear-sightedness. In a letter to a friend, dated Moscow, 1812, he writes characteristically: "The happiness you now enjoy ought to lead you back naturally to the principles of pure _Beylism_. I read Rousseau's _Confessions_ last week. It was simply for want of two or three _Beylean_ principles that he was so unhappy. _The mania of seeing duties and virtues everywhere_ made his style pedantic, his life miserable. After three weeks of friendly intercourse with a man--crash! the duties of friendship, &c." Two years afterwards the man in question has forgotten him; Rousseau seeks and finds some pessimistic explanation. _Beylism_ would have told him: "Two bodies approach each other; warmth and a fermentation result; but every such state is transitory. It is a flower to be voluptuously enjoyed." These words contain a fragment of excellent practical philosophy, and would testify to an unusually well-balanced mind if the practice of their writer's life had corresponded to his theory. But although Beyle was by nature a robust sensualist, and had accustomed himself to a cynical boldness of expression (he shocked George Sand by his cynicism when she and De Musset met him on their way to Italy), and although as a thinker he was what he required a philosopher to be, namely, clear-headed, unimpressionable, and free from illusions (he used to say that to have been a banker was to have gone through the best preparatory school for philosophy), there lay behind the robust temperament and the dryness of the logician an artistic receptivity to every impression, an irritability and feminine sensitiveness which did not fall far short of Rousseau's. And this sensitiveness Beyle retained to the end of his life. In the autobiography (_Vie de Henri Brulard_) which was found amongst his papers, we come upon the following confession: "My sensitiveness is excessive; what only grazes another man's skin draws blood from me. Such was I in 1799; such am I in 1840. But I have learned to hide it all under an irony which the vulgar do not understand." Seldom has a character combined so great a love of spontaneity and straightforwardness with so much calculation and subterfuge; seldom has a mind been so truthful and at the same time so addicted to dissimulation, so ardent in its hatred of hypocrisy and yet so lacking in openness and straightforwardness. [1] See Beyle's dissertation on the subject in a most interesting letter, dated 28th December 1829.