As a stylist, Beyle is directly descended from the prose writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He formed his style upon Montesquieu's; he occasionally reminds us of Chamfort; he is an admirer of Paul Louis Courier, who, like himself, exchanged a military for a literary career, and whose perspicuous, classic simplicity of style strongly commended itself to him. But when Courier made it his chief aim to attain to perfect harmony and pellucidness of style, when, praising an ancient author, he said of him that he would have let Pompey win the battle of Pharsalus if he could thereby have rounded his own period better, he adopted the standpoint farthest removed from Beyle's. Beyle the stylist has no sense for either colour or form. He neither could nor would write for the eye; the picture was nothing to him in comparison with the thought; he never made even the slightest attempt to write in the manner of Chateaubriand or Hugo. And just as little did he appeal to the ear; poetic prose was an abomination to him; he detested the style of Madame de Staël's _Corinne_, and scoffed at that of George Sand's novels. It was in his scorn of poetic eloquence that he penned the well-known sentence in his letter to Balzac: "When I was writing _La Chartreuse_ I used to read two or three pages of the _Code civile_ every morning, to help me to catch the proper tone and to be perfectly natural; I do not wish to fascinate the reader's mind by artificial means." An author could hardly express greater or more unreasonable contempt for the artistic. Nevertheless, Beyle has artistic qualities. Though the construction of his books is wretched--the drawing of them, so to speak, bad--many of the details are painted with a masterly touch. Though his style is not in the least musical--which is curious in the case of such a worshipper of Italian music--unforgettable sentences abound in his pages. He was not master of the art of writing a page, but he had the genius which sets its stamp on a word or a descriptive phrase. In this respect he is the antipodes of George Sand; her page is always much superior to her word; Beyle's word is far better than his page. He had a genuine admiration for Balzac, but a horror of his style. In _Mémoires d'un Touriste_ he expresses the opinion that Balzac first wrote his novels in sensible language, and then decked them out in the ornamental Romantic style with such phrases as "The snow is falling in my heart," &c. Beyle's own style has the merits and the defects which are the inevitable results of his philosophic and abruptly intermittent mode of thought. It is rich in ideas and guiltless of ornamentation, but it is slipshod and jerky.[2] A horror of emptiness and vagueness is its distinguishing and truly great virtue; writing so full of well-digested matter as his is rare.