Balzac was at the same time producing the earlier studies to culminate in that Human Comedy which was to stand as the chief accomplishment of his nation in the literature of fiction. But Stendhal, sixteen years older, began to print first and to him falls the glory of innovation. Balzac gives full praise to his predecessor in his essay on Beyle, and his letters contain frequent references to the debt he owed that curious bundle of fatuities, inconsistencies and brilliancies, the author of "The Chartreuse de Parme." Later, Zola calls him "the father of us all," meaning of the naturalistic school of which Zola himself was High Priest. Beyle's business was the analysis of soul states: an occupation familiar enough in these times of Hardy, Meredith and Henry James. He held several posts of importance under Napoleon, worshiped that leader, loved Italy as his birthplace, loved England too, and tried to show in his novels the result of the inactive Restoration upon a generation trained by Napoleon to action, violence, ambition and passion. Read to-day, "Le Rouge et Noir," which it is sufficient to consider for our purposes, seems somewhat slow in movement, struggling in construction, meticulous in manner. At times, its interminability recalls "Clarissa Harlowe," but it possesses the traits' which were to mark the coming school of novel-writing in France and hence in the modern world: to wit, freedom in dealing with love in its irregular relation, the tendency towards tragedy, and that subtlety of handling which makes the main interest to depend upon motive and thought rather than upon the external action itself. "Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,"--that might be the motto. The young quasi-hero is Julian, an ambitious worldling of no family, and his use of the Church as a means of promotion, his amours with several women and his death because of his love for one of them, are traced with a kind of tortuous revelation of the inner workings of the human heart which in its way declares genius in the writer: and which certainly makes a work disillusioning of human nature. Its more external aspect of a study of the politic Church and State, of the rivalry between the reds and the blacks of the state religion, is entirely secondary to this greater purpose and result: here, for the first time at full length, a writer shows the possibility of that realistic portrayal sternly carried through, no matter how destructive of romantic preconceptions of men and women. It is the method of Richardson flowering in a time of greater freedom and more cynical questioning of the gods. II