Stendhal was continually lamenting his want of ability to write. According to him, a perusal of the _Code Civil_, before composition, was the best way he had found of grooming his style. This may well have something to do with the opinion, handed on from one history of French literature to another, that Stendhal, like Balzac--it is usually put in these very words--_had no style_. It is not, correctly speaking, what the critics themselves mean: to have no style would be to chop and change from one method of expression to another, and nothing could be less truly said of either of these writers. They mean that he had a bad style, and that is certainly a matter of taste. Perhaps the critics, while condemning, condemn themselves. It is the severe beauty of the _Code Civil_ which, makes them uncomfortable. An eye for an eye and a spade for a spade is Stendhal's way. He is suspicious of the slightest adornment: everything that is thought clearly can be written simply. Other writers have had as simplified a style--Montesquieu or Voltaire, for example--but there is scant merit in telling simply a simple lie, and Voltaire, as Stendhal himself says, was afraid of things which are difficult to put into words. This kind of daintiness is not Stendhal's simplicity: he is merely uncompromising and blunt. True, his bluntness is excessive. A nice balance between the severity of the _Code Civil_ and the "drums and tramplings" of Elizabethan English comes as naturally to an indifferent pen, whipped into a state of false enthusiasm, as it is foreign to the warmth [Pg viii] of genuine conviction. Had Stendhal been a little less vehement and a little less hard-headed, there might have been fewer modifications, a few less repetitions, contradictions, ellipses--but then so much the less Stendhal. In that case he might have trusted himself: as it was he knew his own tendency too well and took fright. Sometimes in reading Carlyle, one wishes that he had felt the same kind of modesty: he, certainly, could never have kept to the thin centre line, and we should have had another great writer "without a style." Effect meant little to Stendhal, hard fact and clearness everything. Perhaps, he would often have made his meaning clearer, if he had been less suspicious of studied effect and elaborate writing. Not infrequently he succeeds in being colloquial and matter-of-fact, without being definite.