J. J. Weiss has said that profound immorality is probably an attribute common to all great observers of human nature. It would require a devil's advocate of unusual acuity to prove Stendhal a moral man or writer. His philosophy is materialistic. He wrote for the "happy few" and longed for a hundred readers, and wished his readers to be those amiable, unhappy souls who are neither moral nor hypocritical. His egoism brought him no surcease from boredom. His diaries and letters and memoirs, so rich in general ideas, are valuable for the student of human nature. The publication of his correspondence was a revelation--a very sincere, human Stendhal came into view. His cosmopolitanism is unaffected; his chapters are mosaics of facts and sensations; his manner of narrative is, as Bourget says, a method of discovery as well as of exposition. His heroes and heroines delve into their motives, note their ideas and sensations. With a few exceptions, modern romancers, novelists, psychologists of fiction seem shallow after Stendhal. Taine confesses to reading Le Rouge et le Noir between thirty and forty times. Stendhal disliked America; to him all things democratic were abhorrent. He loathed the mass, upheld the class; an individualist and aristocrat like Ibsen, he would not recognize the doctrine of equality. The French Revolution was useful only because it evolved a strong man--Napoleon. America, being democratic, would therefore never produce art, tragedy, music, or romantic love. It is the fate of some men to exist only as a source of inspiration for their fellow-artists. Shelley is the poet's poet, Meredith the novelist's novelist, and Stendhal a storehouse for psychologues. His virile spirit, in these times of vapid socialistic theories, is a sparkling and sinister pool wherein all may dip and be refreshed--perhaps poisoned. He is not orthodox as thinker or artist; but it is a truism that the wicked of a century ago may be the saints of to-morrow. To read him is to increase one's wisdom; he is dangerous only to fools. Like Schopenhauer and Ibsen, he did not flatter his public; now he has his own public. And nothing would have amused this charming and cynical man more than the knowledge of his canonisation in the church of world literature. He gayly predicted that he would be understood about 1880-1900; but his impertinent shadow projects far into the twentieth century. Will he be read in 1935? he has asked. Why not? A monument is to be erected to him in Paris. Rodin has designed the medallion portrait. II