By Norman Hapgood
The fact that none of his work has been translated into English is probably a source of amused satisfaction to many of the lovers of Beyle. Though he exercised a marked influence on Mérimée, was wildly praised by Balzac, was discussed twice by Sainte-Beuve, was pointed to in Maupassant's famous manifesto-preface to Pierre et Jean; though he has been twice eulogised by Taine, and once by Bourget; and though he has been carefully analysed by Zola, he is read little in France and scarcely at all elsewhere. While his name, at his death scarcely heard beyond his little circle of men of letters, has become rather prominent, his books are still known to very few. His cool prophecy that a few leading spirits would read him by 1880 was justified, and the solution of his doubt whether he would not by 1930 have sunk again into oblivion seems now at least as likely as it was then to be an affirmative. "To the happy few," he dedicated his latest important novel, and it will be as it has been, for the few, happy in some meanings of that intangible word, that his character and his writings have a serious interest.
In one of the Edinburgh Review's essays on Mme. du Deffand is a rather striking passage in which Jeffrey sums up the conditions that made conversation so fascinating in the salons of theFrance
