separate individual life only so far as they are copies. There is no invention, no construction, no creation. Moreover, there is no style, or no other quality of style than lucidity. He not only lacks other qualities, he despises them. The "neatly turned" style and the rhetorical alike have his contempt. Most rhetoricians are "emphatic, eloquent, and declamatory." He almost had a duel about Chateaubriand's "cime indeterminée des orèts." Rousseau is particularly irritating to him. "Only a great soul knows how to write simply, and that is why Rousseau has put so much rhetoric into the New Eloïse, which makes it unreadable after thirty years." In another place he says he detests, in the arrangement of words, tragic combinations, which are intended to give majesty to the style. He sees only absurdity in them. His style fits his thought, and his failure to comprehend colour in style is not surprising in a man whose thought has no setting, in a man who remarks with scorn that it is easier to describe clothing than it is to describe movements of the soul. He cares only for movements of the soul. The sense of form might have given his work a larger life, but it is part of his rare value for a few that he talks in bald statements, single-word suggestions, disconnected flashes. This intellectual impressionism, as it were, is more stimulating to them than any work of art. These are not poetic souls, it is needless to say, however much they may love poetry. Beyle is the essence of prose and it is his strength. He loved poetry, but he got from it only the prose, so much of the idea as is in dependent of the form, Merimée tells us that Beyle murdered verse in reading aloud, and in his treatise De l'Amour he informs us that verse was invented to help the memory and to retain it in dramatic art is a remnant of barbarity. The elevation, the abandon, the passion of poetry all but the psychology—were foreign to this mind, whose unimaginative prose is its distinction.
