power of intelligent people," he says; and again: "I was much surprised when, studying painting out of pure ennui, I found it a balm for cruel sorrows." He really loves it. "Ennui! the god whom I implore, the powerful god who reigns in the hall of the Français, the only power in the world that can cause the Laharpes to be thrown into the fire." Hence his love for Madame du Deffand, the great expert in ennui, and for the whole century of ennui, wit, and immorality. Certainly the lack of all fire and enthusiasm, the lack of faith, of hope, of charity, does go often with a clear, sharp, negative freshness of judgment, which is often seen in the colder, finer, smaller workmen in the psychology of social relations. It is a great exposer of pretence. It enables Stendhal to see that most honest Northerners say in their hearts before the statues of Michelangelo, "Is that all?" as they say before their accomplished ideal, "Good Lord! to be happy, to be loved, is it only this?"
But just as Stendhal keeps in the borderland between vice and virtue, shrinking from grossness, and laughing at morality, so he cannot really cross into the deepest unhappiness any more than he could into passionate happiness. Tragedy repelled him. "The fine arts ought never to try to paint the inevitable ills of humanity. They only increase them, which is a sad success . . . . Noble and almost consoled grief is the only kind that art should seek to produce." To these half-tones his range is limited through the whole of his being. Of his taste in architecture, of which he was technically as ignorant as he was of music, Merimée tells us that he disliked Gothic, thinking it ugly and sad, and liked the architecture of the Renaissance for its elegance and coquetry; that it was always graceful details, moreover, and not the general plan that attracted him; which is a limitation that naturally goes with the other.
