ABSTRACT
A worthy cit, meeting Stendhal at a social function, asked him what profession he practised. He does not surrender himself to the claims of the work of art with the devotion of a Baudelaire or a Flaubert. When he creates a character, it is the better to enjoy the world, and himself as reflected therein. Few have been more under the spell of the passion for psychological investigation. With all writers of an intellectual bent, it is a master passion; with Stendhal it became almost an obsession. Innumerable are the minute and helpful observations people owe to Stendhal; they are concise and unique discoveries which have, since his day, become axiomatic; indeed, they form the starting-point of any serious investigation of the emotional and intellectual world. Stendhal owes his supreme position as a psychologist to the fact that he practises the science as an art and not as a profession.
