In other words, what Beyle loves best is reckless energy, both in action and emotion--energy, whether revealing itself as the irresistibleness of the military genius or the boundless tenderness of the loving woman. Therefore he, the cold, dry cynic, positively worshipped Napoleon.[3] Therefore he loved the women of Milan. Therefore he understood and depicted the life of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy much better even than modern Italian life. A work which he long purposed writing was a _History of Energy in Italy_; and it is not too much to say that his Italian Chronicles, copied, adapted, or imitated from old manuscripts, are equivalent to a psychological analysis of Italian energy.
One utterance will suffice to show that the same love of the unforeseen which had irresistibly attracted him to the war, made of him, when the war was over, a traveller, an emigrant, a cosmopolitan. In a letter in which he tells that he has been transferred to another post and is going unwillingly because of the tender ties which bind him to the place where he is living, he expressly mentions the pleasure which he nevertheless involuntarily feels, "the moment there is any talk of travelling and seeing new life." And it is equally evident that the same love of the unforeseen, the same strong personality, the same recklessness, or, taking it in a profounder sense, genius, which attracted him to woman and made him love more passionately and tenderly than others, reveals itself in the devotion to music and plastic art which made of him the enthusiastic dilettante, cicerone, and biographer. His love for Cimarosa and Correggio, Ariosto and Byron, was a passion. Take his attitude to Byron. His published criticism of the great English poet was severe and cold; he was haughty in personal intercourse with him, disputed with him on the subject of Napoleon, &c.; he actually left unanswered a most charming letter which Byron wrote him seven years after their meeting, because he fancied there was a trace of hypocrisy in the English poet's defence of Sir Walter Scott. But observe the way in which, when he is writing unreservedly, he describes his feelings on the occasion of his first meeting with Byron: "I was at the time wildly enthusiastic on the subject of _Lara_. My second look no longer showed me Lord Byron as he really was, but the author of _Lara_ as I thought he ought to be. When the conversation in the box flagged, Monsieur de Brême tried to get me to speak; but I simply could not; I was too full of awe and tenderness. If I had dared, I should have kissed Lord Byron's hand and burst into tears.... My tenderness made me urge him to take a carriage."[4]