HAWTHORNE AND MORAL ROMANCE

poe

EDGAR ALLAN POE

His failures.

With a mind so sensitive, a coinage so rare, and a technique so thorough, it is curious that he should so frequently have failed. And yet, when we examine his failures they are not difficult to explain. They are due in every case, saving only his attempts to be funny, which are like hangman's jokes, to sudden rents in the veils of his illusions, made by single impossible phrases whose impossibility he seems to have been unable to recognise. I could give a hundred examples, but perhaps none better than the excruciating line in an otherwise beautiful poem, where he tells us that

'The sweet Lenore hath "gone before," with Hope, that flew beside.'

Lapses like that destroy like lightning flashes the mysterious atmosphere he has been at pains to create. They are the penalty he had to pay for being a citizen in a youthful democracy. Americans are never safe from the pitfalls of a language that is older than their nation.

His isolation.

In the America of that time, Poe was like the little boy in the grocer's shop, who, while the shopmen are busy with paper and string, dreams of green meadows and scribbles verses on the sugar bags. Even in Europe he would have been one of those men 'who live on islands in the sea of souls.' There are some like Scott and Gautier who are always called by their Christian names,and can talk unreservedly with a thousand. There are others more aloof in mind of whom it is difficult even to think with familiarity. It seems fitting enough to hear of Scott as Walter or Wattie, and of Gautier as Théo, even in old age; but who would have dared to call that man Tommy who heard in tavern song some echo of the music of the spheres? There are men who cannot be habitually good companions, and, when the talk is at its loudest, turn from the crowd, pull aside the curtain, and look up to see the pale moon far above the housetops. Such a man was Poe. He would have been lonely even in the city of Europe where he could perhaps have found three men of his own aloofness from the inessential, his own hatred of the commonplace, his own intense belief in individualism. He was extraordinarily lonely in America. His love of beauty, his elevation of his work above its results in gold, were next to incomprehensible by that people in that chaotic state of their development. Energetic and wholly practical, fiercely busied with material advancement, they could not understand his passionate, impractical, intellectual existence. His biographer, a literary man, remembered not that he was a great artist, but that he died through drink, not that he had made beautiful things but that he had gained little money by doing so. In the Poe who 'reeled across Broadway on the day of the publication ofTheRaven,' in the Poe who died in an hospital, they forgot the reality, and, in their hurry, found it easy to make a melodrama out of a gentle and inoffensive life. Their traditional idea of Poe allows his extravagances to represent him. It is as if we were to describe some hills by saying there was a lightning flash between the peaks. I prefer to think of the little cottage at Fordham, where he lived with his wife and her mother, and their pets, parrots and bobolinks, a peaceful, small citadel held by those three friends against the world. Throughout Poe's harassed existence this note of gentleness and quiet is always sounding somewhere below the discords of penury and suffering.

His work.

The result of his isolation, his poverty, his sensibility, and his intellectual energy was a great deal of work of no value whatever, some melancholy and beautiful verse, critical articles of a kind then new in America, a philosophical poem, some tales of the same flavour as the most delightful of Euclid's propositions, and some other stories that can only be fully enjoyed by those who come to them with the reverence and careful taste it is proper to bring to a glass of priceless wine. It is by them chiefly that he will be remembered. They are a delicacy, not a staple of food. They are not stories from which we can learn life; but they are the key to strange knowledge of ourselves. They leave us richer,not in facts but in emotions. We find our way with their help into novel corners of sensation. They are like rare coloured goblets or fantastic metal-work, and we find, often with surprise, that we have waited for them. That is their vindication, that the test between the valueless and the invaluable of the fantastic. There are tales of twisted extravagance that stir us with no more emotion than is given by an accidental or capricious decoration never felt or formed in the depths of a man. But these stories, like those patterns, however grotesque, that have once meant the world to a mind sensible to beauty, have a more than momentary import. Like old melody, like elaborate and beautiful dancing, like artificial light, like the sight of poison or any other concentrated power, they are among the significant experiences that are open to humanity.

The essayist in story-telling.

Hawthorneis one of the earliest story-tellers whom we remember as much for himself as for his books. He is loved or hated, as an essayist is loved or hated, without reference to the subjects on which he happened to write. He wrote in a community for whom a writer was still so novel as to possess some rags of the old splendours of the sage; an author was something wonderful, and no mere business man. He had not to expect any hostility in his reader, but rather a readiness to admire (of which he seldom took advantage), and an eagerness to enjoy him for his own sake. He could assume, as an essayist assumes when he dances naked before his readers, that they were not there to scoff. He brought a sweet ingenuous spirit into modern story-telling that would perhaps have been impossible had he been writing for a more sophisticated audience. We love him for it. He made books, he said, 'for his known and unknown friends.' As he says it, he brings us all into the circle. When we think of Fielding, Bunyan, or Cervantes, we think ofTom Jones,Pilgrim's Progress, andDon Quixote; when wethink ofElia,Table Talk, andThe Scarlet Letter, we think of Lamb, Hazlitt, and Hawthorne.

Hawthorne and Poe.

This engaging, unsuspicious, essayistical attitude of his would have been quite impossible to Poe; but we must remember that Hawthorne and Poe, although contemporary, knew very different Americas. Poe's birth was a kind of accident, and he approached America penniless, so that she was a hostile place to him, a country of skinflint editors and large terrible towns, from which to escape in books, and, as far as possible, in life. He hated the New America, but he belonged to her. Hawthorne belonged to the old. His family connected him with her history; he was never at her mercy; as we learn from his rambling prefaces, that would be intolerable in a less lovable writer, she was endeared to him by a delightful boyhood, and did not refuse him a peaceful youth of devotion to his art. She never treated him otherwise than tenderly, and he did not leave her until as a representative of her people, nor sought escape from her in books, except for those of his shadowy creatures who could move with greater freedom in a less bread-and-buttery fairyland.

hawthorne

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

Hawthorne's life.

His life, as we learn it from those prefaces and from his biographers, was as gentle as the man himself. We read of quiet days of work in a study from whose windows he could watch the sunlight through the willow boughs; of days on the river with Thoreau in a canoe which thatangular reformer had built with his own hands; of meetings with Emerson walking in the woods, 'with that pure intellectual gleam diffused about his person like the garment of a shining one'; of evenings before the red fire in a little room with white moonlight bringing out the patterns on the carpet, weaving the tapestries of dream that were next day to come alive upon the paper. These people, who were to make the intellectual life of America, were not American in the peace of their existence. Hawthorne, in the newest of all countries, wrote 'in a clear, brown, twilight atmosphere.' He was a lover of secondhand things, and so clothed things with his imagination that all he touched was green with ivy. No contemporary or even historical romances have about them such ancient tenderness and legendary dusk as his. It is extraordinary to think that he was born within two years of Poe. He thought 'the world was very weary, and should recline its vast head on the first convenient pillow and take an age-long nap.' America, at least, had a thousand other things to do, but it was not until he had seen Europe that Hawthorne recognised the fact.

His notebooks.

His notebooks reflect at the same time this quiet life and its excitements, the stirring adventures of an artist in search of perfection. He 'had settled down by the wayside of life like a man under an enchantment.' None but the artist can know how happy such enchantment is. Henotices the flashing soles of a boy's bare feet running past him in the wood, and 'a whirlwind, whirling the dried leaves round in a circle, not very violently.' He writes one day, 'The tops of the chestnut trees have a whitish appearance, they being, I suppose, in bloom'; two days later, unsatisfied, he makes another attempt to fit his words to his impression:—'The tops of the chestnut trees are peculiarly rich, as if a more luscious sunshine were falling on them than anywhere else, "Whitish," as above, don't express it.' One of his biographers, himself no mean artist, suggests that Hawthorne's must have been a dull existence, if in it such trifles were worthy of note. But the frequency of such notes, interspersed by innumerable sketches for stories, is not a sign of the poverty of Hawthorne's life but of its opulence. For Hawthorne, busied always with dim things not easily expressed, every walk was a treasure hunt that might supply some phrase, some simile, that would give blood and sinew to the ghost of an idea.

The material of his work.

His friends were as far removed from the ordinary as himself. He was never 'bustled in the world of workaday.' Even his spell of life as surveyor in the Customs was such that his description of it reads not unlike Charles Lamb's recollections of the old clerks in the South-Sea House. The Customs House was a place of sleep and cobwebs, and the people in it, mostly retiredsea-captains, 'partook of the genius of the place.' 'Pour connaître l'homme,' says Stendhal, 'il suffit de l'étudier soi-même; pour connaître les hommes, il faut les pratiquer.' Hawthorne had never kept company with men; his nature and his circumstances made him learn man from his own heart. He was never hampered as a romancer by the kind of knowledge that would have made him a novelist. He deals not with manners, for he had little opportunity of studying them, nor with passions, for they had not greatly troubled him, but with conscience. He plays upon the strings of conscience, and, dusty as the instrument may be, his playing wakes an echo.

Perhaps if he had been less personal, less lovable, we could not have tolerated his tampering with those secret strings whose music is so novel and so poignant. Certainly we would have found him intolerable if he had been less serious. If he had jangled those fibres with a laugh they would have given no response. If he had waked them with a careless discord they would have broken. We can bear it because he is Hawthorne; we listen to him because he is in earnest. All, in such matters, depends upon the attitude of the artist. War, for example, is a terrible thing in Tolstoy, a joyous thing in Dumas, and an ordinary thing, neither terrible nor joyous, in Smollett. We take to ourselves something of an artist's outlook, and sin is nothing to us unlesswe hear of it from a man to whom it is momentous.

Goya's 'Monk and Witch'.

I remember a little picture by Goya representing a monk and a witch. The woman, with white staring eyeballs, wide nostrils, fallen jaw, shrinks back against the monk in puling terror; and he, crazed utterly, his eyes fixed on nothingness, shrieks with gaping mouth some horrid incantation that drowns the gasping breathing of the witch. Theirs is no physical fear of fire or sword or scourge: they have sinned, and seen the face of God. Before me are a set of reproductions of Holbein's 'Dance of Death.' Death lies before the feet of the burgess in the road, plucks unconcernedly at the robe of the abbot, viciously sticks a spear through the middle of the knight, and snuffs the altar candles in the nun's cell, where her young lover is playing on a guitar. But the picture of Judgment at the end is no more than a careless grace after meat. It is there with propriety but without conviction. Death is a full stop, not a comma. What is it to me that the burgess may have cheated, the abbot be a hypocrite, the knight a roysterer, and the nun a wanton? Death is close at hand to put a stop to the doings of them all. I do not know what was the sin of the monk or the witch, and yet the mere memory of their spiritual terror moves me more than the pictures before my eyes. Their peril is not of this world.

The background of Hawthorne's tales.

Hawthorne's finest stories are a Dance of Death, in which Death is no mere end of a blind alley, but a dividing of the ways. Those dim people he found in his own soul are important to us by their chances of salvation or damnation. Their feet

'Are in the world as on a tight-rope slungOver the gape and hunger of Hell.'[8]

'Are in the world as on a tight-rope slung

Over the gape and hunger of Hell.'[8]

The background to their actions is not happiness and misery, questions of this world only, but righteousness and mortal sin. The fortunes of Hawthorne's characters are shaping for Eternity. When Ethan Brand flings himself into the furnace, what one of Hawthorne's readers ever thought he died there?

Even this dignity of grave belief, combined with the charm of the writer, would not excuse unskilful playing. But Hawthorne is as dexterous on his chosen instrument as Poe on his, and as consciously an artist as Stevenson, who indeed, inMarkheim, plays, no more skilfully than he, Hawthorne's peculiar tune. In the preface toThe House of the Seven Gablesthere is a paragraph that, though long, it is not impertinent to quote. It shows how carefully he had thought out the possibilities, and how scrupulously he had defined the limits, of his chosen art.

Romance and Novel.

'When a writer calls his work a Romance it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, bothas to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience. The former—while, as a work of art, it must subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart—has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own choosing or creation. If he thinks fit, also, he may so manage his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights, and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture. He will be wise, no doubt, to make a very moderate use of the privileges here stated, and especially to mingle the Marvellous rather as a slight, delicate, and evanescent flavour, than as any portion of the actual substance of the dish offered to the public. He can hardly be said, however, to commit a literary crime, even if he disregard this caution.'

There is a hint here of the provincial pedant; 'dishes offered to the public' are a little out of date; but the principles are sound. Hawthorne could not give clear outlines to the results of his 'burrowings in our common nature' unless he set them in an atmospherical medium that made such outlines possible for things so vague and so mysterious. Romance left him free to do so. He could make a world to fit them, a patterned world, coloured to suggest New England, Italy, or Nowhere. He was never forced to shock us by introducing them into quite ordinary life. He never loses command over his 'atmosphericalmedium,' and never weakens the importance of his characters by letting them escape from the dominion of morals. And yet his stories are not 'impaled on texts.' Moral feeling makes them alive, but it is treated like the Marvellous—'mingled as a slight, delicate, and evanescent flavour.' No artist had ever such tricky balances to keep. No artist keeps his balance more successfully.

Devices of craftsmanship.

His artistry is as subtle in the details as in the design. It is hard to examine his stories unmoved. But, if we quiet our consciences, and still the throbbing of our hearts, and force ourselves to read them paragraph by paragraph with scientific calm, we find there are few tales from which we can learn more delicate devices of craftsmanship in making afraid, and in giving reality to intangible and mysterious things. Before such skill the most prosaic reader surrenders his reason and shudders with the rest.

Notice, for example, inRappacini's Daughter, Hawthorne's way of making credible the marvellous. He states the miracle quite simply, and by asking 'Was it really so?' lays, without making his intention obvious, a double emphasis on every point. On every point he throws a doubt, and stamps belief into the mind. When Giovanni wonders if Beatrice is like the flowers in that rich garden of death, in breath and body poisonous, 'to be touched only with a glove, norto be approached without a mask,' Hawthorne suggests that he had grown morbid. We know at once that he had not. A beautiful insect flutters about her and dies at her feet. 'Now here it could not be but that Giovanni Guasconti's eyes deceived him.' We know that they did not. As Beatrice goes into the house, Giovanni fancies that the flowers he had given her were already withering in her grasp. 'It was an idle thought,' says Hawthorne, 'there could be no possibility of distinguishing a faded flower from a fresh one at so great a distance.' We see the dead petals fall like leaves in autumn as she steps across the threshold.

And then notice, inThe Scarlet Letter, his use of simple actions made significant by their contexts. When Hester Prynne has thrown aside, as if for ever, the searing symbol of her outlawry, her child refuses to recognise her, until she picks it miserably up, and pains her bosom once again with the embroidered scarlet character. 'Now thou art my mother, indeed!' cries the child, 'and I am thy little Pearl!' And when Hester tells her that one day the minister will share a fireside with them, and hold her on his knees, and teach her many things, and love her dearly—'And will he always keep his hand over his heart?' the child inquires. It is quite natural in her to notice a peculiar habit, and to cling to a familiar piece of ornament; but her words and actions assume thedignity of portents when we know what they meant to that poor woman and that conscience-stricken man.

The power of details.

The imagination needs straws to make its bricks, and Hawthorne is careful never to set it the impossible task. He knows how to squeeze all the emotion in his material into one small fragment of pictorial suggestion that can be confidently left to produce its effect in concert with the reader's mind. Remember how Goodman Brown, at setting out, looked back and saw 'the head of Faith still peeping after him with a melancholy air in spite of her pink ribbons.' A trifle, apparently, but one that is not to be wasted. After his talk with the devil, he thought he heard his wife's voice above him in the air, as an unseen multitude of saints and sinners were encouraging her to that awful meeting in the forest. '"Faith!" he shouted in a voice of agony and desperation, and the echoes of the forest mocked him, crying "Faith! Faith!" as if bewildered wretches were seeking her all through the wilderness. The cry of grief, rage, and terror was yet piercing the night when the unhappy wretch held his breath for a response. There was a scream, drowned immediately in a louder murmur of voices, fading into far-off laughter, as the dark cloud swept away, leaving the dear and silent sky above Goodman Brown. But something fluttered lightly down through the air and caught on thebranch of a tree. The young man seized it, and beheld a pink ribbon.'—A pink ribbon, a merry little thing that we can see and touch, is made a sudden, awful summary of horror and despair.

He makes nature throb with his own mood, and by imperceptible art weights the simplest words with the emotion of his tale. How are the very tones of madness caught as the young man flourishes the devil's stick and strides along the forest path. '"Ha! ha! ha!" roared Goodman Brown when the wind laughed at him. "Let us hear which will laugh loudest. Think not to frighten me with your deviltry. Come witch, come wizard, come Indian powpow, come devil himself and here comes Goodman Brown. You may as well fear him as he fear you."' That paragraph is the work of a master.

The character of his work.

And yet, artist as he was, Hawthorne lived too near provincialism to show no signs of its influence in his outlook and his work. He could not enjoy statues without clothes. He was able to commit the enormity of typifying a search for the absolute beautiful by the making of a tiny toy butterfly that flapped its wings just like a real one. Nor did he ever reach that conception of his art, of all art, that sets prettiness in niches round rather than upon the altar of the temple. He valued perhaps too highly the simple flowerlike embroidery that is characteristic of his work. When, while he was in the Custom House,this power of facile prettiness deserted him for a season, he produced nothing, and feared that all his power was gone, for it was not in him to conjure without a wand. He thought afterwards that he might have written something with the pedestrian fidelity of the novel; but that was the one thing he could never do. A man who is accustomed to see his pages glimmer with opalescent colour, and to feel the touch of elfin fingers on his brow, is oddly disconcerted in those moments when the little people must be brushed aside like midges, and the glimmering veil be torn by the elbows of a ruder reality. Such men are not so common that we can complain of thedéfauts de leurs qualités. And indeed, in his more solemn stories, instinct with the spiritual terror of Goya's miniature, the grace that never leaves him adds to the effect. A rapier seems never more cruel than in a hand elaborately gloved. What kind of man is that, we ask, who, balancing souls between Heaven and Hell, can never quite forget his friendship with the fairies?

Mérimée's attitude towards writing.

Thereis a lean athletic air about the tales of Prosper Mérimée. Their author is like a man who throws balls at the cocoa-nuts in the fair—to bring them down, and not for the pleasure of throwing. His writing was something quite outside himself, undertaken for the satisfaction of feeling himself able to do it. He was in the habit of setting himself tasks. 'I will blacken some paper,' he writes, 'in 1829,' and he keeps his word. He was not an author, in the modern professional sense, but a man, one of whose activities was authorship. There is a real difference between writers of these classes, the amateurs existing outside their work, the professionals breathing only through it. Gautier, full-blooded, brutal, splendid creature, is almost invisible but in his books. Mérimée, irreproachably dressed, stands beside his, looking in another direction. I am reminded of the sporting gentlemen of Hazlitt's day who now and again would step into the ring and show that they too had a pretty way with the gloves. Late in his life, when one of his juvenile theatrical pieces was to be played for the firsttime, Mérimée went to the performance, and heard a hostile noise in the house. 'Is it me they are hissing?' he asked, 'I am going to hiss with the rest.' I think of Congreve asking Voltaire to consider him as a plain gentleman, not as an author.

merimee

PROSPER MÉRIMÉE

Writing was only one of the interests of Mérimée's life; only one of the innumerable tasks he set himself. He learnt half a dozen languages without being a mere linguist. He travelled in half a dozen countries without being a traveller. He was extremely erudite, but never a bookish scholar. He fulfilled with enthusiasm his duties as Inspector of Ancient Monuments without lapsing into a dusty-handed antiquary. He saw much of the fashionable life of Paris without being a man of the world. He was a courtier without being nothing but a courtier, and could accomplish a state mission without turning into a diplomatist. He studied 'la théologie, la tactique, la poliorcétique, l'architecture, l'épigraphie, la numismatique, la magie et la cuisine,' without being solely a theologian, a tactician, a specialist in sieges, an architect, a decipherer of inscriptions, a coin collector, a wizard, or an undiluted cook. No more was he a writer, as Dumas, Hazlitt, Hawthorne, and Keats were writers. On no shore did he burn his boats. His character was as various as his activities. He was sensualist and sentimentalist, dandy and Bohemian. Evenings begun in the salon of Mme.de Boigne or at the Hôtel Castellane were, his biographer tells us, finished behind the scenes at the Opera. He wrote delightful love-letters, but whole series of his letters to his friends are unfitted for print by consistent indecency. He read his tales to his Empress, and told them in the gipsy tongue by the camp-fires of Andalusian muleteers. His experiments in literature were analogous to his experiments in cooking. Both were expressions of an intense curiosity about life and the methods of life, and a thirst for personal practical efficiency in them all. Never had man more facets in which to see the world. It is important in this essay, that considers only one of them, not to forget that there were others.

The imaginary author of his tales.

It is indeed not easy to see more than one facet of a man's personality at once, and difficult not to assume that this one facet is the whole. Thecurésof the old churches in France who saw Mérimée busied in protecting the ancient buildings from ruin and restoration would have been amazed by the witty dandy of the dinners in the Café de la Rotonde, or by the author ofColomba. Each one of such a man's expressions suggests a complete portrait, but only the composite picture tells the truth. It is difficult not to reason from his work and build up an imaginary author—a discreet, slightly ironical person, who smiles only with the corners of his mouth, never laughs, never weeps, modestly disclaims any very personal connectionwith his tales, and is careful to seem as little moved as may be by the terrible or mysterious things he sets before us. This imaginary polite person, who represented Mérimée in conversation as well as in books, is not Mérimée, but, just now, as I see him quietly smiling in the air before me, I know who he is. He is the conventional raconteur, whose manner every Englishman assumes in the telling of anecdote or ghost story.

Printed and spoken stories.

Perhaps each nation has its own. Perhaps each nation adopts an attitude for anecdote peculiar to its own genius. The French at any rate is very different from the English. The Frenchman will gesticulate in his tale, suit the expression of his face to its emotions, and try, ingratiatingly, to win our indulgence for his story, that becomes, as he tells it, part of himself. The Englishman, more tenacious of his dignity, less willing to hazard it for an effect, throws all responsibility upon the thing itself. In England, the distinction between printed story-telling and story-telling by word of mouth is more marked than elsewhere. The object of both is to interest and move us, but, while the literary artist makes no bones about it, and takes every advantage possible, giving the setting of his tale, its colour scheme, its scent, its atmosphere, the plain Englishman shrinks from all assumption of craftsmanship, sets out his facts bare, rough like uncut stones, and repudiates by a purposely disordered language, perhaps by a fewwords of slang, any desire of competition with the professional.[9]And we, the audience, allow ourselves to be moved more readily by an amateur than by a man who avows his intention of moving us. The avowed intention provokes a kind of hostility; it is a declaration of war, an open announcement of a plan to usurp the throne of our own mind, and to order the sensations we like to think we can control. We are more lenient with the amateur; we wish to save his face; politeness and good-fellowship are traitors in our citadel, and we conspire with the enemy to compass our own yielding.

Mérimée's adoption of the conventions of anecdote.

Mérimée gives his tales no more background than an Englishman could put without immodesty into an after-dinner conversation. He does not decorate them with words, nor try to suggest atmosphere by rhythm or any other of the subtler uses of language. He does not laugh at his jokes, nor, in moments of pathos, show any mist in his eyes. The only openly personal touches in his stories are those sentences of irony as poignant as those of another great conversationalist, whoseModest Proposalfor the eating of little children is scarcely more cruel thanMateo Falcone. His style is without felicities. It has none of the Oriental pomp of Gautier's prose, none of the torrential eloquence of Hugo's; but its limitations are its virtues. Pomp is the ruin of a plain factas of a plain man, and rhetoric rolls facts along too fast to do anything but smooth them. This style, that seems to disclaim any pretension to be a style at all, leaves facts unencumbered, with their corners unpolished. It emphasises Mérimée's continual suggestion that he is not a story-teller, and so helps to betray us into his power. But I cannot understand those critics who find it a style of clear glass that shows us facts through no personality whatever. Always, in reading a Mérimée, I have an impression of listening to a man who has seen the world, and was young once upon a time, who loves Brantôme, and who in another century would have been a friend of Anthony Hamilton, and perhaps have written or had a minor part in memoirs like those of the Count Grammont. And this man is the imaginary mouthpiece of English anecdote, the mask handed from speaker to speaker at an English dinner-table.

Mérimée'sanglomanie.

Mérimée himself had something of the appearance of an Englishman; everything except the smile, according to Taine. No Frenchman can write of him without referring to hisanglomanie. His mother had English relatives, and Hazlitt, Holcroft, and Hazlitt's worshipped Northcote were among his father's friends. He was not baptized in the Catholic religion. He seems to have grown up in an atmosphere not unlike that of many English intellectual families, and veryearly made friends across the Channel for himself. This Englishness perhaps partly accounts for the peculiar attitude he took as a story-teller, and also made possible that curious reconciliation between the virtues of rival schools that the attitude demanded; made possible, that is to say, the apparent paradox of a man whose subjects were Romantic, whose style was almost Classical, and whose stories were yet a prophecy of the Realists. It is not a French characteristic to recognise virtues in more than one type at once, and to combine them. 'Le Roi est mort; vive le Roi.' The French invented that saying. They do not recognise compromises, but are exclusive in their judgments, and regulate their opinions by general rules. A Romantic hates all Classicists, a Realist finds his worst term of opprobrium in the word Romantic. An Englishman, on the other hand, does not think of regulating his affections or actions by a theory. If he has principles, he locks them up with his black clothes for use on special occasions. He keeps a sturdy affection for Oliver Cromwell, without letting his love for the Commonwealth abate in the least his loyalty to the King. Mérimée seems extraordinarily English in being able to own Romantic ideals, without using Romantic method.

The contrast between his manner and his material.

The conversational story-telling depends for its success, not on the wit or charm of the talker, buton the plots of his stories. No more exigent test of the intrinsic power of a tale can be applied than this, of telling it badly in conversation. A good story will sometimes gain by the naked recital of its facts; a bad one is immediately betrayed. Bad stories, in this sense, are those that resemble the women of whom Lyly wrote:—'Take from them their periwigges, their paintings, their Jewells, their rowles, their boulstrings, and thou shalt soone perceive that a woman is the least part of hir selfe.' How many times, in repeating to a friend the story of a book, you have become suddenly aware it was an empty, worthless thing that, in clothes more gorgeous than it had a right to wear, had made you its dupe for a moment. Mérimée was compelled by his method to tell good stories or none. His material, to be sufficiently strong to stand without support, to be built with rigid economy, and to make its effects out of its construction, to be told as if with a desire of making no impression, and to make an impression all the stronger for such telling, could not be of a light or delicate nature. His events had to be striking, visible, conclusive. He had to choose stories in which something happened. There is death in almost every one of his tales. Hence comes the amazing contrast between his work and that of the Romantics. The large gesture, the simple violent passions are his as well as theirs, because he needed them, but, while theymatched their subjects in their temperaments, and wrote of hot blood with pulsing veins, everything in Mérimée's stories is vivid and passionate except the author. The atmosphere of his tales is not warm or moist, but extraordinarily rarified. In that clear air his colours seem almost white. If they were not so brilliant we should not perceive them at all. Even his women are chosen for the attitude. The women a man loves are usually reflected in his work. But Mérimée's women are the women of Romance, dying for love or for hate, ready at any moment to throw their emotions into dramatic action, while the women he loved were capricious, whimsical, tender seldom,outréesnever. The writer needed picturesque women as clear as facts. The man loved women who never betrayed themselves, but were sufficiently elusive to give him an Epicurean pleasure in pursuing them.

An art of construction.

The art of Mérimée's tales is one of expository construction. He was compelled by his self-denials to be as conscious an artist as Poe. He is like a good chess-player who surrenders many pieces, and is forced to make most wonderful play with the few that remain. His effects are got from the material of his tales, not superimposed on the vital stuff like the front of a Venetian palace on the plain wall. He takes his dramatic material, and sets it before us in his undecorated style, so that no morsel of its vitality is wasted,smothering no wild gesture in elaborate drapery, but cutting it out so nakedly that every quivering sinew can be seen. His art has been compared to drawing, but it is more like sculpture. His stories are so cleanly carved out of existence that they are 'without deception.' We can examine them from above and from below, in a dozen different lights. There is no point of view from which the artist begs us to refrain. Behind a drawing there is a bare sheet. Behind a story of Mérimée's there is the other side.

Pointillism in facts.

His art is more like painting in those few tales of the marvellous that are his ghost stories, as the others are his anecdotes. Mérimée had the archæologist's hatred of the mysterious, and the artist's delight in creating it. He reconciled the two by producing mysterious effects by statements of the utmost clarity, the very clarity of the statements throwing the reader off his guard so that he does not perceive the purposeful skill with which they are chosen and put together. There is a school of painting in France, whose followers call themselves Pointillists; they get their effects by laying spots of simple colours side by side, each one separate, each one though in the right position with regard to other spots of other colours placed in its neighbourhood. At a sufficient distance they merge luminously into the less simple colours of the picture. Mérimée's treatment of the marvellous was not unlike this. The vague mystery ofLaVénus d'Illeis not reflected by any vagueness or mystery in the telling of the tale. It is impossible to point to the single sentence, the single paragraph that makes the mystery mysterious. You cannot find them because they do not exist. Instead, there are a hundred morsels of fact. Not one of them is incredible; not one is without a reasonable explanation if an explanation is necessary. And yet all these concrete, simple facts combine imperceptibly in producing the extraordinary supernatural feeling of the tale. Compare this negative manner of treating a miracle with the frank, positive fairy-tale of Gautier'sArria Marcella. The effects of both tales are perfectly achieved, but Arria Marcella belongs to written story-telling. We believe in her because Gautier wishes us to believe, and uses every means of colour and rhythm and sensual suggestion to compel his readers to subject their imaginations to his own. The Venus belongs to story-telling by word of mouth. Hers is a ghost story whose shudder we covet, and experience, in spite of ourselves, in spite of the half-incredulous story-teller, by virtue of those simple facts so cunningly put together.

Strength or charm.

But to write analytically of such stories is to write with compass and rule, dully, awkwardly, technically, badly. It is impossible to express the excellence of a bridge except by showing how perfectly its curves represent the principles of itsdesign, and to talk like an architect of the method of its building. And that is so very inadequate. It is easy to write of warmth, of delicacy, of sweetness; there is nothing harder in the world than to write of the icy strength that is shown not in action but in construction. And although there is a real charm about the shy, active, intellectual man who made them, a charm that is shown in his love-letters, yet there is no charm at all about Mérimée's stories. The difference between them and such tales as Nathaniel Hawthorne's is that between the little Grecian lady in baked clay, who stands upon my mantelpiece, still removing with what grace of curved body and neck and delicate arm the thorn that pricked her tiny foot some thousand years ago, and the copy of an Egyptian god, standing upright, one straight leg advanced, his jackal head set square upon his shoulders, his arms stiff at his sides, his legs like pillars, so strong in the restraint of every line that to look at him is a bracing of the muscles. There is no charm in him, no grace, no delicacy, and he needs neither delicacy, grace, nor charm. Erect in his own economy of strength he has an implacable, strenuous power that any added tenderness would weaken and perhaps destroy.

'I amthe last of the fathers of the church,' said Flaubert, and on this text his niece remarks that 'with his long chestnut coat, and little black silk skull-cap, he had something the air of one of the Port-Royal solitaries.' The metaphor is accurately chosen. Flaubert lived in an atmosphere of monastic devotion to his art, and the solitaries of Port-Royal were not more constant than he to their intellectual preoccupations. A man of excessive openness to sensation, he fled it and was fascinated by it. He would take ever so little of the world and torture himself with its examination because it hurt him to look at it. Life, and especially that life whose sensitiveness was so slight as, in comparison with his own, to have no existence, brought him continual pain. 'La bêtise entre mes pores.' Stupidity touching him anywhere made him shrink like a snail touched with a feather. He hadrecoquillements, shrinkings up, when with his dearest friends, and it was pain to him to be recalled to ordinary existence. He escaped from modernity in dreams of the Orient, but was continually drawn back by memory of the unhappiness that was waiting forhim, to the contemplation of those ordinary people whose slightest act, as he imagined it, struck such a grating discord with himself. An exuberant life like Gautier's was impossible to such a man. He could not be so gregarious a recluse as Balzac. He had to fashion a peculiar retreat, a room with two windows, from one of which he could see the stars, and from the other watch and listen to the people whom he hated and found so efficient as the instruments of his self torture. He found the seclusion he desired in a most absolute devotion to the art of literature, which was in his hands the art of making beauty out of pain. Pain, self-inflicted, was at the starting-point of all his works, and in most of them went with him step by step throughout.

flaubert

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Flaubert and the bourgeois.

An analysis of the pain that Flaubert suffered in examining Philistines, that white light of suffering which throws up so clearly the bourgeois figures on which he let it play, supplies the key not only to the matter of much of his work, but to its manner, and particularly to that wonderful prose of his, whose scrupulosity has been and is so frequently misunderstood. Flaubert was not pained by a bourgeois because he felt differently from himself. He was pained by a bourgeois because a bourgeois did not know that he felt differently from himself, because a bourgeois never knew how he felt at all. Whole wolves hate a lame one. It has never been stated withwhat inveterate hatred a lame one regards whole wolves. And Flaubert was less fitted for life than an ordinary man. He was given to know when he was honest or dishonest to himself. In so far was he, on their own ground, weaker than those others, who never know whether they tell the truth or a lie. He was born as it were with no skin over his heart. He had no need to make guesses at his feelings. What more terrible nightmare could be imagined for such a man than to hear men and women, educated, as the bourgeois are, into a horrible facility of speech, using the language of knowledge and emotion, unchecked by any doubts as to their possible inaccuracy. In all bourgeois life, where language and action have larger scales than are necessary, there is a discrepancy between expression and the thing for which expression is sought. For Flaubert, sensitive to this discrepancy as the ordinary man is not, it was a perpetual pain. And just as a man who has a nerve exposed in one of his teeth, touches it again and again, in spite of himself, for the exquisite twinge that reminds him it is there, so Flaubert in more than one half of his books is occupied in hurting himself by the delicate and infinitely varied search for this particular discord.

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