Chapter 9

[1]For example: "Julien's answers to these objections were very satisfactory as far as the actual words were concerned, but the tone in which he spoke and the ill-concealed fire which gleamed in his eyes made Monsieur Chélan uneasy. Yet we must not augur too unfavourably of Julien. He had found the very expressions which a crafty hypocrite would have used. This, at his age, was not bad. As to tone and gestures, it is to be remembered that he had lived among peasants and had had no opportunity of studying the great masters. Hardly had he had the privilege of seeing these said gentlemen than he became as admirable in the matter of gesture as in that of language." On another occasion Julien is dining with a brutally cruel governor of a prison. He feels ashamed of the company he is in; he says to himself that he too may some day attain to such a position, but only by committing the same base actions to which his companions have accustomed themselves. "O Napoleon!" he ejaculates, "how glorious was thy day, when men rose to fortune by the dangers of the battle-field! But think of doing it by basely adding to the sufferings of the unfortunate!" Beyle adds: "I confess that the weakness which Julien betrays in this monologue gives me a poor opinion of him. He would be a fit colleague of those gloved conspirators who aim at completely changing the destinies of a great country, but are determined not to have even the smallest scratch to reproach themselves with."

[2]The following consecutive sentences will show at a glance how well and how badly Beyle could write: "Ce raisonnement, si juste en apparence, acheva de jeter Mathilde hors d'elle-même. Cette âme altière, mais saturée de toute cette prudence sèche,qui passe dans le grand monde pour peindre fidèlement le cœur humain, n'était pas faite pour comprendre si vite le bonheur de se moquer de toute prudence qui peut être si vif pour une âme ardente." One has an idea what the writer means, although the sentence, apart from its clumsy construction, is not even logically correct. But immediately upon it follows one which astonishes us equally by its profundity and its wit: "Dans les hautes classes de la société de Paris, où Mathilde avait vécu, la passion ne peut que bien rarement se dépouiller de la prudence, et c'est du cinquième étage qu'on se jette par la fenêtre."

[3]The best appreciations of Beyle are Balzac's criticism ofLa Chartreuse; Taine's ofRouge et Noir; Mérimée's notice in the introduction to Beyle'sCorrespondance inédite, somewhat amplified inPortraits historiques; Colomb's biographical essay; Sainte-Beuve's two articles in theCauseries du Lundi, T. 9; Bussiere's article inRevue des deux Mondesof Jan. 15,1843; Zola's inLes Romanciers naturalists; and Paul Bourget's inRevue Nouvelle, August 15, 1882. Alfred de Bougy'sStendhalis mere plagiarism and self-assertion.

Readers of the present generation—familiar with Victor Hugo's contemptuous allusion to Mérimée inL'histoire d'une Crime, and apt to see in Hugo only the rhetorically poetic republican, in Mérimée the polished, sarcastic secretary of the Courts of Love of the Second Empire—find it difficult to realise that these two men, whom literary and political antipathies in course of time separated so widely, belonged in their youth to the same camp, and associated not merely on peaceful but on friendly terms. On one of the bright spring days of Romanticism, the all-seeing sun beheld the studiously correct author ofMateo Falcone_in shirt-sleeves and apron in Victor Hugo's kitchen, where, surrounded by the whole family, he gave the cook a successful demonstration in the art of preparingmacaroni à l'italienne. And we know that on a certain festive evening Hugo, possibly roused to enthusiasm by that same excellent macaroni, made the applicable and flattering anagram, "M. Première Prose," out of the name Prosper Mérimée.[1]

Victor Hugo himself, at a later period, would have utterly denied the applicability of the anagram (when Mérimée's sober style happened to be praised in his hearing, he ejaculated, "The sobriety of a weak stomach!"), but it may safely be maintained that it exactly expresses the opinion of the oldest living generation of Frenchmen. In the estimation of the elderly cultured man of the world, no style surpasses Prosper Mérimée's.

MÉRIMÉE

Note that I say man of the world; for precision, simple naturalness, and brevity, though they may be admired by the sensuous and picturesque prose authors of a later day and their public, are not the qualities most highly valued by them. The ordinary well-educated Frenchman, on the other hand, likes a story and dislikes description; he is, unconsciously, a firm adherent of the principles propounded in Lessing'sLaokoon, a genuine worshipper of common-sense, who sneers at the Romantic and naturalistic mania for description, and has always infinitely preferred Voltaire's style to Diderot's. The writer who, without confusing his general impression, presents as many facts as possible in the narrowest possible space, approaches the artistic ideal of the average educated man, nay, attains it when, as in Mérimée's case, he combines with this compactness absolute self-control in the matter of tone and style. The older generation in France, to whom the word "Romanticism" has gradually become almost the equivalent of bombastic rhodomontade, can hardly understand how Mérimée was ever reckoned among the Romanticists; they acknowledge that he took part in the first Romantic campaign, but insist that this happened partly by mistake. Jules Sandeau, in welcoming Louis de Loménie, Mérimée's successor in the Académie Française, related, in order to show the kind of Romanticist Mérimée had been, the old anecdote of the gentleman who, during the Revolution of July, impatiently seized the gun of one of the insurrectionists who could not shoot, aimed at a Swiss soldier posted at one of the windows of the Tuileries, shot him dead, and then politely replied to the entreaties of the insurgent that he should keep the weapon which he used so skilfully: "Many thanks, but, to tell the truth, I am a royalist." Mérimée was, Sandeau thus implied, always a Classicist; if, in the first stage of his career, he almost outdid the Romanticists, it was only because he could not withstand the temptation to show them how to shoot. The idea underlying this amusing exaggeration is, however, anything but correct. It is easy to prove that Mérimée, in spite of the classic severity of his style, is in many respects a typical representative of the French Romantic tendency. The more we study his character the more convinced of this do we become.

Prosper Mérimée (born 28th September 1803) came of a family of artists. His father, a man of varied culture, was a good painter, who wrote a book on the technique of his art; his mother was also a painter, well known for her portraits of children; she had a talent for storytelling, and was accustomed to keep her little sitters quiet while she was painting them by telling them interesting tales. The portrait which she painted of her only son in his fifth year gives an equally favourable impression of her talent and of her child's looks. The face possesses a style of beauty very uncommon in such a young boy; for there is something of the pride and intellectual superiority of the distinguished man in this infantine countenance framed in fair, soft curls. The eyes are innocent and frank, but there is mischief in the curve of the sagacious, firmly closed lips. The bearing is that of a little prince.[2]One can quite well understand how this child one day, seeing his parents, who had pretended to be angry with him, laugh behind his back at his tears of repentance, determined "never to ask forgiveness," a determination which he adhered to as a man. His mother, with whom he lived until her death in 1852, was a woman of remarkable strength of character, in whose mind the philosophy of the eighteenth century had engendered such an aversion for every form of religious belief that she would not even allow her son to be baptized—a circumstance which he, in later life, used to mention with a certain satirical satisfaction. To a pious and amiable lady who was using all her eloquence to induce him to undergo the ceremony, he replied: "I will, upon one condition, and that is, that you stand godmother, and carry me, dressed in a long white frock, in your arms."

The outward events of Mérimée's life may be simply and shortly narrated. At the age of twenty-two, after completing the legal studies which form part of the education of most well-to-do young Frenchmen, he made a brilliantdébutas an author. During the following six years he led an independent life in the social circles belonging to the Liberal Opposition, dividing his time between literature and the pursuit of pleasure. In 1831, when his political friends came into power, he was appointed Inspector of Historical Monuments, as successor to Vitet, in whose footsteps he had already followed as an author. He fulfilled the duties of his office zealously and capably. Repeated tours in Spain and England, one in the East, and two in Greece, completed his peculiar training and enriched him with stores of impressions of foreign characters and customs. His extraordinary proficiency as a linguist enabled him to reap every advantage from his travels; he moved about in foreign countries like a native. It is especially unusual for a Frenchman to know as many languages as Mérimée did. He spoke English, Spanish (in all its dialects, including the gipsy language), Italian, modern Greek, and Russian, and had thoroughly studied the literatures of these languages, besides mastering those of ancient Greece and Rome. In his official capacity he published accounts of his travels in France, full of erudite detail; these and some studies on episodes in Roman history procured his election to the Académie des Inscriptions in 1841. In 1844 he was made a member of the Académie Française. Under the Second Empire, as an old friend of the Countess Montijo, he was on intimate terms with the Imperial family; and he and Octave Feuillet were long the only literary ornaments of the new court. In 1853 he was made a Senator. The appointment was beneath his dignity, and his acceptance of it injured his reputation, in spite of the fact that he almost never took part in the deliberations of the Chamber. During his last illness Mérimée heard of the fall of the Empire. He died at Cannes on the 23rd of September 1870.

The inner life of this man, as revealed by his books, is by no means so simple. The character of the youth who went out into the world at eighteen was composed of many conflicting elements. He was exceedingly proud; bold and bashful at the same time. He had an audacious intellect and a shy, reserved disposition. To conceal the shyness, which wounded his pride, he assumed either a stiff, cold manner, or an appearance of frivolity tinged with cynicism. This cynicism became a kind of mannerism with him in conversation with men. As a youth he was certainly not so suspicious and reserved as he afterwards became, but it is a mistake to attribute his general scepticism to any one particular disappointment. He met, like the rest of us, with many disappointments, and was often roughly disillusioned; he was deceived by friends, sacrificed by the woman he loved (d'Haussonville gives particulars in theRevue des deux Mondes, 15th August 1877); he learned to know the world, learned that life is warfare, and that a man has not only to protect himself against false and untrustworthy friends, secret and open enemies, but also against those who, as he himself puts it, "do evil for evil's sake." But if the germs of suspicion had not been in him from the first, a dozen consecutive bitter experiences would not have cured him of faith in his fellow-men; for the man of a trustful nature has always had at least an equal number of contrary experiences which outweigh the others. But Mérimée's nature was as critical as it was productive, and men of his character are apt to make the rule by which we judge the professional critic—that he only deserves trust in proportion as he shows distrust—the rule of their lives. We can imagine the suffering which his own poetic impressionability entailed on a man with Mérimée's highly developed critical sense.

The critical temperament is above everything truthful; and Mérimée was remarkably so. His natural audacity, moreover, impelled him to say exactly what he thought, regardless of conventionalities. One sees from his letters how frank he was by nature, how inclined to speak the undisguised truth, and how impatient of conventional falsehoods and even of alleviating or embellishing circumlocutions. This is especially noticeable in the first volume ofLettres à une inconnue. Even in these love-letters Mérimée is almost rude when it seems to him that the object of his affections has expressed some merely conventional opinion. Though his fear of ridicule and his ever-increasing scepticism did not dispose him to knight-errantry or lead him to court martyrdom, he nevertheless, in his fiftieth year, committed a chivalrous folly of which most men of the world would only be capable in their extreme youth. When his friend, the notorious Libri, was found guilty of having abused his position as public librarian to the extent of appropriating and selling a number of valuable books belonging to the nation, Mérimée, unable to believe Libri capable of such an action, undertook his rehabilitation with an ardour worthy of a better cause, and attacked the committee of investigation and the judges in an article in theRevue des deux Mondes(April 15, 1852), the sparkling wit of which recalls Paul Louis Courier's pamphlets. A professed Don Quixote could not have acted more foolishly; nor is the case much altered if what the initiated maintain is true, namely, that his ardour was inspired rather by Madame Libri than by her husband.

Under the Empire, and even as a courtier, Mérimée preserved his freedom of speech. I am not referring to the fact that he, as a rule, spoke disparagingly of Napoleon III., which is not particularly to his credit, seeing that he accepted office under that prince's government; but even in conversation with members of the Imperial family he combined frankness with courtesy. Writing in July 1859, he tells that the Empress had asked him in Spanish what he thought of the speech made by the Emperor on his return from Italy. "In order," he writes, "to be both straightforward and courtier-like, I answered, 'Muy necesario!' (Very necessary)."

Mérimée's natural tendency to outspokenness was, however, held in check by his pride and shyness. He early learned that the man who makes a naïve public display of his feelings not only lays himself open to ridicule, but invites the sympathy and familiarity of the vulgar crowd; and, as a youth, he resolved that he would never wear his heart upon his sleeve. Nor did it need all his mistrust to discover that the great majority of those around him who made a frank and childlike display of their feelings knew very well what they were about. The men who published their noble-mindedness, their earnestness, their love of morality and religion, their patriotism, &c., in the great market-place of publicity, always seemed to him either to be angling for applause or to be actuated by some business motive. He could not fail to see how well it pays, as a rule, to give expression to noble sentiments and warm feeling, and he found it difficult to suppose others ignorant of the fact. In any case, he could not bring himself to do as they did; he was one of those who cannot bear to proclaim the fact that they love virtue and hate vice, and to be always singing the praises of "the Good, the True, and the Beautiful."

To avoid all comradeship with the calculating "men of feeling," and to protect his emotional life from the gaze of the profane, Mérimée had recourse to the expedient of concealing his quivering sensibility under steely irony, as under a coat of mail. He determined rather to appear worse than he was, than to run the risk of being taken for one of these models of all the virtues. With this aim in view he dealt so hardly with himself that he lost his first fresh, simple naturalness, and acquired instead a manner which, though still natural and simple, was, nevertheless, distinctly a cultivated manner. InLe Vase étrusque, the one of his tales which gives most insight into his own intellectual and emotional life, we read of the hero, Saint-Clair: "He was born with a tender and loving heart; but, at an age when one is liable to receive impressions which last for the rest of one's life, too frank a display of his tender-heartedness drew down upon him the ridicule of his companions. He was proud and ambitious, and valued the good opinion of others, as all children do. Thenceforward he made it his study to conceal all the outward manifestations of what he regarded as a dishonourable weakness. He attained his aim, but his victory cost him dear. He succeeded in hiding the emotions of his feeling heart from others, but, by shutting them up in his own breast, he made them a thousand times more painful. In society he acquired the lamentable reputation of being unfeeling and careless, and in solitude his restless imagination created torments for him which were the more unbearable because he would confide them to no one." It is impossible to ignore the direct self-portraiture in this character sketch, though the colouring is too sombre.

[1]Victor Hugo raconté par un témoin de sa vie, ii 159. Eugène de Mirécourt:Mérimée, 25.

[2]A reproduction of the portrait is to be found in Maurice Tourneux'sProsper Mérimée: ses portraits, ses dessins, sa bibliothèque.

Thus prepared, Mérimée, at the age of eighteen, made the acquaintance of Henri Beyle, who was twenty years his senior. They met at the house of the famous singer, Madame Pasta, who had left Milan and taken up her residence in Paris. It was inevitable that Beyle should exercise considerable influence over a kindred spirit so much his junior. Direct proof of this influence can hardly be given, for, before he met Beyle, Mérimée had written nothing; but, if we compare the works of the two authors, the resemblance between some of their peculiarities is striking; and the comparison is further instructive because it serves to throw Mérimée's own special characteristics into strong relief. I consider it impossible that Mérimée can have influenced Beyle, unless, indeed, we reckon as influence the communication of general information; for Beyle is undoubtedly indebted to Mérimée for many of the observations on the subject of art in hisMémoires d'un Touriste. Of the two minds Beyle's was obviously the first matured; therefore, when the younger of the two friends begins his biographical notice of the elder with the assertion that, in spite of their friendship, they had hardly had two ideas in common in the course of their lives, this obvious exaggeration may reasonably be attributed to the writer's anxiety to prevent his readers from applying certain of his remarks on Beyle to himself.

Beyle and Mérimée resemble each other, in the first instance, in their love of fact. All Mérimée's readers know that what he presents them with is the bare, accurately demonstrable fact, the exactly drawn detail. All that he cares for in history, as he himself confesses in hisChronique du Règne de Charles IX., are the anecdotes; and of these he prefers the kind which illustrate the manners and types of character of the period. Exactly the same can be said of Beyle. Anecdote is positively the natural form of his thought; he thinks in anecdotes. He paints the individual in anecdotes, the period in biographies. His aversion for the vague leads him to write the kind of history which seems to him most full of life, in other words, to communicate fact in the form of a novel, or of a short, realistic drama. And the pithy, short anecdotes which he relates are never commonplace, but invariably the striking expression of some essential fact. In so far the resemblance to Mérimée is marked. When a modern admirer of Beyle (Paul Heyse) praises his short Italian tales, "in which strong, reckless passions assert themselves without any self-deception, and take their course with a fiery, or cold, heedlessness of consequences, prepared in the last resort to have recourse to the knife," we feel that these expressions might, without the alteration of a word, be applied to Mérimée's stories.

Nevertheless, a story as communicated by Mérimée conveys such a different meaning from a story as communicated by Beyle, that it is easy to determine the limits of the elder man's influence upon the younger. Beyle's salient characteristic is the tendency to generalise. The trait of character which is exhibited in any given action, is to him only an instance; it illustrates a psychological law, or is the evidence of certain social conditions or racial peculiarities, which it is of great consequence to him to elucidate. When, for example, he fills his bookDe l'Amour_to repletion with anecdotes, he does it merely for the purpose of showing, in a practical and impressive manner, what he means by the different names which he gives to the different varieties of the passion and their different stages of development. To obtain the reader's assent to the conclusions he draws, he presents his material, his arguments, in the form of anecdotes. In his novels this tendency to generalise has almost a distracting effect. He too frequently explains to his reader: "She acted in such and such a manner because she was an Italian; a Parisian would of course have acted very differently."

No traces of anything similar are to be found in Mérimée's writings; no reflections or divagations—strictly accurate, bold representation of his fact, and nothing more. When he has chosen his subject, which is most frequently some survival of ancient savagery that has attracted his attention as an old coin among modern ones attracts the eye of the connoisseur, or an old building in a modern town the eye of the traveller, his whole aim is to make the curious phenomenon stand out in as strong relief as possible from the insipid dead-level of his own day; he removes everything which might prevent the strange survival of the past from producing its full effect; but such a proceeding as tracing its connection with the general condition of the society or country of which it bears the impress, never occurs to him. To see things in their whole bearing is not his affair: the bird's-eye view he leaves to others. He seeks and finds a curious phenomenon in the world of reality, delineates it, and in the process of reproduction imparts to it some of his own life; but he never regards it as anything but the curious phenomenon. And he is as strictly matter-of-fact in interpretation as in delineation. Note, for example, how he protests (in hisPortraits historiques et littéraires) against any symbolic interpretation ofDon Quixote, in which work he refuses to see anything but a masterly parody of the romances of chivalry. "Let us leave to solemn German professors," he exclaims, "the honour of the discovery that the Knight of La Mancha symbolises poetry and his squire prose. The interpreter will always discover in the works of a man of genius a thousand poetical intentions of which their author was entirely ignorant." Contrast with this kind of criticism the following fine passage from Sainte-Beuve. "This book, originally a purely topical work, has become part of the literature of the world. It has conquered the imagination of humanity. Every reader has worked his will with it, has shaped it to his taste.... Cervantes did not think of this, but we do. Each one of us is a Don Quixote to-day, a Sancho Panza to-morrow. In every one of us there is more or less of this discordant union of a high-flying ideal with the plain common-sense which keeps close to the ground. With many it is actually only a question of age; a man falls asleep Don Quixote and awakes Sancho Panza." Beyle would have endorsed these sentiments; Mérimée was kept from doing so by his antipathy to generalisation.

Their love of the fact in its simplicity produced in both Beyle and Mérimée a strong aversion for French classic rhetoric; and both are distinguished from all contemporary French Romanticists by the fact that they do not substitute lyric poetry for that rhetoric. Beyle never wrote a line of poetry; he had no ear whatever for rhythm. In spite of the enthusiastic admiration which he imagined he felt for the Italian poets, he regarded metre as merely an assistance to memory, and could see no reason for it in a composition not intended to be learned by rote. Mérimée is characterised by a similar dislike of verse. He had such a repugnance to the effeminate, languishing music of rhyme, that the numerous poems cited in his writings are, without exception, rendered in prose; he preferred letting them lose all their character to translating them in verse. The explanation naturally suggests itself that he did not feel capable of writing poetry. But I am rather of opinion that it was his pride which would not allow him to submit his poetry to the criticism of the public. HisLettres à une inconnueshow that he could write English verse, so the question can hardly have been one of inability. But such talent as he had, he did not cultivate; an aversion to display of feeling, a shy reservedness, produced the same practical result as Beyle's want of ear.

In this matter, however, as in various others, Mérimée outdoes his master. In the depths of Beyle's soul there was a lyric tendency; it finds its way to the surface in his persistent enthusiasm for Napoleon, for Italy, for the sixteenth century, for Cimarosa and Rossini, Correggio and Canova, and in all the superlatives which flow almost as abundantly from his pen as from Balzac's. Mérimée, on the other hand, not content with banishing the lyric form from his works, entirely abjures the spirit; he walls himself in; no prose is less lyrical than his.

In order to obtain an adequate impression of his literary matter-of-factness, let us for a moment compare his tales, not with Beyle's, but with George Sand's first novels, which were written about the same time. What George Sand offers us in hers is, principally, such a masterly revelation of the inner life of a young woman, with its modesty and its enthusiasm, its impulse to self-devotion and its susceptibility to passion, as no woman had ever given to the world before; but in the deepest recesses of her soul there is a purpose; she has a wrong to avenge, wrath to satisfy; she does not see the sufferings of the female sex from the standpoint of an outsider; she does not try to conceal that her heart has bled. Mérimée, on the other hand, has no cause, no theory, no political or social bias whatever. He has no enthusiasms and believes in nothing, neither in a philosophic system, nor in a school of art, nor in a religious truth; scarcely even in the general progress of humanity. The sceptical man-of-the-world, he hardens his heart against all reformers, missionaries, improvers of the world, and saviours of humanity; he does not answer the question whether or not he agrees with them; he turns a deaf ear to it. George Sand shows what marriage is in France, and asks her public with a quivering voice: "What do you say to this? Is it to be endured?" Mérimée writesLa double Mépriseand ends his tale without moving a muscle of his face.

As a rest from overpowering emotion George Sand goes back to primitive human nature, and with simple, beautiful touches delineates (as in Mauprat) the power and the happiness of faithful love, or produces (as in the peasant stories andJean de la Roche) simple, touching, ideal representations of the innate nobility of the human soul. Mérimée does not believe in the ideal, and has no talent for the idyll. There is a sombre, dusky tone over everything he paints; the impulse of the soul towards a purity which it loves, or a heroism which it admires, is foreign to his art. In her inmost heart George Sand is the lyric poet. Whether she makes the passion of love the centre of her book, concedes it every right and gives it her whole sympathy even when it inspires an unworthy character (as in that remarkable and profoundly suggestive tale,Valvèdre), or whether she is carried away by her admiration for the courage and strength of character of the best of her own sex, she always shares the emotions and passions of her characters, rejoices, weeps, sighs, and smiles with them. Mérimée, on the contrary, resembles Beyle in giving an impersonal, dramatic expression to his ideas and feelings, and surpasses him in the artistic skill with which he does it. He has been at great trouble to shut up his feelings in his own breast, has imposed silence upon them, the absolute silence of the prison cell, and never, never once, does he give expression to them in his own name. He gives voice to them only through fully responsible characters, and that but sparingly. The characters thus evolved stand out before us with unusual vividness, and their language is peculiarly laconic and vigorous. The more intense and tender Mérimée's emotion originally was, the prouder is its outward bearing. There is nothing feminine in him. Even in his female characters it is not their femininity which he brings out. Beyle, a marked contrast to him in this respect, makes, in writing to him, the true and apt observation, that his novels are wanting in "delicate tenderness."[1]His women are masculine and logical in their passions; almost all of them are powerful individualities; even the most frivolous and immoral meet death with quiet fortitude (Arsène Guillot, Julie de Chaverney, Carmen). None of them have the melting Correggio-like quality which Beyle imparted to his female characters.

Beyle's more lyric style and profounder understanding of true womanliness are principally due to the fact that he was at heart an imaginative enthusiast. His matter-of-factness is only skin deep. Hence enthusiasm itself was a favourite theme of his, whereas it was one which Mérimée avoided. Compare them, for instance, as delineators of battle scenes; compare the two best prose descriptions of battles in existence at that time, Mérimée's famousL'Enlèvement de la Redouteand Beyle's equally famous account of the battle of Waterloo. They present a striking contrast. In Beyle's pages we have a youth's enthusiasm for Napoleon and thirst for military glory depicted with a touch of irony, but also with genuine sympathy; in Mérimée's we have only the dark side of war—the half-mechanical assault on a redoubt, and the tumult of battle, which he paints with as masterly a hand as Gérôme's, without thought of patriotism, enthusiasm, or any more elevated sentiment than soldier-like stoicism and hope of promotion.

Beyle and Mérimée resemble each other in their attitude to religion, which was a peculiar one for Romanticists. The French Romanticists were originally as little inimical to Roman Catholicism as the German. Several of them began life as good Catholics, and the attitude of the rest was, generally speaking, one either of respect or indifference. But both Mérimée and Beyle were from the very first thoroughly pagan in thought and feeling. And Mérimée's free-thought, as well as Beyle's, was of the ardent type. He was not naïve enough to cherish a species of enmity towards a personal God, but he shared Beyle's detestation of the representatives of religion. His dislike of Christianity is, however, far more indirectly expressed than Beyle's, which is incessantly forcing itself on our notice. He does not, like Beyle, hate Catholicism; he only smiles at it. He never puts out more than a finger tip from under his black domino. It amuses him to describe insinuating Catholic priests; and when his characters have occasion to speak of baptism, confession, or any other religious ceremony, he is apt to make them do it "in a sanctimonious, nasal tone." But when the words are his own, we never have more than such cautious, subtle irony as is contained in the following passage. "It was a religious book which Madame de Pienne had brought with her; and I do not intend to tell you its title, in the first place because I do not wish to injure its author, in the second, because you would probably accuse me of desiring to draw some opprobrious inference regarding such books in general. Suffice it to say that the work in question was written by a young man of nineteen, with the special aim of restoring hardened sinners of the female sex to the bosom of the Church, that Arsène was terribly exhausted, and that she had not closed her eyes the whole of the previous night. Whilst the third page was being read, that happened which would have happened whatever the book had been—Mademoiselle Guillot closed her eyes and fell asleep."

Here again the difference between Beyle and Mérimée is mainly conditioned by the fact that the former was far less sceptical than the latter. Beyle was a materialist of the school of the Encyclopedists, and as such had firm beliefs. He had his philosophy—Epicureanism, to which he adhered faithfully; his method—psychological analysis; his religion—the worship of beauty in life, in music, in the plastic arts, and in literature. Mérimée has no philosophy; one cannot imagine anything less dogmatic than his half-stoical, half-sensual turn of mind; and he has no religion; he worships nothing. He avoids enthusiasm as carefully as if it were a disease. We are impressed by this fact in reading his remarks on Leonidas and the battle of Thermopylæ in the famous essay on Grote'sHistory of Greece. He tells how he himself some years before had spent three days at Thermopylæ, and confesses that, "prosaic as he is," it was not without emotion that he climbed the little height where the last of the Three Hundred fell. But he did not allow himself to be overcome by his emotion. He examined the Persian arrow-heads, and found that they were of flint—these Asiatics, therefore, were but poor savages in comparison with the Europeans; if we have cause to marvel at anything, it is that they made their way through the Pass at all. He proceeds to criticise Leonidas severely for having occupied this impregnable position himself, leaving the other pass, which was much more difficult to defend, in charge of a coward. The death of Leonidas was undoubtedly the death of a hero; but let us picture to ourselves, if we can, his return to Sparta after having surrendered the key of Hellas to the Barbarians. Mérimée comes to the conclusion that Herodotus has written history as a poet, and moreover as a Greek poet, whose chief aim it is to throw the beautiful into strong relief; and he ends with the question: Can it be said that in this case the fiction is of more value than the truth? Ninety-nine men out of a hundred would unhesitatingly answer: Yes. Mérimée does not. He is writing in 1849, and with recent historical tragedies in his mind he answers: "Possibly. But it was by misrepresenting Thermopylæ, misrepresenting the ease with which three hundred free men could resist three million slaves, that the orators of Italy persuaded the Piedmontese to pit themselves alone against the Austrians." Compare with this sceptic spirit of Mérimée's the enthusiastic and simple faith with which Beyle retails the untrustworthy legend of Beatrice Cenci.

The period of 1830 was a time when the most eminent authors of France were very much on their guard against any excess in the matter of patriotism. The newly aroused appreciation of the merits of foreign literatures led, by a natural reaction, to contempt for their own and its classic authors, and even at times for the French spirit generally. The first, tolerably foolish, attack made by the Romantic School on Racine is a well-known episode. French classic literature was declared to be a literature only suitable for the schoolroom. Victor Hugo, who was by no means generally lacking in national pride, exclaimed, in the preface toLes Orientales: "Other nations say, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare. We say, Boileau." Hugo's youth had been spent in Spain, and he treated Spanish themes in his first dramas (Inez de Castro, Hernani), retaining the Spanish division of the play into days instead of acts. Spain and Italy were the Promised Land of the budding Romanticists. Alfred de Musset wroteContes d'Espagne et d'Italie; Théophile Gautier never wearied of showering maledictions on the cold climate and colourless customs of France, called Spain his true fatherland, &c., &c.

Beyle and Mérimée both exemplify in a very marked degree this protest against national vanity. In Beyle's mouth the word "French" was almost a term of contumely; his satirical appellation for Frenchmen wasles vainvifs; his books teem with such ejaculations as: "Could anything be more comical than to ascribe depth of character to a Parisian?" He calls his country, "le plus vilain pays du monde, que les nigauds appellent la belle France." We have seen that he eventually renounced his nationality. Mérimée, who was almost as much in love with Spanish as Beyle with Italian customs, had the essentially Romantic leaning to the foreign, the exotic; and he too, like his older friend, considered one of the leading traits of French national character to be that constant attention to the opinion of others (le qu'en dira-t-on) which destroys all originality, makes a joyless thing of life, and forms the best foundation for the hypocrisies of society. His general opinion of his countrymen was a tolerably low one, and he took no pains to conceal the fact from them. But, unlike Beyle, he in the end proclaimed his allegiance to the old gospel, the old creed, of patriotism. The step was not an easy one for a man who hated patriotic phrase-mongering like the plague; it took nothing less than the downfall of France to draw any expression of love for his country from his lips. But in a letter dated September 13, 1870, he writes: "All my life long I have endeavoured to keep free from prejudices, and to be a cosmopolitan rather than a Frenchman; but all these philosophic draperies are of no avail. I bleed to-day from these stupid Frenchmen's wounds, I weep for their humiliations, and, ungrateful and foolish as they are, I love them in spite of everything."

In his estimate of Beyle's character, Mérimée (in this agreeing with Sainte-Beuve) decides that one of its most marked traits was his fear of being duped. "Thence arose," he writes, "that artificial hardness, that overdone analysis of the low motives of all generous actions, and that resistance to the first impulses of the heart, all of which, in my opinion, was more assumed than real. The aversion and contempt with which sentimentality inspired him often led him into the contrary exaggeration, to the great scandal of those who, not knowing him intimately, took all that he said of himself literally." This fear of being duped, with all its consequences as here described, was quite as characteristic of Mérimée himself as of Beyle; only that Mérimée, being of a more refined nature, had to do more violence to himself in the process of acquiring that cynical tone which in the end became as natural to him in intercourse with men as was insinuating gallantry in intercourse with women. He too, as a young man, enjoyed being considered a monster of immorality; and it was only when some comic incident, such as that of the country lady's refusing to travel alone with him in the diligence,[2]showed him what his reputation really was, that he felt a few days' remorse for his folly. Horror of hypocrisy actually made Mérimée a hypocrite, inducing him to feign vice and hard-heartedness; and his fear of being deceived not only led him to deceive others, but to cheat himself out of many pure and simple pleasures. It is not only on the stage, as Gorgias says, that the dupe is often wiser than the man who is never duped. He who does not live in constant fear of treachery has more courage, is more productive, realises more of the possibilities which lie latent in his soul.

In Mérimée's case the constant fear of exposing himself had two bad consequences which it had not in Beyle's. In the first place, it produced in him in course of time a kind of official stiffness. As a member of the Academy and of the Senate, and as the trusted favourite of the Imperial family, he had to appear in public and make speeches on occasions when he could not but inwardly laugh at the figure he cut and at his own words. Beyle never placed himself in a position which obliged him to speak with respect of things he scorned, or to pay compliments to blockheads. It was a sincere feeling which he expressed in the words: "When I see a man strutting about a drawing-room with any number of orders on his coat, I involuntarily think of all the meannesses and the contemptible, nay, often treacherous actions which he must have committed to have amassed so many proofs of them."

In the second place, the fear in question made Mérimée so severely critical of himself as an author that he became unproductive. Beyle's motto was: "No day without its line." Mérimée never wrote much, and at last stopped altogether. His demands of himself in the matter of plasticity and technical perfection were so excessive that he preferred withdrawing from the contest with his own ideal to risking defeat. It seemed to him that it was better to rest contented with what he had done than to stake his reputation as an artist on any new work. And it made it the easier for him to refrain, that he was by nature of a reserved, retiring disposition, and not impelled by any uncontrollable impulse to constant production.

It was in vain that Beyle reproached him for "laziness." Amongst the causes of that laziness there was one which Beyle did not understand, and which constituted the main difference between the two men. Beyle was a psychologist and a poet, but not an artist; Mérimée was an artist to his finger-tips. It is as the artist and as the artist alone that he is great; and his superiority to Beyle lies in his artistic skill. It was he who gave imperishable artistic form to that wealth of intellectual material which Beyle brought to light. And the laziness was anything but absolute idleness. It found expression in essays, descriptions of historical monuments, translations from the Russian, and modest but careful historical research and historical writings. Mérimée was a philologist and an archaeologist, a scholar and a scientist. His art may be likened to an oasis lying in the midst of his arid technical studies; it borders on science on every side, and the passage from it to historical writing is an easy one; for there comes a moment when the love of fact and the passion for accuracy and precision can no longer find satisfaction in merely imaginary portraiture. In this particular the history of Mérimée's personal career as an author resembles the history of the Romantic School; he reflects a great movement on a small scale. For in France as well as in Germany, scientific criticism and historical research followed in the path which the literary criticism of the Romanticists had opened up for imaginative literature. When the poets had done with the foreign and medieval material, the scientists began to deal with it in the spirit which poetry had evoked.

As Mérimée's fiction was always in a manner the offspring of his researches, as many of his stories, such asCarmen, La Vénus d'Ille, andLokis, are even sportively set in a framework of archæological or philological investigation, it was natural enough that science should gradually make its way from the outside to the heart of his work. In his position as a scientific man lies the last great difference between him and Beyle. Mérimée is not a scientist of the first rank; he has the second-class qualities of thoroughness and trustworthiness, but lacks the spark of inspiration which he possesses as an author. He has, however, the distinctive sign of the true man of science; he never speaks of what he does not understand; he never indulges in random conjectures or ingenious paradoxes; he progresses step by step. At times he may be dry and wooden, but he never makes a mistake.

If Mérimée is the sober, uninspired man of science, Beyle is the inspired scientific dilettante, with all the signs of genius, but also all the signs of dilettantism. His books teem with daring assertions, indemonstrable conjectures, theories regarding nations with whose languages he was unfamiliar, amateurish paradoxes like that which places Werner'sLutherin the forefront of German drama. His essays are as entertaining and suggestive as Mérimée's are tiresome and dry; but Mérimée's conclusions are founded upon rock, Beyle's too often built upon sand.

Thus, both as the scientist and the author, Mérimée marks an advance upon Beyle. He is a man of a narrower and less fertile mind; but the contents of his mind are infinitely better ordered, and he is master of a highly perfected artistic style.

[1]"Souvent vous ne me semblez pas assezdélicatement tender; or il faut cela dans un roman pour me toucher."

[2]Lettres à une inconnue, i. 72.

Mérimée's earliest attitude as the dramatist and novelist is an attitude of literary aggressiveness. Although by nature an observer, he does not, like Balzac, set himself the task of representing, in all its breadth, the world he sees around him; neither is it his ambition that posterity shall study in his works the customs and ideas of his period; he desires to challenge a prevailing taste; and with the object of irritating and rousing his fellow-countrymen, he generally chooses themes which have as little connection as possible with modern civilised society.

It was natural that his hostility should first vent itself upon literary sentimentality. The shy, proud youth was penetrated with the idea that it is the duty of the author to communicate his ideas to the public, but that his dignity as a man requires him to keep his feelings to himself. But in this opinion he received no support from the French literary men of the day. Ever since Rousseau's novels, not to mention hisConfessions, had prepared the way for orgies of half-real, half-fictitious emotion and a communicativeness which kept back nothing, a series of authors, from Chateaubriand to Lamartine and Sainte-Beuve, had dissected themselves for the entertainment of the public, initiated their readers into the secrets of their hearts, in short, unreservedly satisfied the low curiosity of the vulgar herd. And with what aim? To win its sympathy. Mérimée was far too proud to desire it. "For Heaven's sake no confessions!" he says to himself the first time he puts pen to paper. And to avoid all risk of becoming sentimental or morbid, he conceals himself completely behind the characters he describes, allows them and their destinies free play, and never expresses his opinion of their conduct. Beyle, who had quite as strong an aversion for sentimentality, was unable to refrain from putting in his word; Mérimée makes himself invisible, inaudible, untraceable. But his temperament makes it impossible for him to do this in any other way than by confining himself to the representation of intense, determined characters, who follow their impulses without much deliberation or talk, are carried away by their passions, and suddenly, unexpectedly, proceed to action. "To me," says Mérimée's South American sea-captain inLa Famille Carvajal, "all these tragedy heroes are phlegmatic, passionless philosophers. If one of them kills his rival in a duel or any other manner, remorse overpowers him immediately and makes him as soft as a woollen mitten. I have seen twenty-seven years' service, I have killed forty-one Spaniards, and I don't know what such a feeling is.... Characters, emotions, actions—everything seems unnatural to us when we read these plays aloud in the mess-room. They are all princes, who vow that they are madly in love, and dare not so much as touch the tips of their mistresses' fingers, but keep these ladies a boat's hook length off. We sailors go to work more boldly in such matters."

Mérimée does not write for the "bourgeois," into whose eyes the slightest emotion brings tears; he addresses himself to people of stronger nerves, who require more violent shocks to move them. Therefore away with the regulation lengthy introductions, and all the preparations and omens of tragedy! Human beings with blood in their veins do not deliberate so long; and nervous weakness is not an interesting spectacle to any but the neurotic. If a woman loves, what can be more natural than that she should say so, and, regardless of every other consideration, make the intervals between the first avowal, the first kiss, and the first embrace as short as possible? If a man hates with a manly hatred, what more natural than that he should put an end to his torment and his enemy's life with a stab or a shot? It is, undoubtedly, natural, when the race which the author chooses to depict is not an effete, but a vigorous one; and this is the explanation of Mérimée's tendency to give to every feeling the character of a fierce passion, to dwell upon what is cruel and hard, to make death—not tragedy death, but real death, in all its cold, hard pitilessness—the dénouement of every tale which he sends out from his artist's workshop. It explains what may be summed up in a word asl'atrocein his writings.

He is familiar with death. If the old designations were applicable in his case, we should call him a great tragic author; but Mérimée does not believe in what dogmatic upholders of Aristotelian principles call tragic expiation. Concerning the representation of death in the works of other authors he seems to say with Schiller:

"Aber der Tod, Ihr Herrn, ist so ästhetisch doch nicht."

Deepest down in his soul lies the love of strength. But he does not, like Balzac, love strength in the shape of strong desire, strong passions; he loves it in the form of original force of character and of stirring, decisive event; and therefore he naturally begins by feeling and reproducing the poetry of decisive event, long before he is mature enough to represent that of simple, strong character. Of all events, death is the most decisive; and hence it is that he falls in love with death—not, be it observed, with death as it is conceived of by spiritualists and believers, not with death as a purifying passage to another existence, but as a violent, sudden, bloody termination. Like Sièyes, he is forla mort sans phrase.

The idea not unnaturally suggests itself that a certain want of feeling, a certain tendency to cruelty, in Mérimée the man, probably lay at the root of this literary hard-heartedness. It can, however, almost be proved from direct assertions of his own, that the most extravagant manifestations of the quality were originally called forth by his strong aversion to sentimentality in literature. In his essay on the friend of his youth, Victor Jacquemont, we come upon the following passage: "I have never known a more truly feeling heart than Jacquemon's. His was a loving, tender nature; but he took as much pains to conceal his sensibility as others do to dissimulate their evil inclinations. In our youth we had been repelled by the false sentiment of Rousseau and his imitators, and the result in our case was the usual one—an exaggerated reaction. We wished to be strong, and therefore we jeered at sentimentality."

It is, nevertheless, self-evident that this hatred of the pathetic, which contrasts so strongly with the extreme sentimentality of most of Mérimée's youthful contemporaries, and this predilection for the violent and the savage, were not purely and simply products of a spirit of contradiction. To gauge the strength of the predilection we have but to glance at the history of Mérimée's development: in another man we should expect to see such a feeling checked in its first outbreaks by the lighter, brighter mood of youth, and tempered in age by waning vigour. But such was not the case with Mérimée. His love of violent solutions is of the same age as his love of pen and ink, and the horrors and terrors with which in the works of his mature manhood his genius produces a tragic effect, become in those of his old age merely gloomy and repulsive.

In theThéâtre de Clara Gazul, Mérimée's first book, published when he was only twenty-two, it is amusing to observe the conflict of youth with the inveterate natural bias towards gloom and violence. Read superficially, the book produces the effect of a tolerably serious work. Professing to be written in the Spanish style, it nevertheless differs in many essential particulars from Spanish dramatic literature. The plays of which it is composed have no mutual resemblance; they do not, like the mantle-and-dagger tragedies, monotonously repeat the same types of character and the same situations, produced by jealousy and a touchy sense of honour; nor do they accept the extremely conventional ideas of morality current in the tragedies in question. Mérimée's characters have distinctly defined individualities; and instead of exhibiting superhuman self-control and resignation, they are carried blindly away by their passions and desires. Still less resemblance is there between these plays of Mérimée's and the great series of romantic and fantastic dramas (some of them breathing the spirit of Catholicism, others lacking it) in which Calderon reaches the zenith of his productive power and displays all his wealth of colour. It is only with certain heavy Spanish dramas, such as Calderon'sEl alcalde de Zalamea, Las tres justicias in una, El medico de su honra, El pintor de su deshonra, or Moreto'sEl valiente justiciero, that certain of Mérimée's, for exampleInès Mendo, harmonise in their general tone. Taken as a whole, instead of being what it pretends to be, namely serious, the book is arrogantly wanton and audacious; genuine French frivolity and satire peep out beneath the costume of the Spanish actress. Personages are introduced upon the stage whom, as we are told in the preface toUne Femme est un Diable, our nurses taught us to regard with reverence. But the author hopes that "the emancipated Spaniards" will not take this amiss.

Clara Gazulis, then, a merry book; the good lady who wrote it is no prude. But what a strange kind of mirth it is! Amongst its manifestations is the free use of the knife. If we try to find a parallel to it, nothing suggests itself but the sportive springs of a young tiger. Mérimée finds it almost impossible to end without killing all his principal characters, and one sword-thrust succeeds the other almost automatically. But he amuses himself by destroying the illusion directly after the catastrophe; the actors rise, and one of them thanks the audience for their kind attention; the whole thing is turned into a jest.

Doña Maria.Help! She is poisoned, poisoned by me. I will see to my own punishment; the convent well is not far off. (Exit hurriedly.)Fray Eugenio(to the audience).Do not take it too much amiss that I have caused the death of these two charming young ladies; and graciously excuse the shortcomings of the author.

Doña Maria.

Help! She is poisoned, poisoned by me. I will see to my own punishment; the convent well is not far off. (Exit hurriedly.)

Fray Eugenio(to the audience).

Do not take it too much amiss that I have caused the death of these two charming young ladies; and graciously excuse the shortcomings of the author.

Thus ends the wild playL'Occasion. The wittiest criticism passed on these dramas, and the style in general, is contained in a sentence in Alfred de Musset'sLettres de Dupuis et Cotonet: "Souvient l'Espagne, avec ses Castillans, qui se coupent la gorge comme on boit un verre d'eau, ses Andalouses qui font plus vite encore un petit métier moins dépeuplant, ses taureaux, ses toréadors, matadors, &c."

It was not in Mérimée's works alone that the Spain of the young Romantic School (to which De Musset himself contributed the pale-faced, brown-necked Andalusian beauty) was so passionate and hasty. But no one took such delight in it all as he. And the themes he chose in his old age are in complete accordance with this taste of his youth.

His last tale,Lokis, is the story of a young Lithuanian count of mysterious descent, who from time to time is possessed by, or at least feels that he possesses, the instincts of a wild animal. He goes mad on his wedding-night and kills his bride by biting her throat. The count's character is drawn with delicate skill; the progress of his mental derangement is indicated by a few slight but graphic touches; and Mérimée has evidently enjoyed contrasting this wild young Lithuanian nobleman with a peculiarly worthy and dull German professor (the German of French fiction prior to 1870), a guest in the count's house, who writes every evening to hisfiancée, Fräulein Weber, and communicates the horrible catastrophe to the reader in one of his letters. But the impression left by this vampire tale is one of disgust mingled with horror. The masterly treatment, the perfect style, the refined manner in which the loathsome subject is dealt with, remind us of the white kid gloves of the headsman. The story is only of interest to us as a proof of the strength retained by one of its author's original tendencies.

Personally characteristic of Mérimée as this tendency undoubtedly was, it is plainly of near kin to a tendency of the whole of that school to which Southey gave the name of the "Satanic." The influence of Byron is unmistakable. By 1830 Frenchmen were thoroughly weary (as Englishmen had been for some time) of the "Immanuelistic" literature of the Reaction. The sceptre of literature had passed from the hands of Lamartine into the hands of Victor Hugo, whoseOrientalescontain most sanguinary pictures of war and destruction. Lamartine himself, the Seraphic poet in chief, had struck a Satanic note inLa Chute d'un Ange. And a young poet of Victor Hugo's school was treating gruesome themes in short, artistically finished stories at the same time as Mérimée, and entirely uninfluenced by him. I allude to Petrus Borel, who died poor and unknown. HisDina, la belle Juive, will bear comparison with any of Mérimée's tales of horror. Poor Borel was an enthusiast, an ardent moralist, who, concealing his fervour beneath his realism, desired to inspire indignation with the deeds of violence he described. The refined, polished Mérimée is often only pretending to be bloodthirsty because it amuses him to frighten his readers, especially those of the female sex. But in both cases we have also the genuine Romantic defiance of the "bourgeois."

Mérimée has not escaped unpunished for thus yielding up his talent to the service of literary bloodthirstiness. Though he avoided his Nemesis during his lifetime, she overtook him after death. When De Loménie pronounced the customary panegyric in the Académie Française, he concluded by expressing the opinion that what was wanting in Mérimée's life was the peace and joy of the domestic hearth—that he would have been happier as the father of a family, "with four or five children to bring up." And when his friend, Countess Lise Przezdzieska, published, under the title ofLettres à une autre inconnue, a series of his letters to her which were certainly never intended for publication, she devoted the proceeds of her book to the payment of masses for the soul of her anti-Catholic friend.

At the time when Mérimée made his literary début in the disguise of a Spaniard, the Classic drama had reached the stage when the personages of a play had all, like the pieces on a chessboard, their prescribed duties and moves. There were the stereotyped king, tyrant, princess, conspirators, &c. It mattered not whether the queen who had killed her husband was called Semiramis, Clytemnestra, Johanna of Naples, or Mary Stuart, whether the lawgiver's name was Minos or Peter the Great or Cromwell—their words and actions, thoughts and feelings, were always the same. A young poet of the Classic School, who had treated a subject from Spanish history in a manner which was objected to by the censor, got out of the difficulty by transferring the action of his play with a stroke of the pen from Barcelona to Babylon, and from the sixteenth century to the days before the Flood. "Babylone" had the same number of syllables and rhymed with the same words as "Barcelone," and scarcely any other alteration was necessary.[1]The Spain which Mérimée, in the guise of Clara Gazul, shows to his readers, is not the country in which this Barcelona was situated. Nor does he rest content with masquerading as a Spanish lady. The genuine Romanticist, he regards it as the main task of the author to represent the manners and morals of different ages and countries without a touch of varnish or whitewash, bringing out distinctly and strongly what in those days was called "local colour." He therefore transforms himself into an inhabitant of the most dissimilar countries, in all different stages of civilisation. He is in imagination a Moor, a negro, a South American, an Illyrian, a gipsy, a Cossack. But all things remote and foreign do not possess an equal degree of attraction for him. Indeed he is actually repelled by culture and polish. As Théophile Gautier preferred to visit each country at the season of year when its climate is most characteristic—Africa in summer, Russia in winter—so Mérimée preferred imaginary excursions to the regions whose inhabitants have the least regard for human life, the strongest passions, the wildest and most determined characters, and the most violent original prejudices. He does not confine himself to the present. He is keenly interested in the barbarities of the peasant wars of the Middle Ages; he conjures up the age of Charles IX., and writes a masterly account of the massacre of St. Bartholomew. He is as familiar with fourteenth-century Spain and seventeenth-century Russia as with ancient France and ancient Rome. As the archaeologist and historian he has examined inscriptions and monuments, buildings, ornaments, and weapons, and has studied documents and manuscripts in many languages of which the ordinary literary man knows nothing. This gives his descriptions a truthfulness which was uncommon in his day.

It is his passion for strength in its primitive nakedness which endows him with the historical sense. Hence the heroes of his historical works are always the wildest and most daring characters—Sulla, Catilina, Don Pedro the Cruel of Castile, the first pseudo-Demetrius, &c., &c. His conscientious accuracy and his distrust of the part played by imagination in science rob his historical works proper of life (he is most successful inDon Pedro I.andÉpisode de l'Histoire de la Russie); but he at once imparts life to any period which he treats as the imaginative artist. After Vitet had shown, in his masterlyScènes historiques, how real history can be presented in a free dramatic rendering, Mérimée gave France, inLa Jaquerie, the picture of a much earlier and more savage age than that which his forerunner and teacher had subjected to poetic treatment. He aptly indicates the spirit of his work in the ironically applied speech of Molière's Mascarille, which he affixes to it as motto: "C'est mon talent particulier, et je travaille à mettre en madrigaux toute l'histoire romaine." He has entered with wonderful understanding into the customs and follies, views and prejudices, which constituted the spirit of that far-off age. Let us take one character as an instance—Isabella, daughter of the Baron d'Apremont, a typical high-minded, amiable young girl of the feudal period. Her heart is pure, her morals are of the strictest, she is merciful to the suffering and the vanquished. To the brave and faithful man-at-arms who goes through fire and water for her sake she is very gracious; she begs her father to give her this serf, and in gratitude to him for having saved her life she makes him her equerry; she even embroiders him a purse. But he dares to love her; and then everything is at an end. She overwhelms him with contemptuous reproaches, repulses him with scorn, and considers herself degraded by his having dared to lift up his eyes to her. Compare this lady with one of Ingemann's noble maidens; imagine how the latter, scorning all the prejudices of her day, would have valued the noble heart which beat under the simple jerkin; and note the difference between an idealistic and a bold, historically accurate representation of a coarse and vigorous age. One more example—the scene which takes place at night in front of a lonely hut in the forest, to which the brutal English freebooter-chief, Siward, has conveyed Isabella, whom he has carried off after the assault in which her father has been killed. The whole is nothing but the conversation of two troopers who are holding the saddled horses at the door, and pass the time in talking of the act of violence which is being committed within. But the impression produced is so vivid that it stamps on our minds a picture of the whole age. It is, however, a fault in this work, that the author, in his aversion for sentimentality, has crowded together so many cruel and horrible actions, that in the general savagery the differences which undoubtedly existed then, as now, between society as a whole and single individuals, are overlooked.

The separate personages in hisChronique du Règne de Charles IX.stand out much more clearly from the background. They have strongly marked characteristics without on that account being modern (except perhaps George Mergy); indeed Mérimée has bestowed such attention on details that each chapter in its graphic coherence forms a little whole, and the work in its entirety produces the effect of a mosaic design of character portraits and pictures of society. In the last of his semi-historical works,Les Débuts d'un Aventurier, we observe that what attracts him in the false Demetrius is the primitive cunning, the rough, vigorous Cossack character, and not those mental conflicts, ensuing on the fraud, which fascinated Schiller. Mérimée may be said to leave off where Schiller begins. The manners and customs of a definite group of human beings at a definite period are of far more interest to him than what these human beings have in common with universal humanity; hence here as elsewhere in his historical fiction, it is not the intellectual or emotional side of life which he shows us, but its character side—the results of strong, concentrated will-power. When he writes of modern times, he describes gipsy or brigand life, as inCarmen, a vendetta, as inColomba, a horrible murder on the wedding-night, as inLa Vénus d'IlleandLokis. Or if he lays his plot within the pale of modern society proper, he either describes peculiarities of those classes which labour under social disadvantages—the bold language and irregular ideas of young ballet-dancers and actresses, the erotic temptations of Catholic priests; or contents himself with anything in the life of the upper classes that means character—a passionate love-affair terminated by a duel, a case of adultery which leads to the suicide of one of the parties concerned, any thoroughly scandalous story which it delights him to cast in the teeth of the effete, hypocritical society of the day. He feels himself in his element amidst merciless strokes of fate, terrible vicissitudes, violent passions which, when they are fortunate, override the conventions of society, and when unfortunate, are called crimes. Hence it was that modern Russian literature was so sympathetic to him. The works of Pushkin which he translated,La dame de PiqueandLes Bohémiens, have themes closely akin to those which he treated himself.

Two characteristic feelings lie at the root of Mérimée's disinclination to apprehend and treat the trenchant catastrophes in human life as tragic catastrophes; the one is a kind of fear that the trenchancy which he loves will lose its edge by the introduction of a reconciling element; the other is his disbelief in a greater, comprehensive whole, of which the single incident forms a part. When he produces, as he at times does, a genuinely tragic effect, it happens almost against his will, and is the result of a more mature and profound understanding of the human soul, and of a sympathy, growing with his growing experience of life, for cases in which there is a necessary connection between character and destiny. In his romance of the days of Charles IX., when he makes the one brother fall by the hand of the other, he, the scorner of the symbolic, as a matter of fact represents all the folly and horror of the religious and civil war in one melodramatically tragic, symbolical picture. And when, in the little taleLa Partie de Trictrac, the unfortunate officer who has cheated on one solitary occasion becomes so miserable in the consciousness of his shame that he is driven to commit suicide, the story imperceptibly assumes the character of a tragedy of honour.

In another little work of art,La double Méprise, Mérimée endeavours to represent the web of chance events, of conflicting and wrongly comprehended instincts, which make life so meaningless, and even what is saddest as foolish as it is sad and hideous; but as he unfolds the inner history of the painful incident, and as we by degrees learn that that which seemed foolish was inevitable, it ceases to be foolish. The gist of the story is that a young married woman, Julie de Chaverny, whose dissatisfaction with her married life is developing into actual unhappiness, is led by a chain of ideas and emotions, slight in themselves, but welded together like links of iron, to give herself to a man whom she in reality does not love, and then to take her own life. Mérimée's art displays itself in this case in the calm assurance with which he takes his reader's hand and leads him through the labyrinth of all these ideas and emotions to a climax which is as inevitable as it is illogical. Two inimitable passages are the conversation in which Darcy arouses Julie's enthusiastic admiration by the modesty and humour with which he unwillingly recounts his own gallant deeds, and the conversation in the carriage, during which every utterance of Julie's, her resistance even more than her confessions, brings her nearer to her fall. The situation is summed up in the following classic sentence, prepared for by everything that has gone before: "The unfortunate woman believed at this moment in all sincerity that she had always loved Darcy; that she had felt the same ardent attachment to him during all the six years of his absence as she did at that instant." Mérimée understood what a power, what a tragic motive force in human life, inevitable illusion or self-deception is. It is the source to which not only half of human happiness, but a considerable proportion of human misery may be traced.

But Mérimée approaches nearer than this to tragedy proper, where the fateful element sinks deep into the character, mingling with it as a poison mingles with the blood. Think ofCarmen. From the day of José's first meeting with Carmen, the gipsy girl, the course of his life is changed; and he, the honest, good-hearted man, becomes of inevitable necessity, for her sake, a robber and a murderer. Nay, the author, whose aim as a young Romanticist was to hold as far aloof as possible from the poets who wrote tragedy in the ancient Greek style, approaches, inColomba, with his modern Corsican heroine, nearer to Greek tragedy than any of his fellow-countrymen who hymned the fate of one or other of "Agamemnon's imperishable race." Not without reason has Colomba been compared to Elektra. Like Elektra, she broods, to the exclusion of every other thought, on the unavenged death of her father; like Elektra, she incites her brother to take a bloody revenge; and she is even less of the stereotyped tragedy heroine than Sophocles' young girl, for, clad though she is in the steel panoply of appalling prejudices, she bears herself simply and lovably. She is at once bloodthirsty and childlike, hard-hearted and girlish; a fierce grace is her characteristic trait. It is easy for us now to see how much more nearly akin this fresh, vigorous daughter of a little southern island race is to the old Greek female characters than are all those princesses who walked the French stage in buskins, and borrowed the names of Elektra, Antigone, or Iphigenia. But she is perhaps still more nearly related to the heathen daughters of a far-away northern isle, the women of the Icelandic sagas, who brood with such passionate obstinacy over their family feuds, and force the unwilling men to take blood for blood.

In this sameColomba, which is Mérimée's most famous work, Romantic "local colouring" celebrates its most signal triumph. The story is pervaded by the genuine aroma of Bonaparte's native isle, and breathes the genuine Corsican spirit. As a proof of the fidelity with which Corsican customs are reproduced, as well as of the popularity of the book, it may be mentioned that when Mérimée was waiting in court to hear the verdict in the Libri case, a Corsican ex-bandit came forward from among the audience and quietly offered, in case of the verdict being given against him, to revenge him by assassinating the president of the court. Better evidence of the correctness of Mérimée's colouring could hardly be required. But Mérimée would not have been Mérimée if he had not (at the very time when he was publishingColomba) saved his reputation as the enemy of all theories by making merry over this same much-talked-of "local colouring." In the preface, written in 1840, to the second edition ofLa Guzla, his collection of fictitious Illyrian popular songs and ballads, he tells that, "in the year of grace 1827," he was a Romanticist with an enthusiasm for local colour, nay, the firm belief that without it there was no salvation. By local colouring he and his comrades meant what in the seventeenth century went by the name of "manners" (mœurs); but they were very proud of their word, and imagined themselves to be the inventors of the thing as well as the word. His devotion to local colouring inspired him with the desire to visit Illyria; want of money was the chief obstacle to his carrying out his wish; the idea occurred to him to write a description of his travels in anticipation and pay for the tour with the profits of his book; but he gave up this bold plan, and instead manufactured, with the assistance of a guide-book and the knowledge "of five or six Slavonic words," a collection of "ballads translated from the Illyrian." Everyone was deceived.[2]A German savant of the name of Gerhardt actually translatedGuzla(along with two other volumes of Slavonic poetry) into German, and this, moreover, in the original metre, which he had been able to trace in the French translator's prose. After Mérimée had thus discovered how easily "local colouring" may be obtained, he forgave Racine and the Classicists their lack of it.

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