In such survivals, indeed, you see the operation of his favourite
motive, the sense of wild power, under a sort of mask, or assumed
habit, realised as the very genius of nature itself; and that
interest, with some superstitions closely allied to it, the belief in
the vampire, for instance, is evidenced especially in certain
pretended Illyrian compositions--prose translations, the reader was
to understand, of more or less ancient popular ballads; La Guzla, he
called the volume, The Lyre, as we might say; only that the
instrument of the Illyrian minstrel had but one string. Artistic
deception, a trick of which there is something in the historic
romance as such, in a book like his own Chronicle of Charles the
Ninth, was always welcome to Mérimée; it was part of the machinery of
his rooted habit of intellectual reserve. A master of irony also, in
Madame Lucrezia he seems to wish to expose his own method cynically;
to explain his art--how he takes you in--as a clever, confident
conjuror might do. So properly were the readers of La Guzla taken in
that he followed up his success in that line by the Theatre of Clara
Gazul, purporting to be from a rare Spanish original, the work [30]
of a nun, who, under tame, conventual reading, had felt the touch of
mundane, of physical passions; had become a dramatic poet, and
herself a powerful actress. It may dawn on you in reading her that
Mérimée was a kind of Webster, but with the superficial mildness of
our nineteenth century. At the bottom of the true drama there is
ever, logically at least, the ballad: the ballad dealing in a kind of
short-hand (or, say! in grand, simple, universal outlines) with those
passions, crimes, mistakes, which have a kind of fatality in them, a
kind of necessity to come to the surface of the human mind, if not to
the surface of our experience, as in the case of some frankly
supernatural incidents which Mérimée re-handled. Whether human love
or hatred has had most to do in shaping the universal fancy that the
dead come back, I cannot say. Certainly that old ballad literature
has instances in plenty, in which the voice, the hand, the brief
visit from the grave, is a natural response to the cry of the human
creature. That ghosts should return, as they do so often in
Mérimée's fiction, is but a sort of natural justice. Only, in
Mérimée's prose ballads, in those admirable, short, ballad-like
stories, where every word tells, of which he was a master, almost the
inventor, they are a kind of half-material ghosts--a vampire tribe--
and never come to do people good; congruously with the mental
constitution of the writer, which, alike in fact and fiction, [31]
could hardly have horror enough--theme after theme. Mérimée himself
emphasises this almost constant motive of his fiction when he adds to
one of his volumes of short stories some letters on a matter of fact-
-a Spanish bull-fight, in which those old Romans, he regretted, might
seem, decadently, to have survived. It is as if you saw it. In
truth, Mérimée was the unconscious parent of much we may think of
dubious significance in later French literature. It is as if there
were nothing to tell of in this world but various forms of hatred,
and a love that is like lunacy; and the only other world, a world of
maliciously active, hideous, dead bodies.
Mérimée, a literary artist, was not a man who used two words where
one would do better, and he shines especially in those brief
compositions which, like a minute intaglio, reveal at a glance his
wonderful faculty of design and proportion in the treatment of his
work, in which there is not a touch but counts. That is an art of
which there are few examples in English; our somewhat diffuse, or
slipshod, literary language hardly lending itself to the
concentration of thought and expression, which are of the essence of
such writing. It is otherwise in French, and if you wish to know
what art of that kind can come to, read Mérimée's little romances;
best of all, perhaps, La Vénus d'Ille and Arsène Guillot. The former
is a modern version of the beautiful old story of the Ring given to
Venus, given to her, in [32] this case, by a somewhat sordid creature
of the nineteenth century, whom she looks on with more than disdain.
The strange outline of the Canigou, one of the most imposing outlying
heights of the Pyrenees, down the mysterious slopes of which the
traveller has made his way towards nightfall into the great plain of
Toulouse, forms an impressive background, congruous with the many
relics of irrepressible old paganism there, but in entire contrast to
the bourgeois comfort of the place where his journey is to end, the
abode of an aged antiquary, loud and bright just now with the
celebration of a vulgar worldly marriage. In the midst of this well-
being, prosaic in spite of the neighbourhood, in spite of the pretty
old wedding customs, morsels of that local colour in which Mérimée
delights, the old pagan powers are supposed to reveal themselves once
more (malignantly, of course), in the person of a magnificent bronze
statue of Venus recently unearthed in the antiquary's garden. On her
finger, by ill-luck, the coarse young bridegroom on the morning of
his marriage places for a moment the bridal ring only too effectually
(the bronze hand closes, like a wilful living one, upon it), and
dies, you are to understand, in her angry metallic embraces on his
marriage night. From the first, indeed, she had seemed bent on
crushing out men's degenerate bodies and souls, though the
supernatural horror of the tale is adroitly made credible by a
certain vagueness in the [33] events, which covers a quite natural
account of the bridegroom's mysterious death.
The intellectual charm of literary work so thoroughly designed as
Mérimée's depends in part on the sense as you read, hastily perhaps,
perhaps in need of patience, that you are dealing with a composition,
the full secret of which is only to be attained in the last
paragraph, that with the last word in mind you will retrace your
steps, more than once (it may be) noting then the minuter structure,
also the natural or wrought flowers by the way. Nowhere is such
method better illustrated than by another of Mérimée's quintessential
pieces, Arsène Guillotand here for once with a conclusion ethically
acceptable also. Mérimée loved surprises in human nature, but it is
not often that he surprises us by tenderness or generosity of
character, as another master of French fiction, M. Octave Feuillet,
is apt to do; and the simple pathos of Arsène Guillot gives it a
unique place in Mérimée's writings. It may be said, indeed, that
only an essentially pitiful nature could have told the exquisitely
cruel story of Matteo Falcone precisely as Mérimée has told it; and
those who knew him testify abundantly to his own capacity for
generous friendship. He was no more wanting than others in those
natural sympathies (sending tears to the eyes at the sight of
suffering age or childhood) which happily are no extraordinary
component in men's natures. It was, perhaps, no fitting return for a
[34] friendship of over thirty years to publish posthumously those
Lettres à une Inconnue, which reveal that reserved, sensitive, self-
centred nature, a little pusillanimously in the power, at the
disposition of another. For just there lies the interest, the
psychological interest, of those letters. An amateur of power, of
the spectacle of power and force, followed minutely but without
sensibility on his part, with a kind of cynic pride rather for the
mainspring of his method, both of thought and expression, you find him
here taken by surprise at last, and somewhat humbled, by an
unsuspected force of affection in himself. His correspondent,
unknown but for these letters except just by name, figures in them
as, in truth, a being only too much like himself, seen from one side;
reflects his taciturnity, his touchiness, his incredulity except for
self-torment. Agitated, dissatisfied, he is wrestling in her with
himself, his own difficult qualities. He demands from her a freedom,
a frankness, he would have been the last to grant. It is by first
thoughts, of course, that what is forcible and effective in human
nature, the force, therefore, of carnal love, discovers itself; and
for her first thoughts Mérimée is always pleading, but always
complaining that he gets only her second thoughts; the thoughts, that
is, of a reserved, self-limiting nature, well under the yoke of
convention, like his own. Strange conjunction! At the beginning of
the correspondence he seems to have been [35] seeking only a fine
intellectual companionship; the lady, perhaps, looking for something
warmer. Towards such companionship that likeness to himself in her
might have been helpful, but was not enough of a complement to his
own nature to be anything but an obstruction in love; and it is to
that, little by little, that his humour turns. He--the
Megalopsychus, as Aristotle defines him--acquires all the lover's
humble habits: himself displays all the tricks of love, its
casuistries, its exigency, its superstitions, aye! even its
vulgarities; involves with the significance of his own genius the
mere hazards and inconsequence of a perhaps average nature; but too
late in the day--the years. After the attractions and repulsions of
half a lifetime, they are but friends, and might forget to be that, but
for his death, clearly presaged in his last weak, touching letter, just
two hours before. There, too, had been the blind and naked force of
nature and circumstance, surprising him in the uncontrollable movements of
his own so carefully guarded heart.
The intimacy, the effusion, the so freely exposed personality of
those letters does but emphasise the fact that impersonality was, in
literary art, Mérimée's central ai
motive, the sense of wild power, under a sort of mask, or assumed
habit, realised as the very genius of nature itself; and that
interest, with some superstitions closely allied to it, the belief in
the vampire, for instance, is evidenced especially in certain
pretended Illyrian compositions--prose translations, the reader was
to understand, of more or less ancient popular ballads; La Guzla, he
called the volume, The Lyre, as we might say; only that the
instrument of the Illyrian minstrel had but one string. Artistic
deception, a trick of which there is something in the historic
romance as such, in a book like his own Chronicle of Charles the
Ninth, was always welcome to Mérimée; it was part of the machinery of
his rooted habit of intellectual reserve. A master of irony also, in
Madame Lucrezia he seems to wish to expose his own method cynically;
to explain his art--how he takes you in--as a clever, confident
conjuror might do. So properly were the readers of La Guzla taken in
that he followed up his success in that line by the Theatre of Clara
Gazul, purporting to be from a rare Spanish original, the work [30]
of a nun, who, under tame, conventual reading, had felt the touch of
mundane, of physical passions; had become a dramatic poet, and
herself a powerful actress. It may dawn on you in reading her that
Mérimée was a kind of Webster, but with the superficial mildness of
our nineteenth century. At the bottom of the true drama there is
ever, logically at least, the ballad: the ballad dealing in a kind of
short-hand (or, say! in grand, simple, universal outlines) with those
passions, crimes, mistakes, which have a kind of fatality in them, a
kind of necessity to come to the surface of the human mind, if not to
the surface of our experience, as in the case of some frankly
supernatural incidents which Mérimée re-handled. Whether human love
or hatred has had most to do in shaping the universal fancy that the
dead come back, I cannot say. Certainly that old ballad literature
has instances in plenty, in which the voice, the hand, the brief
visit from the grave, is a natural response to the cry of the human
creature. That ghosts should return, as they do so often in
Mérimée's fiction, is but a sort of natural justice. Only, in
Mérimée's prose ballads, in those admirable, short, ballad-like
stories, where every word tells, of which he was a master, almost the
inventor, they are a kind of half-material ghosts--a vampire tribe--
and never come to do people good; congruously with the mental
constitution of the writer, which, alike in fact and fiction, [31]
could hardly have horror enough--theme after theme. Mérimée himself
emphasises this almost constant motive of his fiction when he adds to
one of his volumes of short stories some letters on a matter of fact-
-a Spanish bull-fight, in which those old Romans, he regretted, might
seem, decadently, to have survived. It is as if you saw it. In
truth, Mérimée was the unconscious parent of much we may think of
dubious significance in later French literature. It is as if there
were nothing to tell of in this world but various forms of hatred,
and a love that is like lunacy; and the only other world, a world of
maliciously active, hideous, dead bodies.
Mérimée, a literary artist, was not a man who used two words where
one would do better, and he shines especially in those brief
compositions which, like a minute intaglio, reveal at a glance his
wonderful faculty of design and proportion in the treatment of his
work, in which there is not a touch but counts. That is an art of
which there are few examples in English; our somewhat diffuse, or
slipshod, literary language hardly lending itself to the
concentration of thought and expression, which are of the essence of
such writing. It is otherwise in French, and if you wish to know
what art of that kind can come to, read Mérimée's little romances;
best of all, perhaps, La Vénus d'Ille and Arsène Guillot. The former
is a modern version of the beautiful old story of the Ring given to
Venus, given to her, in [32] this case, by a somewhat sordid creature
of the nineteenth century, whom she looks on with more than disdain.
The strange outline of the Canigou, one of the most imposing outlying
heights of the Pyrenees, down the mysterious slopes of which the
traveller has made his way towards nightfall into the great plain of
Toulouse, forms an impressive background, congruous with the many
relics of irrepressible old paganism there, but in entire contrast to
the bourgeois comfort of the place where his journey is to end, the
abode of an aged antiquary, loud and bright just now with the
celebration of a vulgar worldly marriage. In the midst of this well-
being, prosaic in spite of the neighbourhood, in spite of the pretty
old wedding customs, morsels of that local colour in which Mérimée
delights, the old pagan powers are supposed to reveal themselves once
more (malignantly, of course), in the person of a magnificent bronze
statue of Venus recently unearthed in the antiquary's garden. On her
finger, by ill-luck, the coarse young bridegroom on the morning of
his marriage places for a moment the bridal ring only too effectually
(the bronze hand closes, like a wilful living one, upon it), and
dies, you are to understand, in her angry metallic embraces on his
marriage night. From the first, indeed, she had seemed bent on
crushing out men's degenerate bodies and souls, though the
supernatural horror of the tale is adroitly made credible by a
certain vagueness in the [33] events, which covers a quite natural
account of the bridegroom's mysterious death.
The intellectual charm of literary work so thoroughly designed as
Mérimée's depends in part on the sense as you read, hastily perhaps,
perhaps in need of patience, that you are dealing with a composition,
the full secret of which is only to be attained in the last
paragraph, that with the last word in mind you will retrace your
steps, more than once (it may be) noting then the minuter structure,
also the natural or wrought flowers by the way. Nowhere is such
method better illustrated than by another of Mérimée's quintessential
pieces, Arsène Guillotand here for once with a conclusion ethically
acceptable also. Mérimée loved surprises in human nature, but it is
not often that he surprises us by tenderness or generosity of
character, as another master of French fiction, M. Octave Feuillet,
is apt to do; and the simple pathos of Arsène Guillot gives it a
unique place in Mérimée's writings. It may be said, indeed, that
only an essentially pitiful nature could have told the exquisitely
cruel story of Matteo Falcone precisely as Mérimée has told it; and
those who knew him testify abundantly to his own capacity for
generous friendship. He was no more wanting than others in those
natural sympathies (sending tears to the eyes at the sight of
suffering age or childhood) which happily are no extraordinary
component in men's natures. It was, perhaps, no fitting return for a
[34] friendship of over thirty years to publish posthumously those
Lettres à une Inconnue, which reveal that reserved, sensitive, self-
centred nature, a little pusillanimously in the power, at the
disposition of another. For just there lies the interest, the
psychological interest, of those letters. An amateur of power, of
the spectacle of power and force, followed minutely but without
sensibility on his part, with a kind of cynic pride rather for the
mainspring of his method, both of thought and expression, you find him
here taken by surprise at last, and somewhat humbled, by an
unsuspected force of affection in himself. His correspondent,
unknown but for these letters except just by name, figures in them
as, in truth, a being only too much like himself, seen from one side;
reflects his taciturnity, his touchiness, his incredulity except for
self-torment. Agitated, dissatisfied, he is wrestling in her with
himself, his own difficult qualities. He demands from her a freedom,
a frankness, he would have been the last to grant. It is by first
thoughts, of course, that what is forcible and effective in human
nature, the force, therefore, of carnal love, discovers itself; and
for her first thoughts Mérimée is always pleading, but always
complaining that he gets only her second thoughts; the thoughts, that
is, of a reserved, self-limiting nature, well under the yoke of
convention, like his own. Strange conjunction! At the beginning of
the correspondence he seems to have been [35] seeking only a fine
intellectual companionship; the lady, perhaps, looking for something
warmer. Towards such companionship that likeness to himself in her
might have been helpful, but was not enough of a complement to his
own nature to be anything but an obstruction in love; and it is to
that, little by little, that his humour turns. He--the
Megalopsychus, as Aristotle defines him--acquires all the lover's
humble habits: himself displays all the tricks of love, its
casuistries, its exigency, its superstitions, aye! even its
vulgarities; involves with the significance of his own genius the
mere hazards and inconsequence of a perhaps average nature; but too
late in the day--the years. After the attractions and repulsions of
half a lifetime, they are but friends, and might forget to be that, but
for his death, clearly presaged in his last weak, touching letter, just
two hours before. There, too, had been the blind and naked force of
nature and circumstance, surprising him in the uncontrollable movements of
his own so carefully guarded heart.
The intimacy, the effusion, the so freely exposed personality of
those letters does but emphasise the fact that impersonality was, in
literary art, Mérimée's central ai