Pity and terror, we know, go to the making of the essential tragic sense.
In Mérimée, certainly, we have all its terror, but without the pity.
Saint-Clair, the consent of his mistress barely attained at last, rushes madly on self-destruction, that he may die with the taste of his great love fresh on his lips.
All the grotesque accidents of violent death he records with visual exactness, and no pains to relieve them; the ironic indifference, for instance, with which, on the scaffold or the battle-field, a man will seem to grin foolishly at the ugly rents through which his life has passed.
Seldom or never has the mere pen of a writer taken us so close to the cannon's mouth as in the Taking of the Redoubt, while Matteo Falcone--twenty-five short pages--is perhaps the cruellest story in the world.
In Mérimée, certainly, we have all its terror, but without the pity.
Saint-Clair, the consent of his mistress barely attained at last, rushes madly on self-destruction, that he may die with the taste of his great love fresh on his lips.
All the grotesque accidents of violent death he records with visual exactness, and no pains to relieve them; the ironic indifference, for instance, with which, on the scaffold or the battle-field, a man will seem to grin foolishly at the ugly rents through which his life has passed.
Seldom or never has the mere pen of a writer taken us so close to the cannon's mouth as in the Taking of the Redoubt, while Matteo Falcone--twenty-five short pages--is perhaps the cruellest story in the world.