Mérimée's temperament was really that of the scholar, not of the artist,
and even his art came to him as a kind of scholarship. He did one thing
after another, as if challenging himself to accomplish a certain end,
and then, that end accomplished, he no longer cared to repeat it. That
is the scholar's way, not the artist's; and the scholar's instinct is
seen, too, in that too purely critical attitude which he adopted,
towards others and towards himself, working in almost a hostile fashion
upon every impulse, so as to destroy his interest in any part of his
work but the way in which it was done. He began his career by two very
serious mystifications, _Le Théâtre de Clara Gazul_, a collection of
short plays supposed to be translated from the Spanish, and _La Guzla_,
a collection of ballads in prose supposed to be translated from the
Illyrian. Later on he was, perhaps, a little too anxious to represent
himself as having intended from the first to parody the fierceness and
the "local colour" of the Romantics. "Vers l'an de grâce 1827 j'étais
_romantique_," he says ironically, in the preface of 1840, as he
reprints his work of thirteen years ago. "Nous disions aux
_classiques_: 'Vos Grecs ne sont point des Grecs; vos Romains ne sont
point des Romains; vous ne savez pas donner à vos compositions la
_couleur locale_. Point de salut sans _couleur locale_.'" But no doubt
he wished from the first to show that he also, by a mere disinterested
effort of intelligence, could be as exotic as the Romantics; that
Romanticism, like everything else, was a thing that could be done
deliberately, done and then dropped. The invention of history and
archaeology leads to history and archaeology themselves. Mérimée next
produced a piece in dialogue on _La Jacquerie_, in which there is more
and better history than drama; then followed his historical novel, the
_Chronique du Règne de Charles IX._, in which he set himself, as
deliberately as usual, to do more carefully what Walter Scott, then a
fashion in France, had done with genius. He produced the most perfect of
historical novels, and looked about for some new difficulty to conquer.
He found it in the short story, of which he was to make something
firmer, more architectural, than anything yet made in this form of
fiction. It was then that he wrote the best of his short stories, from
the _Mateo Falcone_ of 1829 to the _Carmen_ of 1845. Here, anyone else
would have said, he had found himself; here was the moment to pause, to
"settle down" to the task of doing what he could do best, better than
anyone else. But Mérimée had no sooner perfected his method than he
began to tire of it. His imagination perhaps tired; he turned to
history, and wrote books on the history of Spain and Russia; he became
Inspector of Ancient Monuments, and wrote minute descriptions of
churches; he translated from the Russian, from Poushkin, Gogol, and
Tourguenieff; he travelled, and wrote somewhat dry accounts of his
travels; he wrote _Lokis, La Chambre Bleue_, and _Djoumane_, the only
stories which he had written for twenty-five years; and he seems to have
written them in order to prove to himself that he could still write
them. He died at Cannes in 1870, "claquemuré entre deux vieilles
_governess_," notes Goncourt in his _Journal_: "une des plus tristes
fins du monde."
Mérimée is perhaps the only writer in whom form is equivalent to what is
called in slang "good form." He did his best to assimilate his mind to
what seemed to him, the English pattern, as others of his compatriots
have had their clothes made by English tailors. The English pattern of
mind seemed to him, not that mind as it has expressed itself heroically
in poetry, and with something of loose splendour in prose, but the
typical middle-class mind, severe, precise, doing things by rule,
stiffly proud, a mask for emotion. It was not English literature which
he cared for and wished to rival, but those sides which he saw most
clearly of the English temperament. As the greatest English writers have
not put those sides of the national character, to any considerable
extent, into their books (perhaps because, being men of genius, they
were exceptions to a rule), Mérimée's work, with its cold, exact, polite
record of warm and savage things, has no resemblance with English
literature, and becomes, in French literature, a new thing, the personal
expression of a new, singular temperament.
"Ce comédien de l'insensibilité," Goncourt calls him; and it is Goncourt
who relates the famous story of his childish resolve to keep his
emotions to himself, after the discovery that even his parents could
turn them into ridicule. "Il était né avec un coeur tendre et aimant,"
says Mérimée of the hero of his _Vase Etrusque_, "mais, à un age où l'on
prend trop facilement des impressions qui durent toute la vie, sa
sensibilité trop expansive lui avait attiré les railleries de ses
camarades." In the exterior which Mérimée so carefully made for himself,
it is not necessary to decide how much was genuine at the beginning and
how much became genuine through force of habit. It made, at all events,
the art of his stories; and we have only to turn to another page of the
Goncourts' _Journal_ to see how precisely that art corresponds with what
struck those acute observers in the manner of his conversation. "Il
cause en s'écoutant avec de mortels silences, lentement, mot par mot,
goutte à goutte, comme s'il distillait ses effects, faisant tomber
autour de ce qu'il dit une froideur glaciale." It is such an icy
coldness that disengages itself from the finest of his stories; from
_Mateo Falcone_, for instance, perhaps his masterpiece, in its intensity
of effect and in its economy of means. It amused him to tell moving and
pitiful things so relentlessly, getting the same pleasure in the
anticipation of what his readers would feel that he got from the actual
looks and words of the people to whom he talked in the drawing-rooms. He
counted on a certain repugnance in those who most admired him, as men of
his disposition count on the help of a certain instinctive dislike in
those of whom they are most anxious to make themselves masters.
In his stories, with their force, clearness, concise energy, Mérimée is
without charm; "as if," says Walter Pater, in his remarkable and closely
packed essay, "in theological language, he were incapable of grace."
"Gifted as he was with pure _mind_," with a style "the perfection of
nobody's style," he is a kind of hard taskmaster, who is at least sure
of getting his own way, sure of never loosening his hold. He has, above
all things, a mastery over effect; and he has none of those
preoccupations of the poet, of the thinker, or of the "inspired" writer,
which so often come to shake the equilibrium of that to which they add a
heavy and toppling burden of splendour. Each of his stories is a story,
nothing more or less, and in each he does exactly what he set out to do,
even the dry, scholarly digressions, as they may sometimes seem, being
only a part of the plan, of the building up of the illusion. He is
interested in his characters only as they come into the light of a
crisis; they live for him only in that moment; all the rest is so much
detail, so much psychology in the abstract, with which he has nothing to
do. Maupassant was to follow him, while thinking that he followed
Flaubert, in this rigorous art of cutting your coat to your cloth. It
was Mérimée, really, who perfected the short story in France, who left
it a model for the writers of every nation.
Towards the end of his life Mérimée became deeply interested in Russia,
and it was through his translations and studies that Tourguenieff became
almost a French writer. In Tourguenieff he had partly a follower, but
one who gave a new, more profound, more essentially human character to
the short story, which has since been developed so fruitfully in Russia.
To the Russian, to Tourguenieff, to Tolstoi, to Gorki, the soul is
interesting in itself, for its own sake. Mérimée only pays heed to it
when it does something interesting, when it precipitates itself into
action. That is why so many Russian stories, with all their charm and
meaning, remain nebulous, and why Mérimée's are always hard, firm, each
complete as a drama. Look at Gorki, and how easily he loses the thread
of his narrative or how often he forgets to have a thread to follow, so
significant to him is the mere existence of these people, among whose
actions he is embarrassed to choose. Take the first act of his play,
_Les Petits Bourgeois_, and see how little selection or composition
there is, with what an assemblage of little intimate details, each
closely observed, but each observed without relation to any other or to
the movement of the whole. Mérimée gives us no detail which has not its
almost mathematical significance, but in this orderly arrangement of
life it sometimes happens that we are left with a sense of something out
of which life has been trimmed dead.
"In history," says Mérimée, in the preface to his _Chronique du Règne de
Charles IX._, "I care only for anecdotes." It was the anecdote which he
cared for also in fiction, and with him, as with Stendhal, from whom he
got the word and perhaps some of his taste for the thing, the anecdote
was a somewhat more formal variety of what was afterwards to be called
the document. Mérimée as a writer stands somewhere between Choderlos de
Laclos or Crébillon fils, and the generation of "Realists" which was to
follow him. He has the naïve immorality, the deliberate frivolity of the
eighteenth century; but he is frivolous with the gravity of a scholar.
Genuinely interested in those questions which women discuss among
themselves, he knew how to work artistically upon his own interest,
giving it an ironical turn, which saves it from the criticism of his
intelligence. And in those anecdotes, to which he reduces history, and
out of which he makes the more living history of his fiction, he finds
as much of the soul of great passions and profound emotions as he cares
to consider. The document is not yet crude fact, as with the Realists;
it is fact chosen carefully for its significance, and arranged just so
much as it needs in order to seem as well as be significant. "Dans
chaque anecdote pouvant servir à porter la lumière dans quelque coin du
coeur," says Mérimée, speaking of Stendhal (he might be speaking for
himself), "il retenait toujours ce qu'il appelait le _trait_, c'est à
dire le mot ou l'action qui révèle la passion." It was for this word or
action in which passion reveals itself that Mérimée was always a seeker:
how often and how absolutely he found it, the tales which follow may be
left to prove for themselves.