(1803-1870)
The stories here presented are a selection from that brilliant
series which shine like a constellation in French literature of the
last century, blazoning Mérimée’s name across it. Each one has been
tested and judged by successive generations of readers and critics.
The authoritative appraisers of literary values, French and English,
have been pronouncing upon them from the time of their publication
until now, when they are still pronouncing upon them, as upon new
productions. Their interest, nevertheless, is still fresh, their
charm as attractive as ever, and inexplicable, as charm must be. The
prediction that was made in their day having been fulfilled so far,
it does not seem hazardous to renew it, at our own risk, that they may
be placed alongside of those classics of fiction that meet so natural
a soil in the human mind that we can no more foresee their ceasing to
give pleasure to readers in course of time than we can foresee the
flowers in the gardens ceasing to give pleasure to lovers of flowers.
_Carmen_, with which the book begins, was the last one written of the
series. It might, however, be said to antedate them all, for the first
impulsive, perhaps instinctive, love of Mérimée’s imagination was for
the passionate drama of Spain, and his first production, _The Plays of
Clara Gazul_, was so vivid an imitation of it that it mystified the
critics of the time, who had yet to learn the extreme susceptibility of
Mérimée’s mind to exotic influences; a susceptibility that the author
indulged, if he did not foster, throughout life.
It was not until 1830 (after the publication of _Mateo Falcone_ and
_The Taking of the Redoubt_) that Mérimée saw Spain with the eyes
of his body, and became naturalised in that part of it, that, as he
describes it, “was bounded on the north by a _gitana_ and on the south
by a carbine,” whose patois he spoke fluently, in whose _ventas_ he
was at home, where he confesses to have committed a thousand follies.
In his letters addressed from Madrid and Valencia, during this first
voyage to Spain, those who are curious about such questions can read
the account of Mérimée’s introduction to Carmen,--that is, to José
Maria, the contrabandist and bandit, and to the toreador. As for
Carmen herself, “that servant of the devil,” as José Maria describes
her only too well, although she does not figure in the letters, we may
infer that she did in some of the “thousand follies.” The story was
not, however, written until fifteen years later than this, after many
subsequent visits to its birthplace. A postscriptum, dated 1842, is
attached to the letters, giving an account of the death of the toreador
and of José Maria.
Mérimée had so long before this story proved himself the most
exquisite master, in his day, of the art of simplicity and naturalness
in writing, that he would seem to have left no farther room to himself
for advance in perfection, no margin for additional praise for this his
last story; and yet it has a quality of its own that distinguishes it
from every preceding one.
“Señor,” said José Maria, “one becomes a rascal without thinking of it;
a pretty girl steals your wits, you fight for her, an accident happens,
you have to live in the mountains, and from a smuggler you become a
robber before you know it.”
This is the simplicity and naturalness, not of Mérimée, but of José
Maria himself; and the story that follows shows absolutely no other
author than the condemned bandit. There is no consciousness in reading
it of the perfection that mars the very perfection of _Colomba_, nor
suspicion of premeditated pathos as in the supremely pathetic _Arsène
Guillot_. Form and pathos are no more thought of by the author than by
José Maria himself. And, therefore, as Taine says, “dissertations on
primitive and savage instinct, learned essays like Schopenhauer’s on
love and death, are not worth its hundred pages.”
As if he himself recognised the finality of his art in this identity of
it with nature, Mérimée laid aside his pen after writing it, and wrote
no more stories for twenty years; in truth, wrote no more, for as his
biographer Filon expresses it, when he took up his pen again, he found
it irremediably rusted.
_The Taking of the Redoubt_ resembles _Carmen_ in this, that the author
so completely effaces his personality from the teller of the story,
that one finds it easier to suppose than not that the incident was
related to him, as he says in the prefatory note, by the officer to
whom it happened, and that he merely wrote it down from memory. The
concession, however, concedes nothing, as long as the word “memory”
is retained in the explanation. For what it stands for here is an
imagination that could make the carelessly dropped incident its own,
and turn upon it a marvellous sight (lens-eye and light, all in one),
until what we read was as clear to Mérimée as it is to us now. Then he
wrote it down in the pages that are without a match in the thousands
of descriptions of battles that have been written. As one does not go
to another for words to describe what one sees oneself, so we need no
interpreter of our sensations when we read _The Taking of the Redoubt_.
It is for us alone, as Mérimée seems to tell us, to read it or not to
read it, to see what took place or not see it.
In the list of Mérimée’s stories _Mateo Falcone_ stands immediately
before _The Taking of the Redoubt_. Both were published in the same
year, in 1829, which was the twenty-sixth of the author’s age. It is
so seldom mentioned now in English without Walter Pater’s judgment
upon it, “perhaps the cruellest story in the world,” that that might
well be added to the name as a sub-title. It would be so, perhaps, if
Mérimée had not related it. He himself, despite the cold impassivity
that he had schooled himself into maintaining as an author,--he himself
shows here and there a trace of the emotion that he arouses in us.
The temptation, fall, and punishment of the little child touch indeed
the most sensitive nerve in the human heart; the one that can give
the keenest pain; that cuts through the heart like a knife. The story
would be well-nigh unbearable in another hand than Mérimée’s, or had he
told it in a clean, clear thrust of reality, as in _The Taking of the
Redoubt_. But he retards the action in the beginning with details and
diverts the attention with local colour; not, however, be it remarked,
such local colour as he saw with his own eyes, in Spain, but the kind
that he learned how to make so easily in the days of _Clara Gazul_ and
_La Guzla_, that he lost, as he confesses, all respect for it. Mateo,
Gianetto, Gamba, and Giuseppa belong also to the domain of the not
seen, not known. But the child, the unfortunate Fortunato, stands out
against the artificial background of place, time, and circumstance,
with a vividness of reality that, as in _The Taking of the Redoubt_,
would make the reality seem vague and indistinct beside it. A few pages
of this story might be cited as the highest point that Mérimée attained
as an artist.
He himself considered _The Venus of Ille_ the best story he ever wrote.
The preference is characteristic of him. It contains all the elements
of the mysterious and horrible for which he had an inherent passion;
and he relates it as he loved to relate the extraordinary, in the tone
of skeptical raillery that is the surest as well as the subtlest way of
sowing in a reader distrust in the integrity of his common sense. This
tone, also, was an inherent quality of Mérimée’s; it represented the
attitude of his mind towards the illusions of his imagination, which
he explains in one of his _Lettres Inédites_: “You cannot imagine,
madame, the difference there is between the things which it pleases
me to suppose and those which I admit to be true. I please myself in
imagining goblins and fairies. I make my own hair stand on end by
relating ghost stories to myself. But, notwithstanding the physical
effect I experience, I am not prevented from not believing in ghosts;
on this point my incredulity is so great that even if I were to see a
ghost, I would not believe in it any the more.”
The old mediæval legend was exhumed by Mérimée, as he unearthed the
bronze statue of the maleficent Venus, in the little village under
the shadow of the Canigou,--in all its beauty and terror, in all its
ferocity, one might say, of pagan Christian. He altered nothing of
it, and added only what as a visiting archæologist, his rôle in the
story, he could not omit: the details of his rather curious experience;
the impression made upon him by the statue, as a woman of seductive
wickedness and cruel, imperious passions, a type of woman that, as his
biographer comments, “none in the Paris of his day (the home of such
divinities) understood so well as he.”
The ascent to the dramatic catastrophe of the story is so natural,
easy, and pleasant (the preparations for a wedding and its celebration
are of all pleasant things in the world what a reader loves most to
dally with); the means employed by the writer are so natural--for
there is not the faintest suggestion of or appeal to the morbid--that
we arrive at the crisis well prepared to lose none of its weird and
terrible intensity, and the thrill and the shudder that arise in us
then are as real as Mérimée’s own physical tribute to the power of his
imagination.
Such stories have an intrinsic value that renders them independent of
an author’s name and reputation, even of his time and country. They are
as easily detached from him, and with as little loss to themselves,
as precious stones are from the name and place of the mine that once
held them. This supreme distinction of a story is, nevertheless, what
commends it to the assiduous seekers after the secret of literary
perfection; the philosopher’s stone of the world of letters. Mérimée,
on the whole, has stood the biographical and critical tests applied to
him well, both as man and artist, and, although the secret of his art
in truth went to the grave with him, this much at least has been found
out, that he was worthy to be the author of his stories.
[Illustration: (Signature) Grace King]