struggles of ideas and of the emotions which the ideas produce. He
shows us, as if through a microscope, or in an anatomical preparation
where the minutest veins are made visible by the injection of colouring
matter, the fluctuations of the feelings of happiness and unhappiness
in acting, suffering human beings, and also their relative strength.
Mosca has received an anonymous letter which tells him that his
mistress loves another. This information, which he has several reasons
for believing to be correct, at first utterly unmans him. Then, as a
sensible man and a diplomatist, he involuntarily begins to take the
letter itself into consideration and to speculate as to its probable
writer. He determines that it has been composed by the Prince. "This
problem solved, _the little feeling of pleasure produced by the
obviously correct guess_ was soon effaced by the return in full force
of the painful mental apparition of his rival's fresh, youthful grace."
Beyle has not neglected to note the momentary interruption of the
pangs of jealousy by the satisfaction of discovery.--In the course
of a few days Julien is to be executed. Meanwhile he is receiving
constant visits from the woman he loves, but from whom he has been
separated for years, and is absorbed by love to the exclusion of all
thought of his imminent fate." One strange effect of this strong and
perfectly unfeigned passion was _that Madame de Renal almost shared
his carelessness and gentle gaiety_. This last bold touch speaks to me
of extraordinarily profound observation. Beyle has correctly felt and
expressed the power of a happy, absorbing passion to banish all gloomy
thoughts (even the thought of certain death) as soon as they attempt to
intrude themselves; he knows that passion wrestling with the idea of
approaching calamity renders it powerless, when it does not succeed in
dismissing it as utterly incredible. It is such passages as these which
make other novelists seem shallow in comparison with Beyle.
His characters are never simple, straightforward beings; yet he manages
to impart to them, to the women as well as the men, a peculiar imprint
of nobility. They possess a certain genuine, though distorted heroism,
a certain strength of aspiration which elevates all their emotions;
and in the hour of trial they show that they have finer feelings and
stouter hearts than the generality of human beings. Observe some of
the little characteristics with which he stamps his women. Of Madame
de Rénal in _Rouge et Noir_ we are told: "Hers was one of those noble
and enthusiastic souls which feel almost as keen remorse for not
having performed a magnanimous action of which they have perceived the
possibility, as for having committed a crime." Mathilde de la Mole
says: "I feel myself on a plane with everything that is audacious and
great.... What great action has not seemed foolishness at the moment
when it was being ventured on? It is not till it is accomplished
that it seems possible to the ordinary mortal." In these two short
quotations, two uncommon female characters of opposite types, the
self-sacrificing and the foolhardy, are outlined with the hand of a
master. We feel that Beyle was absolutely correct when, in his letter
to Balzac, he defines his artistic method as follows: "I take some
person or other whom I know well; I allow him or her to retain the
fundamental traits of his or her character--_ensuite je lui donne plus
d'esprit_."
Of the two novels, _Le Rouge et le Noir_, the scene of which is laid
in France, is unmistakably the better; in _La Chartreuse de Parme_
we only occasionally feel that we are treading the firm ground of
reality. Beyle constructed his own Italy upon the foundation of the
fantastically interpreted experiences of his youth, and upon us moderns
this Italy produces an impression of untrustworthiness. Both in his
novel and in his essays he shows that the Italian mind, by reason of
its quality of vivid imagination, is much more plagued by suspicions
and delusions than the French, but that in compensation its pleasures
are more intense and more lasting, and that it possesses a keener
sense of beauty and less vanity. We are every now and then surprised
by observations in the domain of racial psychology, which, provided
they are correct (which I believe them to be), are extraordinarily
acute. We are told, for instance, of the Duchess of Sanseverina, that,
although she herself had employed poison to make away with an enemy,
she was almost beside herself with horror when she heard that the man
she loved was in danger of being poisoned. "The moral reflection did
not occur to her which would at once have suggested itself to a woman
educated in one of those religions of the North which permit personal
examination: 'I employed poison and am therefore punished by poison.'
In Italy this species of reflection in a moment of tragic passion would
seem as foolishly out of place as a pun would in Paris in similar
circumstances." What evidently attracted Beyle most profoundly in
the Italian character was its purely pagan basis, which none of the
ancient or medieval religions had really affected. But, in spite of the
excellence of its racial psychology, _La Chartreuse de Parme_ is less
to the taste of the modern reader than _Le Rouge et le Noir_ from the
fact of its containing more of the purely extrinsic Romanticism of its
day in the shape of disguises, poisonings and assassinations, prison
and flight scenes, &c. A deeper-seated, intrinsic Romanticism is common
to both books.
In many ways Beyle is extremely modern; his constant prophecy, "I shall
be read about 1880," has been accurately fulfilled; nevertheless,
both in his emotional life and in his delineation of character, he
is distinctly a Romanticist. It is to be observed, however, that
his Romanticism is the Romanticism of a powerful and of a critical
mind; it is the element of enthusiasm to the verge of madness and of
tenderness to the pitch of self-sacrifice, that is sometimes found in
characters the distinguishing features of which are sense and firmness.
In Beyle's essentially self-conscious characters this Romanticism
acts like a powerful explosive. It is enclosed in a hard, firm body,
but there it retains its power. A blow, and the dynamite shatters its
casing and spreads death and destruction around--_vide_ Julien, the
Duchess of Sanseverina, &c. At times these characters appear rather to
belong to that sixteenth century which Beyle studied so devoutly than
to the nineteenth. Beyle himself remarks of Fabrice that his first
inspiration was quite in the spirit of the sixteenth century; and
Mathilde is represented as living her whole life in that spirit. But
with this Romanticism of energy and daring deeds Beyle combines the
form of Romantic enthusiasm peculiar to the France of 1830. His Julien,
the gifted plebeian who is kept from rising by the spirit of the
Restoration period, who feels himself eclipsed by the all-prevailing
gilded mediocrity, is consumed by hunger and thirst for adventures and
impressions, and employs, when he is reduced to impotent hatred, every
possible means to raise himself above his original social position,
but remains, even when he is for the moment successful, at war with
his surroundings and unsatisfied. As the melancholic rebel, as the
vengeance-breathing plebeian, as _l'homme malheureux en guerre avec
la société_ (Beyle's own name for him), he is a brother, about the
same age but more prudent, of the step-children of society whom Hugo
paints--Didier, Gilbert, Ruy Blas; of the hero of Alexandre Dumas'
youth, Antony the bastard; of De Musset's Frank, George Sand's Lélia,
and Balzac's Rastignac.
As a stylist, Beyle is directly descended from the prose writers of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He formed his style upon
Montesquieu's; he occasionally reminds us of Chamfort; he is an admirer
of Paul Louis Courier, who, like himself, exchanged a military for a
literary career, and whose perspicuous, classic simplicity of style
strongly commended itself to him. But when Courier made it his chief
aim to attain to perfect harmony and pellucidness of style, when,
praising an ancient author, he said of him that he would have let
Pompey win the battle of Pharsalus if he could thereby have rounded
his own period better, he adopted the standpoint farthest removed from
Beyle's. Beyle the stylist has no sense for either colour or form. He
neither could nor would write for the eye; the picture was nothing to
him in comparison with the thought; he never made even the slightest
attempt to write in the manner of Chateaubriand or Hugo. And just
as little did he appeal to the ear; poetic prose was an abomination
to him; he detested the style of Madame de Staël's _Corinne_, and
scoffed at that of George Sand's novels. It was in his scorn of poetic
eloquence that he penned the well-known sentence in his letter to
Balzac: "When I was writing _La Chartreuse_ I used to read two or three
pages of the _Code civile_ every morning, to help me to catch the
proper tone and to be perfectly natural; I do not wish to fascinate
the reader's mind by artificial means." An author could hardly express
greater or more unreasonable contempt for the artistic. Nevertheless,
Beyle has artistic qualities. Though the construction of his books is
wretched--the drawing of them, so to speak, bad--many of the details
are painted with a masterly touch. Though his style is not in the least
musical--which is curious in the case of such a worshipper of Italian
music--unforgettable sentences abound in his pages. He was not master
of the art of writing a page, but he had the genius which sets its
stamp on a word or a descriptive phrase. In this respect he is the
antipodes of George Sand; her page is always much superior to her word;
Beyle's word is far better than his page. He had a genuine admiration
for Balzac, but a horror of his style. In _Mémoires d'un Touriste_ he
expresses the opinion that Balzac first wrote his novels in sensible
language, and then decked them out in the ornamental Romantic style
with such phrases as "The snow is falling in my heart," &c. Beyle's
own style has the merits and the defects which are the inevitable
results of his philosophic and abruptly intermittent mode of thought.
It is rich in ideas and guiltless of ornamentation, but it is slipshod
and jerky.[2] A horror of emptiness and vagueness is its
distinguishing and truly great virtue; writing so full of well-digested
matter as his is rare.
Beyle often said that only pedants and priests talk about death; he
was not afraid of it, but he looked upon it as a sad and ugly thing of
which it becomes us best to speak as little as possible. When in 1842
he died suddenly, as he had hoped he might, his name was almost unknown
to the public. Only three people attended his funeral, at which not a
word was spoken. Such notices of him as appeared in the newspapers,
though well-intentioned, only proved how little understood he was by
those who appreciated him most. But since then his fame has steadily
increased. At first he was regarded as a more or less affectedly
eccentric original; and at a later period, when his great gifts were
acknowledged, he was still looked upon as an isolated figure, as a
paradoxical, unfruitful genius. I, for my part, see in him not only one
of the chief representatives of the generation of 1830, but a necessary
link in the great intellectual movement of the century; for as a
psychologist his successor and the continuer of his work was no less a
man than Taine, and as an author his successor and disciple was Prosper
Mérimée.[3]
[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 of _La
Chartreuse_; Taine's of _Rouge et Noir_; Mérimée's notice in the
introduction to Beyle's _Correspondance inédite_, somewhat amplified in
_Portraits historiques_; Colomb's biographical essay; Sainte-Beuve's
two articles in the _Causeries du Lundi_, T. 9; Bussiere's article in
_Revue des deux Mondes_ of Jan. 15,1843; Zola's in _Les Romanciers
naturalists_; and Paul Bourget's in _Revue Nouvelle_, August 15, 1882.
Alfred de Bougy's _Stendhal_ is mere plagiarism and self-assertion.
XXI
MÉRIMÉE
Readers of the present generation--familiar with Victor Hugo's
contemptuous allusion to Mérimée in _L'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 of
_Mateo 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 preparing _macaroni 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.
[Illustration: 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's _Laokoon_, 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 brilliant _début_ as 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 the _Revue 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.