remarkably so. His natural audacity, moreover, impelled him to say
exactly what he thought, regardless of conventionalities. One sees
from his letters how frank he was by nature, how inclined to speak the
undisguised truth, and how impatient of conventional falsehoods and
even of alleviating or embellishing circumlocutions. This is especially
noticeable in the first volume of _Lettres à une inconnue_. Even in
these love-letters Mérimée is almost rude when it seems to him that
the object of his affections has expressed some merely conventional
opinion. Though his fear of ridicule and his ever-increasing scepticism
did not dispose him to knight-errantry or lead him to court martyrdom,
he nevertheless, in his fiftieth year, committed a chivalrous folly
of which most men of the world would only be capable in their extreme
youth. When his friend, the notorious Libri, was found guilty of having
abused his position as public librarian to the extent of appropriating
and selling a number of valuable books belonging to the nation,
Mérimée, unable to believe Libri capable of such an action, undertook
his rehabilitation with an ardour worthy of a better cause, and
attacked the committee of investigation and the judges in an article
in the _Revue des deux Mondes_ (April 15, 1852), the sparkling wit of
which recalls Paul Louis Courier's pamphlets. A professed Don Quixote
could not have acted more foolishly; nor is the case much altered
if what the initiated maintain is true, namely, that his ardour was
inspired rather by Madame Libri than by her husband.
Under the Empire, and even as a courtier, Mérimée preserved his freedom
of speech. I am not referring to the fact that he, as a rule, spoke
disparagingly of Napoleon III., which is not particularly to his
credit, seeing that he accepted office under that prince's government;
but even in conversation with members of the Imperial family he
combined frankness with courtesy. Writing in July 1859, he tells that
the Empress had asked him in Spanish what he thought of the speech made
by the Emperor on his return from Italy. "In order," he writes, "to be
both straightforward and courtier-like, I answered, '_Muy necesario!_'
(Very necessary)."
Mérimée's natural tendency to outspokenness was, however, held in check
by his pride and shyness. He early learned that the man who makes a
naïve public display of his feelings not only lays himself open to
ridicule, but invites the sympathy and familiarity of the vulgar crowd;
and, as a youth, he resolved that he would never wear his heart upon
his sleeve. Nor did it need all his mistrust to discover that the great
majority of those around him who made a frank and childlike display
of their feelings knew very well what they were about. The men who
published their noble-mindedness, their earnestness, their love of
morality and religion, their patriotism, &c., in the great market-place
of publicity, always seemed to him either to be angling for applause or
to be actuated by some business motive. He could not fail to see how
well it pays, as a rule, to give expression to noble sentiments and
warm feeling, and he found it difficult to suppose others ignorant of
the fact. In any case, he could not bring himself to do as they did; he
was one of those who cannot bear to proclaim the fact that they love
virtue and hate vice, and to be always singing the praises of "the
Good, the True, and the Beautiful."
To avoid all comradeship with the calculating "men of feeling," and to
protect his emotional life from the gaze of the profane, Mérimée had
recourse to the expedient of concealing his quivering sensibility under
steely irony, as under a coat of mail. He determined rather to appear
worse than he was, than to run the risk of being taken for one of these
models of all the virtues. With this aim in view he dealt so hardly
with himself that he lost his first fresh, simple naturalness, and
acquired instead a manner which, though still natural and simple, was,
nevertheless, distinctly a cultivated manner. In _Le Vase étrusque_,
the one of his tales which gives most insight into his own intellectual
and emotional life, we read of the hero, Saint-Clair: "He was born
with a tender and loving heart; but, at an age when one is liable to
receive impressions which last for the rest of one's life, too frank
a display of his tender-heartedness drew down upon him the ridicule
of his companions. He was proud and ambitious, and valued the good
opinion of others, as all children do. Thenceforward he made it his
study to conceal all the outward manifestations of what he regarded
as a dishonourable weakness. He attained his aim, but his victory
cost him dear. He succeeded in hiding the emotions of his feeling
heart from others, but, by shutting them up in his own breast, he
made them a thousand times more painful. In society he acquired the
lamentable reputation of being unfeeling and careless, and in solitude
his restless imagination created torments for him which were the more
unbearable because he would confide them to no one." It is impossible
to ignore the direct self-portraiture in this character sketch, though
the colouring is too sombre.
[1] _Victor Hugo raconté par un témoin de sa vie_, ii 159. Eugène de
Mirécourt: _Mérimée_, 25.
[2] A reproduction of the portrait is to be found in Maurice Tourneux's
_Prosper Mérimée: ses portraits, ses dessins, sa bibliothèque_.
XXII
BEYLE AND MÉRIMÉE
Thus prepared, Mérimée, at the age of eighteen, made the acquaintance
of Henri Beyle, who was twenty years his senior. They met at the house
of the famous singer, Madame Pasta, who had left Milan and taken up
her residence in Paris. It was inevitable that Beyle should exercise
considerable influence over a kindred spirit so much his junior. Direct
proof of this influence can hardly be given, for, before he met Beyle,
Mérimée had written nothing; but, if we compare the works of the
two authors, the resemblance between some of their peculiarities is
striking; and the comparison is further instructive because it serves
to throw Mérimée's own special characteristics into strong relief.
I consider it impossible that Mérimée can have influenced Beyle,
unless, indeed, we reckon as influence the communication of general
information; for Beyle is undoubtedly indebted to Mérimée for many of
the observations on the subject of art in his _Mémoires d'un Touriste_.
Of the two minds Beyle's was obviously the first matured; therefore,
when the younger of the two friends begins his biographical notice
of the elder with the assertion that, in spite of their friendship,
they had hardly had two ideas in common in the course of their lives,
this obvious exaggeration may reasonably be attributed to the writer's
anxiety to prevent his readers from applying certain of his remarks on
Beyle to himself.
Beyle and Mérimée resemble each other, in the first instance, in their
love of fact. All Mérimée's readers know that what he presents them
with is the bare, accurately demonstrable fact, the exactly drawn
detail. All that he cares for in history, as he himself confesses
in his _Chronique du Règne de Charles IX._, are the anecdotes; and
of these he prefers the kind which illustrate the manners and types
of character of the period. Exactly the same can be said of Beyle.
Anecdote is positively the natural form of his thought; he thinks
in anecdotes. He paints the individual in anecdotes, the period
in biographies. His aversion for the vague leads him to write the
kind of history which seems to him most full of life, in other
words, to communicate fact in the form of a novel, or of a short,
realistic drama. And the pithy, short anecdotes which he relates are
never commonplace, but invariably the striking expression of some
essential fact. In so far the resemblance to Mérimée is marked. When
a modern admirer of Beyle (Paul Heyse) praises his short Italian
tales, "in which strong, reckless passions assert themselves without
any self-deception, and take their course with a fiery, or cold,
heedlessness of consequences, prepared in the last resort to have
recourse to the knife," we feel that these expressions might, without
the alteration of a word, be applied to Mérimée's stories.
Nevertheless, a story as communicated by Mérimée conveys such a
different meaning from a story as communicated by Beyle, that it is
easy to determine the limits of the elder man's influence upon the
younger. Beyle's salient characteristic is the tendency to generalise.
The trait of character which is exhibited in any given action, is to
him only an instance; it illustrates a psychological law, or is the
evidence of certain social conditions or racial peculiarities, which
it is of great consequence to him to elucidate. When, for example,
he fills his book _De l'Amour_ to repletion with anecdotes, he does
it merely for the purpose of showing, in a practical and impressive
manner, what he means by the different names which he gives to the
different varieties of the passion and their different stages of
development. To obtain the reader's assent to the conclusions he draws,
he presents his material, his arguments, in the form of anecdotes. In
his novels this tendency to generalise has almost a distracting effect.
He too frequently explains to his reader: "She acted in such and such
a manner because she was an Italian; a Parisian would of course have
acted very differently."
No traces of anything similar are to be found in Mérimée's writings; no
reflections or divagations--strictly accurate, bold representation of
his fact, and nothing more. When he has chosen his subject, which is
most frequently some survival of ancient savagery that has attracted
his attention as an old coin among modern ones attracts the eye of
the connoisseur, or an old building in a modern town the eye of the
traveller, his whole aim is to make the curious phenomenon stand out
in as strong relief as possible from the insipid dead-level of his own
day; he removes everything which might prevent the strange survival
of the past from producing its full effect; but such a proceeding as
tracing its connection with the general condition of the society or
country of which it bears the impress, never occurs to him. To see
things in their whole bearing is not his affair: the bird's-eye view
he leaves to others. He seeks and finds a curious phenomenon in the
world of reality, delineates it, and in the process of reproduction
imparts to it some of his own life; but he never regards it as anything
but the curious phenomenon. And he is as strictly matter-of-fact in
interpretation as in delineation. Note, for example, how he protests
(in his _Portraits historiques et littéraires_) against any symbolic
interpretation of _Don Quixote_, in which work he refuses to see
anything but a masterly parody of the romances of chivalry. "Let us
leave to solemn German professors," he exclaims, "the honour of the
discovery that the Knight of La Mancha symbolises poetry and his
squire prose. The interpreter will always discover in the works of a
man of genius a thousand poetical intentions of which their author was
entirely ignorant." Contrast with this kind of criticism the following
fine passage from Sainte-Beuve. "This book, originally a purely topical
work, has become part of the literature of the world. It has conquered
the imagination of humanity. Every reader has worked his will with it,
has shaped it to his taste.... Cervantes did not think of this, but we
do. Each one of us is a Don Quixote to-day, a Sancho Panza to-morrow.
In every one of us there is more or less of this discordant union of a
high-flying ideal with the plain common-sense which keeps close to the
ground. With many it is actually only a question of age; a man falls
asleep Don Quixote and awakes Sancho Panza." Beyle would have endorsed
these sentiments; Mérimée was kept from doing so by his antipathy to
generalisation.
Their love of the fact in its simplicity produced in both Beyle and
Mérimée a strong aversion for French classic rhetoric; and both are
distinguished from all contemporary French Romanticists by the fact
that they do not substitute lyric poetry for that rhetoric. Beyle
never wrote a line of poetry; he had no ear whatever for rhythm. In
spite of the enthusiastic admiration which he imagined he felt for the
Italian poets, he regarded metre as merely an assistance to memory, and
could see no reason for it in a composition not intended to be learned
by rote. Mérimée is characterised by a similar dislike of verse. He
had such a repugnance to the effeminate, languishing music of rhyme,
that the numerous poems cited in his writings are, without exception,
rendered in prose; he preferred letting them lose all their character
to translating them in verse. The explanation naturally suggests itself
that he did not feel capable of writing poetry. But I am rather of
opinion that it was his pride which would not allow him to submit his
poetry to the criticism of the public. His _Lettres à une inconnue_
show that he could write English verse, so the question can hardly have
been one of inability. But such talent as he had, he did not cultivate;
an aversion to display of feeling, a shy reservedness, produced the
same practical result as Beyle's want of ear.
In this matter, however, as in various others, Mérimée outdoes his
master. In the depths of Beyle's soul there was a lyric tendency; it
finds its way to the surface in his persistent enthusiasm for Napoleon,
for Italy, for the sixteenth century, for Cimarosa and Rossini,
Correggio and Canova, and in all the superlatives which flow almost as
abundantly from his pen as from Balzac's. Mérimée, on the other hand,
not content with banishing the lyric form from his works, entirely
abjures the spirit; he walls himself in; no prose is less lyrical than
his.
In order to obtain an adequate impression of his literary
matter-of-factness, let us for a moment compare his tales, not with
Beyle's, but with George Sand's first novels, which were written about
the same time. What George Sand offers us in hers is, principally,
such a masterly revelation of the inner life of a young woman, with
its modesty and its enthusiasm, its impulse to self-devotion and its
susceptibility to passion, as no woman had ever given to the world
before; but in the deepest recesses of her soul there is a purpose;
she has a wrong to avenge, wrath to satisfy; she does not see the
sufferings of the female sex from the standpoint of an outsider; she
does not try to conceal that her heart has bled. Mérimée, on the other
hand, has no cause, no theory, no political or social bias whatever. He
has no enthusiasms and believes in nothing, neither in a philosophic
system, nor in a school of art, nor in a religious truth; scarcely even
in the general progress of humanity. The sceptical man-of-the-world,
he hardens his heart against all reformers, missionaries, improvers of
the world, and saviours of humanity; he does not answer the question
whether or not he agrees with them; he turns a deaf ear to it. George
Sand shows what marriage is in France, and asks her public with a
quivering voice: "What do you say to this? Is it to be endured?"
Mérimée writes _La double Méprise_ and ends his tale without moving a
muscle of his face.
As a rest from overpowering emotion George Sand goes back to primitive
human nature, and with simple, beautiful touches delineates (as in
Mauprat) the power and the happiness of faithful love, or produces
(as in the peasant stories and _Jean de la Roche_) simple, touching,
ideal representations of the innate nobility of the human soul. Mérimée
does not believe in the ideal, and has no talent for the idyll. There
is a sombre, dusky tone over everything he paints; the impulse of the
soul towards a purity which it loves, or a heroism which it admires,
is foreign to his art. In her inmost heart George Sand is the lyric
poet. Whether she makes the passion of love the centre of her book,
concedes it every right and gives it her whole sympathy even when it
inspires an unworthy character (as in that remarkable and profoundly
suggestive tale, _Valvèdre_), or whether she is carried away by her
admiration for the courage and strength of character of the best of her
own sex, she always shares the emotions and passions of her characters,
rejoices, weeps, sighs, and smiles with them. Mérimée, on the contrary,
resembles Beyle in giving an impersonal, dramatic expression to his
ideas and feelings, and surpasses him in the artistic skill with which
he does it. He has been at great trouble to shut up his feelings in
his own breast, has imposed silence upon them, the absolute silence
of the prison cell, and never, never once, does he give expression
to them in his own name. He gives voice to them only through fully
responsible characters, and that but sparingly. The characters thus
evolved stand out before us with unusual vividness, and their language
is peculiarly laconic and vigorous. The more intense and tender
Mérimée's emotion originally was, the prouder is its outward bearing.
There is nothing feminine in him. Even in his female characters it is
not their femininity which he brings out. Beyle, a marked contrast
to him in this respect, makes, in writing to him, the true and apt
observation, that his novels are wanting in "delicate tenderness."[1]
His women are masculine and logical in their passions; almost all of
them are powerful individualities; even the most frivolous and immoral
meet death with quiet fortitude (Arsène Guillot, Julie de Chaverney,
Carmen). None of them have the melting Correggio-like quality which
Beyle imparted to his female characters.
Beyle's more lyric style and profounder understanding of true
womanliness are principally due to the fact that he was at heart an
imaginative enthusiast. His matter-of-factness is only skin deep.
Hence enthusiasm itself was a favourite theme of his, whereas it was
one which Mérimée avoided. Compare them, for instance, as delineators
of battle scenes; compare the two best prose descriptions of battles
in existence at that time, Mérimée's famous _L'Enlèvement de la
Redoute_ and Beyle's equally famous account of the battle of Waterloo.
They present a striking contrast. In Beyle's pages we have a youth's
enthusiasm for Napoleon and thirst for military glory depicted with a
touch of irony, but also with genuine sympathy; in Mérimée's we have
only the dark side of war--the half-mechanical assault on a redoubt,
and the tumult of battle, which he paints with as masterly a hand
as Gérôme's, without thought of patriotism, enthusiasm, or any more
elevated sentiment than soldier-like stoicism and hope of promotion.
Beyle and Mérimée resemble each other in their attitude to religion,
which was a peculiar one for Romanticists. The French Romanticists
were originally as little inimical to Roman Catholicism as the German.
Several of them began life as good Catholics, and the attitude of the
rest was, generally speaking, one either of respect or indifference.
But both Mérimée and Beyle were from the very first thoroughly pagan in
thought and feeling. And Mérimée's free-thought, as well as Beyle's,
was of the ardent type. He was not naïve enough to cherish a species
of enmity towards a personal God, but he shared Beyle's detestation
of the representatives of religion. His dislike of Christianity
is, however, far more indirectly expressed than Beyle's, which is
incessantly forcing itself on our notice. He does not, like Beyle,
hate Catholicism; he only smiles at it. He never puts out more than
a finger tip from under his black domino. It amuses him to describe
insinuating Catholic priests; and when his characters have occasion
to speak of baptism, confession, or any other religious ceremony, he
is apt to make them do it "in a sanctimonious, nasal tone." But when
the words are his own, we never have more than such cautious, subtle
irony as is contained in the following passage. "It was a religious
book which Madame de Pienne had brought with her; and I do not intend
to tell you its title, in the first place because I do not wish to
injure its author, in the second, because you would probably accuse me
of desiring to draw some opprobrious inference regarding such books in
general. Suffice it to say that the work in question was written by
a young man of nineteen, with the special aim of restoring hardened
sinners of the female sex to the bosom of the Church, that Arsène was
terribly exhausted, and that she had not closed her eyes the whole of
the previous night. Whilst the third page was being read, that happened
which would have happened whatever the book had been--Mademoiselle
Guillot closed her eyes and fell asleep."
Here again the difference between Beyle and Mérimée is mainly
conditioned by the fact that the former was far less sceptical than the
latter. Beyle was a materialist of the school of the Encyclopedists,
and as such had firm beliefs. He had his philosophy--Epicureanism,
to which he adhered faithfully; his method--psychological analysis;
his religion--the worship of beauty in life, in music, in the plastic
arts, and in literature. Mérimée has no philosophy; one cannot imagine
anything less dogmatic than his half-stoical, half-sensual turn of
mind; and he has no religion; he worships nothing. He avoids enthusiasm
as carefully as if it were a disease. We are impressed by this fact in
reading his remarks on Leonidas and the battle of Thermopylæ in the
famous essay on Grote's _History of Greece_. He tells how he himself
some years before had spent three days at Thermopylæ, and confesses
that, "prosaic as he is," it was not without emotion that he climbed
the little height where the last of the Three Hundred fell. But he
did not allow himself to be overcome by his emotion. He examined the
Persian arrow-heads, and found that they were of flint--these Asiatics,
therefore, were but poor savages in comparison with the Europeans; if
we have cause to marvel at anything, it is that they made their way
through the Pass at all. He proceeds to criticise Leonidas severely for
having occupied this impregnable position himself, leaving the other
pass, which was much more difficult to defend, in charge of a coward.
The death of Leonidas was undoubtedly the death of a hero; but let us
picture to ourselves, if we can, his return to Sparta after having
surrendered the key of Hellas to the Barbarians. Mérimée comes to the
conclusion that Herodotus has written history as a poet, and moreover
as a Greek poet, whose chief aim it is to throw the beautiful into
strong relief; and he ends with the question: Can it be said that in
this case the fiction is of more value than the truth? Ninety-nine men
out of a hundred would unhesitatingly answer: Yes. Mérimée does not.
He is writing in 1849, and with recent historical tragedies in his
mind he answers: "Possibly. But it was by misrepresenting Thermopylæ,
misrepresenting the ease with which three hundred free men could
resist three million slaves, that the orators of Italy persuaded the
Piedmontese to pit themselves alone against the Austrians." Compare
with this sceptic spirit of Mérimée's the enthusiastic and simple faith
with which Beyle retails the untrustworthy legend of Beatrice Cenci.
The period of 1830 was a time when the most eminent authors of France
were very much on their guard against any excess in the matter of
patriotism. The newly aroused appreciation of the merits of foreign
literatures led, by a natural reaction, to contempt for their own and
its classic authors, and even at times for the French spirit generally.
The first, tolerably foolish, attack made by the Romantic School on
Racine is a well-known episode. French classic literature was declared
to be a literature only suitable for the schoolroom. Victor Hugo, who
was by no means generally lacking in national pride, exclaimed, in
the preface to _Les Orientales_: "Other nations say, Homer, Dante,
Shakespeare. We say, Boileau." Hugo's youth had been spent in Spain,
and he treated Spanish themes in his first dramas (_Inez de Castro,
Hernani_), retaining the Spanish division of the play into days
instead of acts. Spain and Italy were the Promised Land of the budding
Romanticists. Alfred de Musset wrote _Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie_;
Théophile Gautier never wearied of showering maledictions on the
cold climate and colourless customs of France, called Spain his true
fatherland, &c., &c.