against national vanity. In Beyle's mouth the word "French" was almost
a term of contumely; his satirical appellation for Frenchmen was _les
vainvifs_; his books teem with such ejaculations as: "Could anything
be more comical than to ascribe depth of character to a Parisian?"
He calls his country, "le plus vilain pays du monde, que les nigauds
appellent la belle France." We have seen that he eventually renounced
his nationality. Mérimée, who was almost as much in love with Spanish
as Beyle with Italian customs, had the essentially Romantic leaning to
the foreign, the exotic; and he too, like his older friend, considered
one of the leading traits of French national character to be that
constant attention to the opinion of others (_le qu'en dira-t-on_)
which destroys all originality, makes a joyless thing of life, and
forms the best foundation for the hypocrisies of society. His general
opinion of his countrymen was a tolerably low one, and he took no
pains to conceal the fact from them. But, unlike Beyle, he in the
end proclaimed his allegiance to the old gospel, the old creed, of
patriotism. The step was not an easy one for a man who hated patriotic
phrase-mongering like the plague; it took nothing less than the
downfall of France to draw any expression of love for his country from
his lips. But in a letter dated September 13, 1870, he writes: "All
my life long I have endeavoured to keep free from prejudices, and to
be a cosmopolitan rather than a Frenchman; but all these philosophic
draperies are of no avail. I bleed to-day from these stupid Frenchmen's
wounds, I weep for their humiliations, and, ungrateful and foolish as
they are, I love them in spite of everything."
In his estimate of Beyle's character, Mérimée (in this agreeing with
Sainte-Beuve) decides that one of its most marked traits was his
fear of being duped. "Thence arose," he writes, "that artificial
hardness, that overdone analysis of the low motives of all generous
actions, and that resistance to the first impulses of the heart, all
of which, in my opinion, was more assumed than real. The aversion and
contempt with which sentimentality inspired him often led him into
the contrary exaggeration, to the great scandal of those who, not
knowing him intimately, took all that he said of himself literally."
This fear of being duped, with all its consequences as here described,
was quite as characteristic of Mérimée himself as of Beyle; only that
Mérimée, being of a more refined nature, had to do more violence to
himself in the process of acquiring that cynical tone which in the end
became as natural to him in intercourse with men as was insinuating
gallantry in intercourse with women. He too, as a young man, enjoyed
being considered a monster of immorality; and it was only when some
comic incident, such as that of the country lady's refusing to travel
alone with him in the diligence,[2] showed him what his reputation
really was, that he felt a few days' remorse for his folly. Horror of
hypocrisy actually made Mérimée a hypocrite, inducing him to feign vice
and hard-heartedness; and his fear of being deceived not only led him
to deceive others, but to cheat himself out of many pure and simple
pleasures. It is not only on the stage, as Gorgias says, that the dupe
is often wiser than the man who is never duped. He who does not live
in constant fear of treachery has more courage, is more productive,
realises more of the possibilities which lie latent in his soul.
In Mérimée's case the constant fear of exposing himself had two bad
consequences which it had not in Beyle's. In the first place, it
produced in him in course of time a kind of official stiffness. As a
member of the Academy and of the Senate, and as the trusted favourite
of the Imperial family, he had to appear in public and make speeches
on occasions when he could not but inwardly laugh at the figure he cut
and at his own words. Beyle never placed himself in a position which
obliged him to speak with respect of things he scorned, or to pay
compliments to blockheads. It was a sincere feeling which he expressed
in the words: "When I see a man strutting about a drawing-room with
any number of orders on his coat, I involuntarily think of all the
meannesses and the contemptible, nay, often treacherous actions which
he must have committed to have amassed so many proofs of them."
In the second place, the fear in question made Mérimée so severely
critical of himself as an author that he became unproductive. Beyle's
motto was: "No day without its line." Mérimée never wrote much, and
at last stopped altogether. His demands of himself in the matter of
plasticity and technical perfection were so excessive that he preferred
withdrawing from the contest with his own ideal to risking defeat. It
seemed to him that it was better to rest contented with what he had
done than to stake his reputation as an artist on any new work. And
it made it the easier for him to refrain, that he was by nature of a
reserved, retiring disposition, and not impelled by any uncontrollable
impulse to constant production.
It was in vain that Beyle reproached him for "laziness." Amongst the
causes of that laziness there was one which Beyle did not understand,
and which constituted the main difference between the two men. Beyle
was a psychologist and a poet, but not an artist; Mérimée was an
artist to his finger-tips. It is as the artist and as the artist alone
that he is great; and his superiority to Beyle lies in his artistic
skill. It was he who gave imperishable artistic form to that wealth of
intellectual material which Beyle brought to light. And the laziness
was anything but absolute idleness. It found expression in essays,
descriptions of historical monuments, translations from the Russian,
and modest but careful historical research and historical writings.
Mérimée was a philologist and an archaeologist, a scholar and a
scientist. His art may be likened to an oasis lying in the midst of
his arid technical studies; it borders on science on every side, and
the passage from it to historical writing is an easy one; for there
comes a moment when the love of fact and the passion for accuracy
and precision can no longer find satisfaction in merely imaginary
portraiture. In this particular the history of Mérimée's personal
career as an author resembles the history of the Romantic School; he
reflects a great movement on a small scale. For in France as well as in
Germany, scientific criticism and historical research followed in the
path which the literary criticism of the Romanticists had opened up for
imaginative literature. When the poets had done with the foreign and
medieval material, the scientists began to deal with it in the spirit
which poetry had evoked.
As Mérimée's fiction was always in a manner the offspring of his
researches, as many of his stories, such as _Carmen, La Vénus d'Ille_,
and _Lokis_, are even sportively set in a framework of archæological
or philological investigation, it was natural enough that science
should gradually make its way from the outside to the heart of
his work. In his position as a scientific man lies the last great
difference between him and Beyle. Mérimée is not a scientist of the
first rank; he has the second-class qualities of thoroughness and
trustworthiness, but lacks the spark of inspiration which he possesses
as an author. He has, however, the distinctive sign of the true man
of science; he never speaks of what he does not understand; he never
indulges in random conjectures or ingenious paradoxes; he progresses
step by step. At times he may be dry and wooden, but he never makes a
mistake.
If Mérimée is the sober, uninspired man of science, Beyle is the
inspired scientific dilettante, with all the signs of genius, but also
all the signs of dilettantism. His books teem with daring assertions,
indemonstrable conjectures, theories regarding nations with whose
languages he was unfamiliar, amateurish paradoxes like that which
places Werner's _Luther_ in the forefront of German drama. His essays
are as entertaining and suggestive as Mérimée's are tiresome and dry;
but Mérimée's conclusions are founded upon rock, Beyle's too often
built upon sand.
Thus, both as the scientist and the author, Mérimée marks an advance
upon Beyle. He is a man of a narrower and less fertile mind; but the
contents of his mind are infinitely better ordered, and he is master of
a highly perfected artistic style.
[1] "Souvent vous ne me semblez pas assez _délicatement tender_; or il
faut cela dans un roman pour me toucher."
[2] _Lettres à une inconnue_, i. 72.
XXIII
MÉRIMÉE
Mérimée's earliest attitude as the dramatist and novelist is an
attitude of literary aggressiveness. Although by nature an observer,
he does not, like Balzac, set himself the task of representing, in all
its breadth, the world he sees around him; neither is it his ambition
that posterity shall study in his works the customs and ideas of his
period; he desires to challenge a prevailing taste; and with the
object of irritating and rousing his fellow-countrymen, he generally
chooses themes which have as little connection as possible with modern
civilised society.
It was natural that his hostility should first vent itself upon
literary sentimentality. The shy, proud youth was penetrated with the
idea that it is the duty of the author to communicate his ideas to
the public, but that his dignity as a man requires him to keep his
feelings to himself. But in this opinion he received no support from
the French literary men of the day. Ever since Rousseau's novels,
not to mention his _Confessions_, had prepared the way for orgies of
half-real, half-fictitious emotion and a communicativeness which kept
back nothing, a series of authors, from Chateaubriand to Lamartine and
Sainte-Beuve, had dissected themselves for the entertainment of the
public, initiated their readers into the secrets of their hearts, in
short, unreservedly satisfied the low curiosity of the vulgar herd.
And with what aim? To win its sympathy. Mérimée was far too proud to
desire it. "For Heaven's sake no confessions!" he says to himself the
first time he puts pen to paper. And to avoid all risk of becoming
sentimental or morbid, he conceals himself completely behind the
characters he describes, allows them and their destinies free play,
and never expresses his opinion of their conduct. Beyle, who had
quite as strong an aversion for sentimentality, was unable to refrain
from putting in his word; Mérimée makes himself invisible, inaudible,
untraceable. But his temperament makes it impossible for him to do this
in any other way than by confining himself to the representation of
intense, determined characters, who follow their impulses without much
deliberation or talk, are carried away by their passions, and suddenly,
unexpectedly, proceed to action. "To me," says Mérimée's South American
sea-captain in _La Famille Carvajal_, "all these tragedy heroes are
phlegmatic, passionless philosophers. If one of them kills his rival
in a duel or any other manner, remorse overpowers him immediately and
makes him as soft as a woollen mitten. I have seen twenty-seven years'
service, I have killed forty-one Spaniards, and I don't know what such
a feeling is.... Characters, emotions, actions--everything seems
unnatural to us when we read these plays aloud in the mess-room. They
are all princes, who vow that they are madly in love, and dare not so
much as touch the tips of their mistresses' fingers, but keep these
ladies a boat's hook length off. We sailors go to work more boldly in
such matters."
Mérimée does not write for the "bourgeois," into whose eyes the
slightest emotion brings tears; he addresses himself to people of
stronger nerves, who require more violent shocks to move them.
Therefore away with the regulation lengthy introductions, and all
the preparations and omens of tragedy! Human beings with blood in
their veins do not deliberate so long; and nervous weakness is not an
interesting spectacle to any but the neurotic. If a woman loves, what
can be more natural than that she should say so, and, regardless of
every other consideration, make the intervals between the first avowal,
the first kiss, and the first embrace as short as possible? If a man
hates with a manly hatred, what more natural than that he should put an
end to his torment and his enemy's life with a stab or a shot? It is,
undoubtedly, natural, when the race which the author chooses to depict
is not an effete, but a vigorous one; and this is the explanation of
Mérimée's tendency to give to every feeling the character of a fierce
passion, to dwell upon what is cruel and hard, to make death--not
tragedy death, but real death, in all its cold, hard pitilessness--the
dénouement of every tale which he sends out from his artist's workshop.
It explains what may be summed up in a word as _l'atroce_ in his
writings.
He is familiar with death. If the old designations were applicable in
his case, we should call him a great tragic author; but Mérimée does
not believe in what dogmatic upholders of Aristotelian principles call
tragic expiation. Concerning the representation of death in the works
of other authors he seems to say with Schiller:
"Aber der Tod, Ihr Herrn, ist so ästhetisch doch nicht."
Deepest down in his soul lies the love of strength. But he does not,
like Balzac, love strength in the shape of strong desire, strong
passions; he loves it in the form of original force of character and of
stirring, decisive event; and therefore he naturally begins by feeling
and reproducing the poetry of decisive event, long before he is mature
enough to represent that of simple, strong character. Of all events,
death is the most decisive; and hence it is that he falls in love
with death--not, be it observed, with death as it is conceived of by
spiritualists and believers, not with death as a purifying passage to
another existence, but as a violent, sudden, bloody termination. Like
Sièyes, he is for _la mort sans phrase_.
The idea not unnaturally suggests itself that a certain want of
feeling, a certain tendency to cruelty, in Mérimée the man, probably
lay at the root of this literary hard-heartedness. It can, however,
almost be proved from direct assertions of his own, that the most
extravagant manifestations of the quality were originally called
forth by his strong aversion to sentimentality in literature. In his
essay on the friend of his youth, Victor Jacquemont, we come upon the
following passage: "I have never known a more truly feeling heart than
Jacquemon's. His was a loving, tender nature; but he took as much pains
to conceal his sensibility as others do to dissimulate their evil
inclinations. In our youth we had been repelled by the false sentiment
of Rousseau and his imitators, and the result in our case was the usual
one--an exaggerated reaction. We wished to be strong, and therefore we
jeered at sentimentality."
It is, nevertheless, self-evident that this hatred of the pathetic,
which contrasts so strongly with the extreme sentimentality of most
of Mérimée's youthful contemporaries, and this predilection for the
violent and the savage, were not purely and simply products of a spirit
of contradiction. To gauge the strength of the predilection we have
but to glance at the history of Mérimée's development: in another man
we should expect to see such a feeling checked in its first outbreaks
by the lighter, brighter mood of youth, and tempered in age by waning
vigour. But such was not the case with Mérimée. His love of violent
solutions is of the same age as his love of pen and ink, and the
horrors and terrors with which in the works of his mature manhood his
genius produces a tragic effect, become in those of his old age merely
gloomy and repulsive.
In the _Théâtre de Clara Gazul_, Mérimée's first book, published when
he was only twenty-two, it is amusing to observe the conflict of youth
with the inveterate natural bias towards gloom and violence. Read
superficially, the book produces the effect of a tolerably serious
work. Professing to be written in the Spanish style, it nevertheless
differs in many essential particulars from Spanish dramatic literature.
The plays of which it is composed have no mutual resemblance; they do
not, like the mantle-and-dagger tragedies, monotonously repeat the same
types of character and the same situations, produced by jealousy and a
touchy sense of honour; nor do they accept the extremely conventional
ideas of morality current in the tragedies in question. Mérimée's
characters have distinctly defined individualities; and instead of
exhibiting superhuman self-control and resignation, they are carried
blindly away by their passions and desires. Still less resemblance
is there between these plays of Mérimée's and the great series of
romantic and fantastic dramas (some of them breathing the spirit of
Catholicism, others lacking it) in which Calderon reaches the zenith of
his productive power and displays all his wealth of colour. It is only
with certain heavy Spanish dramas, such as Calderon's _El alcalde de
Zalamea, Las tres justicias in una, El medico de su honra, El pintor
de su deshonra_, or Moreto's _El valiente justiciero_, that certain of
Mérimée's, for example _Inès Mendo_, harmonise in their general tone.
Taken as a whole, instead of being what it pretends to be, namely
serious, the book is arrogantly wanton and audacious; genuine French
frivolity and satire peep out beneath the costume of the Spanish
actress. Personages are introduced upon the stage whom, as we are told
in the preface to _Une Femme est un Diable_, our nurses taught us to
regard with reverence. But the author hopes that "the emancipated
Spaniards" will not take this amiss.
_Clara Gazul_ is, then, a merry book; the good lady who wrote it
is no prude. But what a strange kind of mirth it is! Amongst its
manifestations is the free use of the knife. If we try to find a
parallel to it, nothing suggests itself but the sportive springs of a
young tiger. Mérimée finds it almost impossible to end without killing
all his principal characters, and one sword-thrust succeeds the other
almost automatically. But he amuses himself by destroying the illusion
directly after the catastrophe; the actors rise, and one of them thanks
the audience for their kind attention; the whole thing is turned into a
jest.
_Doña Maria._
Help! She is poisoned, poisoned by me. I will see to my own
punishment; the convent well is not far off. (_Exit hurriedly._)
_Fray Eugenio_ (_to the audience_).
Do not take it too much amiss that I have caused the death of
these two charming young ladies; and graciously excuse the
shortcomings of the author.
Thus ends the wild play _L'Occasion_. The wittiest criticism passed on
these dramas, and the style in general, is contained in a sentence in
Alfred de Musset's _Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet_: "Souvient l'Espagne,
avec ses Castillans, qui se coupent la gorge comme on boit un verre
d'eau, ses Andalouses qui font plus vite encore un petit métier moins
dépeuplant, ses taureaux, ses toréadors, matadors, &c."
It was not in Mérimée's works alone that the Spain of the young
Romantic School (to which De Musset himself contributed the pale-faced,
brown-necked Andalusian beauty) was so passionate and hasty. But no one
took such delight in it all as he. And the themes he chose in his old
age are in complete accordance with this taste of his youth.
His last tale, _Lokis_, is the story of a young Lithuanian count of
mysterious descent, who from time to time is possessed by, or at least
feels that he possesses, the instincts of a wild animal. He goes mad on
his wedding-night and kills his bride by biting her throat. The count's
character is drawn with delicate skill; the progress of his mental
derangement is indicated by a few slight but graphic touches; and
Mérimée has evidently enjoyed contrasting this wild young Lithuanian
nobleman with a peculiarly worthy and dull German professor (the German
of French fiction prior to 1870), a guest in the count's house, who
writes every evening to his _fiancée_, Fräulein Weber, and communicates
the horrible catastrophe to the reader in one of his letters. But
the impression left by this vampire tale is one of disgust mingled
with horror. The masterly treatment, the perfect style, the refined
manner in which the loathsome subject is dealt with, remind us of the
white kid gloves of the headsman. The story is only of interest to us
as a proof of the strength retained by one of its author's original
tendencies.
Personally characteristic of Mérimée as this tendency undoubtedly was,
it is plainly of near kin to a tendency of the whole of that school
to which Southey gave the name of the "Satanic." The influence of
Byron is unmistakable. By 1830 Frenchmen were thoroughly weary (as
Englishmen had been for some time) of the "Immanuelistic" literature
of the Reaction. The sceptre of literature had passed from the hands
of Lamartine into the hands of Victor Hugo, whose _Orientales_ contain
most sanguinary pictures of war and destruction. Lamartine himself,
the Seraphic poet in chief, had struck a Satanic note in _La Chute
d'un Ange_. And a young poet of Victor Hugo's school was treating
gruesome themes in short, artistically finished stories at the same
time as Mérimée, and entirely uninfluenced by him. I allude to Petrus
Borel, who died poor and unknown. His _Dina, la belle Juive_, will bear
comparison with any of Mérimée's tales of horror. Poor Borel was an
enthusiast, an ardent moralist, who, concealing his fervour beneath his
realism, desired to inspire indignation with the deeds of violence he
described. The refined, polished Mérimée is often only pretending to be
bloodthirsty because it amuses him to frighten his readers, especially
those of the female sex. But in both cases we have also the genuine
Romantic defiance of the "bourgeois."
Mérimée has not escaped unpunished for thus yielding up his talent to
the service of literary bloodthirstiness. Though he avoided his Nemesis
during his lifetime, she overtook him after death. When De Loménie
pronounced the customary panegyric in the Académie Française, he
concluded by expressing the opinion that what was wanting in Mérimée's
life was the peace and joy of the domestic hearth--that he would have
been happier as the father of a family, "with four or five children to
bring up." And when his friend, Countess Lise Przezdzieska, published,
under the title of _Lettres à une autre inconnue_, a series of his
letters to her which were certainly never intended for publication, she
devoted the proceeds of her book to the payment of masses for the soul
of her anti-Catholic friend.
XXIV
MÉRIMÉE