Spaniard, the Classic drama had reached the stage when the personages
of a play had all, like the pieces on a chessboard, their prescribed
duties and moves. There were the stereotyped king, tyrant, princess,
conspirators, &c. It mattered not whether the queen who had killed her
husband was called Semiramis, Clytemnestra, Johanna of Naples, or Mary
Stuart, whether the lawgiver's name was Minos or Peter the Great or
Cromwell--their words and actions, thoughts and feelings, were always
the same. A young poet of the Classic School, who had treated a subject
from Spanish history in a manner which was objected to by the censor,
got out of the difficulty by transferring the action of his play with
a stroke of the pen from Barcelona to Babylon, and from the sixteenth
century to the days before the Flood. "Babylone" had the same number of
syllables and rhymed with the same words as "Barcelone," and scarcely
any other alteration was necessary.[1] The Spain which Mérimée, in the
guise of Clara Gazul, shows to his readers, is not the country in which
this Barcelona was situated. Nor does he rest content with masquerading
as a Spanish lady. The genuine Romanticist, he regards it as the main
task of the author to represent the manners and morals of different
ages and countries without a touch of varnish or whitewash, bringing
out distinctly and strongly what in those days was called "local
colour." He therefore transforms himself into an inhabitant of the most
dissimilar countries, in all different stages of civilisation. He is in
imagination a Moor, a negro, a South American, an Illyrian, a gipsy,
a Cossack. But all things remote and foreign do not possess an equal
degree of attraction for him. Indeed he is actually repelled by culture
and polish. As Théophile Gautier preferred to visit each country at
the season of year when its climate is most characteristic--Africa in
summer, Russia in winter--so Mérimée preferred imaginary excursions to
the regions whose inhabitants have the least regard for human life, the
strongest passions, the wildest and most determined characters, and the
most violent original prejudices. He does not confine himself to the
present. He is keenly interested in the barbarities of the peasant wars
of the Middle Ages; he conjures up the age of Charles IX., and writes a
masterly account of the massacre of St. Bartholomew. He is as familiar
with fourteenth-century Spain and seventeenth-century Russia as with
ancient France and ancient Rome. As the archaeologist and historian
he has examined inscriptions and monuments, buildings, ornaments, and
weapons, and has studied documents and manuscripts in many languages
of which the ordinary literary man knows nothing. This gives his
descriptions a truthfulness which was uncommon in his day.
It is his passion for strength in its primitive nakedness which endows
him with the historical sense. Hence the heroes of his historical works
are always the wildest and most daring characters--Sulla, Catilina,
Don Pedro the Cruel of Castile, the first pseudo-Demetrius, &c, &c.
His conscientious accuracy and his distrust of the part played by
imagination in science rob his historical works proper of life (he is
most successful in _Don Pedro I._ and _Épisode de l'Histoire de la
Russie_); but he at once imparts life to any period which he treats as
the imaginative artist. After Vitet had shown, in his masterly _Scènes
historiques_, how real history can be presented in a free dramatic
rendering, Mérimée gave France, in _La Jaquerie_, the picture of a much
earlier and more savage age than that which his forerunner and teacher
had subjected to poetic treatment. He aptly indicates the spirit of his
work in the ironically applied speech of Molière's Mascarille, which he
affixes to it as motto: "C'est mon talent particulier, et je travaille
à mettre en madrigaux toute l'histoire romaine." He has entered with
wonderful understanding into the customs and follies, views and
prejudices, which constituted the spirit of that far-off age. Let us
take one character as an instance--Isabella, daughter of the Baron
d'Apremont, a typical high-minded, amiable young girl of the feudal
period. Her heart is pure, her morals are of the strictest, she is
merciful to the suffering and the vanquished. To the brave and faithful
man-at-arms who goes through fire and water for her sake she is very
gracious; she begs her father to give her this serf, and in gratitude
to him for having saved her life she makes him her equerry; she even
embroiders him a purse. But he dares to love her; and then everything
is at an end. She overwhelms him with contemptuous reproaches, repulses
him with scorn, and considers herself degraded by his having dared
to lift up his eyes to her. Compare this lady with one of Ingemann's
noble maidens; imagine how the latter, scorning all the prejudices of
her day, would have valued the noble heart which beat under the simple
jerkin; and note the difference between an idealistic and a bold,
historically accurate representation of a coarse and vigorous age.
One more example--the scene which takes place at night in front of a
lonely hut in the forest, to which the brutal English freebooter-chief,
Siward, has conveyed Isabella, whom he has carried off after the
assault in which her father has been killed. The whole is nothing but
the conversation of two troopers who are holding the saddled horses at
the door, and pass the time in talking of the act of violence which is
being committed within. But the impression produced is so vivid that it
stamps on our minds a picture of the whole age. It is, however, a fault
in this work, that the author, in his aversion for sentimentality,
has crowded together so many cruel and horrible actions, that in the
general savagery the differences which undoubtedly existed then, as
now, between society as a whole and single individuals, are overlooked.
The separate personages in his _Chronique du Règne de Charles IX._
stand out much more clearly from the background. They have strongly
marked characteristics without on that account being modern (except
perhaps George Mergy); indeed Mérimée has bestowed such attention on
details that each chapter in its graphic coherence forms a little
whole, and the work in its entirety produces the effect of a mosaic
design of character portraits and pictures of society. In the last of
his semi-historical works, _Les Débuts d'un Aventurier_, we observe
that what attracts him in the false Demetrius is the primitive
cunning, the rough, vigorous Cossack character, and not those mental
conflicts, ensuing on the fraud, which fascinated Schiller. Mérimée may
be said to leave off where Schiller begins. The manners and customs
of a definite group of human beings at a definite period are of far
more interest to him than what these human beings have in common
with universal humanity; hence here as elsewhere in his historical
fiction, it is not the intellectual or emotional side of life which he
shows us, but its character side--the results of strong, concentrated
will-power. When he writes of modern times, he describes gipsy or
brigand life, as in _Carmen_, a vendetta, as in _Colomba_, a horrible
murder on the wedding-night, as in _La Vénus d'Ille_ and _Lokis_.
Or if he lays his plot within the pale of modern society proper, he
either describes peculiarities of those classes which labour under
social disadvantages--the bold language and irregular ideas of young
ballet-dancers and actresses, the erotic temptations of Catholic
priests; or contents himself with anything in the life of the upper
classes that means character--a passionate love-affair terminated by
a duel, a case of adultery which leads to the suicide of one of the
parties concerned, any thoroughly scandalous story which it delights
him to cast in the teeth of the effete, hypocritical society of the
day. He feels himself in his element amidst merciless strokes of fate,
terrible vicissitudes, violent passions which, when they are fortunate,
override the conventions of society, and when unfortunate, are called
crimes. Hence it was that modern Russian literature was so sympathetic
to him. The works of Pushkin which he translated, _La dame de Pique_
and _Les Bohémiens_, have themes closely akin to those which he treated
himself.
Two characteristic feelings lie at the root of Mérimée's disinclination
to apprehend and treat the trenchant catastrophes in human life as
tragic catastrophes; the one is a kind of fear that the trenchancy
which he loves will lose its edge by the introduction of a reconciling
element; the other is his disbelief in a greater, comprehensive whole,
of which the single incident forms a part. When he produces, as he at
times does, a genuinely tragic effect, it happens almost against his
will, and is the result of a more mature and profound understanding of
the human soul, and of a sympathy, growing with his growing experience
of life, for cases in which there is a necessary connection between
character and destiny. In his romance of the days of Charles IX.,
when he makes the one brother fall by the hand of the other, he, the
scorner of the symbolic, as a matter of fact represents all the folly
and horror of the religious and civil war in one melodramatically
tragic, symbolical picture. And when, in the little tale _La Partie
de Trictrac_, the unfortunate officer who has cheated on one solitary
occasion becomes so miserable in the consciousness of his shame that
he is driven to commit suicide, the story imperceptibly assumes the
character of a tragedy of honour.
In another little work of art, _La double Méprise_, Mérimée endeavours
to represent the web of chance events, of conflicting and wrongly
comprehended instincts, which make life so meaningless, and even what
is saddest as foolish as it is sad and hideous; but as he unfolds the
inner history of the painful incident, and as we by degrees learn that
that which seemed foolish was inevitable, it ceases to be foolish. The
gist of the story is that a young married woman, Julie de Chaverny,
whose dissatisfaction with her married life is developing into actual
unhappiness, is led by a chain of ideas and emotions, slight in
themselves, but welded together like links of iron, to give herself to
a man whom she in reality does not love, and then to take her own life.
Mérimée's art displays itself in this case in the calm assurance with
which he takes his reader's hand and leads him through the labyrinth
of all these ideas and emotions to a climax which is as inevitable as
it is illogical. Two inimitable passages are the conversation in which
Darcy arouses Julie's enthusiastic admiration by the modesty and humour
with which he unwillingly recounts his own gallant deeds, and the
conversation in the carriage, during which every utterance of Julie's,
her resistance even more than her confessions, brings her nearer to her
fall. The situation is summed up in the following classic sentence,
prepared for by everything that has gone before: "The unfortunate woman
believed at this moment in all sincerity that she had always loved
Darcy; that she had felt the same ardent attachment to him during all
the six years of his absence as she did at that instant." Mérimée
understood what a power, what a tragic motive force in human life,
inevitable illusion or self-deception is. It is the source to which not
only half of human happiness, but a considerable proportion of human
misery may be traced.
But Mérimée approaches nearer than this to tragedy proper, where the
fateful element sinks deep into the character, mingling with it as
a poison mingles with the blood. Think of _Carmen_. From the day of
José's first meeting with Carmen, the gipsy girl, the course of his
life is changed; and he, the honest, good-hearted man, becomes of
inevitable necessity, for her sake, a robber and a murderer. Nay, the
author, whose aim as a young Romanticist was to hold as far aloof as
possible from the poets who wrote tragedy in the ancient Greek style,
approaches, in _Colomba_, with his modern Corsican heroine, nearer to
Greek tragedy than any of his fellow-countrymen who hymned the fate of
one or other of "Agamemnon's imperishable race." Not without reason
has Colomba been compared to Elektra. Like Elektra, she broods, to the
exclusion of every other thought, on the unavenged death of her father;
like Elektra, she incites her brother to take a bloody revenge; and
she is even less of the stereotyped tragedy heroine than Sophocles'
young girl, for, clad though she is in the steel panoply of appalling
prejudices, she bears herself simply and lovably. She is at once
bloodthirsty and childlike, hard-hearted and girlish; a fierce grace
is her characteristic trait. It is easy for us now to see how much
more nearly akin this fresh, vigorous daughter of a little southern
island race is to the old Greek female characters than are all those
princesses who walked the French stage in buskins, and borrowed the
names of Elektra, Antigone, or Iphigenia. But she is perhaps still
more nearly related to the heathen daughters of a far-away northern
isle, the women of the Icelandic sagas, who brood with such passionate
obstinacy over their family feuds, and force the unwilling men to take
blood for blood.
In this same _Colomba_, which is Mérimée's most famous work, Romantic
"local colouring" celebrates its most signal triumph. The story is
pervaded by the genuine aroma of Bonaparte's native isle, and breathes
the genuine Corsican spirit. As a proof of the fidelity with which
Corsican customs are reproduced, as well as of the popularity of the
book, it may be mentioned that when Mérimée was waiting in court to
hear the verdict in the Libri case, a Corsican ex-bandit came forward
from among the audience and quietly offered, in case of the verdict
being given against him, to revenge him by assassinating the president
of the court. Better evidence of the correctness of Mérimée's colouring
could hardly be required. But Mérimée would not have been Mérimée if
he had not (at the very time when he was publishing _Colomba_) saved
his reputation as the enemy of all theories by making merry over this
same much-talked-of "local colouring." In the preface, written in 1840,
to the second edition of _La Guzla_, his collection of fictitious
Illyrian popular songs and ballads, he tells that, "in the year of
grace 1827," he was a Romanticist with an enthusiasm for local colour,
nay, the firm belief that without it there was no salvation. By local
colouring he and his comrades meant what in the seventeenth century
went by the name of "manners" (_mœurs_); but they were very proud of
their word, and imagined themselves to be the inventors of the thing as
well as the word. His devotion to local colouring inspired him with the
desire to visit Illyria; want of money was the chief obstacle to his
carrying out his wish; the idea occurred to him to write a description
of his travels in anticipation and pay for the tour with the profits
of his book; but he gave up this bold plan, and instead manufactured,
with the assistance of a guide-book and the knowledge "of five or
six Slavonic words," a collection of "ballads translated from the
Illyrian." Everyone was deceived.[2] A German savant of the name
of Gerhardt actually translated _Guzla_ (along with two other volumes
of Slavonic poetry) into German, and this, moreover, in the original
metre, which he had been able to trace in the French translator's
prose. After Mérimée had thus discovered how easily "local colouring"
may be obtained, he forgave Racine and the Classicists their lack of it.
We are conscious, under all this witty pleasantry, of the distinguished
author's vexation with himself for having borne a banner, belonged to
a party, even though it was only in literature and as a youth. And
the preface, moreover, does not tell the exact truth; for Mérimée's
Illyrian prose ballads, though by no means remarkably good in other
respects, are distinctly the product of intelligent and careful study,
and accurately reproduce the style of Slavonic popular poetry. But
Mérimée could never write of himself without self-depreciation. His
prefaces, when he on a rare occasion condescends to enter into direct
relations with the public by means of a preface, are distinguished by
a nonchalant, apathetic humility, a manner which isolates the man who
assumes it more completely than the most exaggerated self-assertion.
[1] Guizot: _Shakespeare et son temps_, 294.
[2] Goethe alone publicly proclaimed Mérimée to be the author of
the Illyrian poems. In one of his letters Mérimée makes some not
unreasonably caustic remarks on the explanation given by the great poet
of his divination of the personality concealed under the pseudonym
_Hyacinth Maglanovitch_: "It occurred to us that the word Guzla lay
concealed in the word Gazul." The fact was that Mérimée, who, like all
the other young Romanticists, courted Goethe's favour, had sent him the
book along with a letter confiding the secret of its authorship.
XXV
MÉRIMÉE
The stern or satirical reserve of Mérimée's style is most noticeable
in the works which he wrote in his official capacity, in his brief
descriptions of French historical monuments, crowded with technical
expressions (_Notes sur le Midi de la France_, &c.) Not a word about
himself, not a single personal impression of travel, not one remark
addressed to the uninitiated! What a satisfaction there lay in
disappointing all the critics who were lying in wait to detect the
dilettante and novel-writer in the inspector of historical monuments!
Reserve is also apparent in the love of mystification displayed by the
author of _Le Théâtre de Clara Gazul_ and the Illyrian ballads. We are
reminded of Beyle here, though the tendency took a somewhat different
form in his case. Mérimée's pseudonymity was of short duration, but
whilst it lasted it was impenetrable. Nothing gave him greater pleasure
than to send his readers on a wild-goose chase. He neglected nothing
that could give an appearance of authenticity to his pseudonyms. He
supplied his works not only with biographies, but with portraits of
their supposed authors. To complete the jest, he prefixed to the first
edition of _Clara Gazul_ an engraved portrait of himself dressed as a
Spanish lady, in a low-necked dress, with a lace mantilla thrown over
his head.
He who misleads by keeping silence is obliged sooner or later to
speak, and the mystifier of the public is in the end compelled to
admit it into his confidence and bear its criticism. But there is a
more impenetrable kind of armour than either silence or mystification,
namely irony, and in it Mérimée, like Beyle, clad himself.
There was a satirical vein in his writing from the first; for his
ardent admiration for primitive strength of character naturally
involved contempt for phrasemongers. Such a play as _Les Mécontents_,
for instance, contains as bitter a satire as ever was penned upon
drawing-room revolutionists. A set of Royalist provincial noblemen,
old imbeciles whose one passion is to hear themselves speak, concoct
a conspiracy against the First Empire; they determine to distribute
inflammatory pamphlets, they arrange secret signals, draw up plans
of procedure, and quarrel for the presidency at their meetings, but
disperse incontinently at the mere sight of a gendarme. A play of much
later date, _Les deux Héritages ou Don Quichotte_ (which probably
served Émile Augier as a model for some of his dramas), contains an
analogous satire upon social and religious hypocrisy, political humbug,
the cold, calculating, unchivalrous spirit of a youthful generation,
comparing himself with which Mérimée must have been tempted to call
himself an idealist and enthusiast.
But in these dramatic works, the faulty construction of which is
apparent even to the reader, the irony peculiarly characteristic of
Mérimée is absent. In them he lays on the colour too thickly; it is as
the novelist that he really excels. Far more delicate than the irony of
his dramas is, for instance, that of the charming little story _L'abbé
Aubain_, a work which proves the versatility of Mérimée's talent,
for in it he writes almost like Edmond About, only with much greater
elegance. _L'abbé Aubain_ is a short series of letters, some of them
written by a lady who supposes herself to be beloved by a young abbé,
the rest by the abbé, who jests constrainedly on the subject of the
lady's attachment to him. We make the acquaintance of two weak, refined
characters, who lie to each other, to themselves, and to the world, and
whose little dainty, easy-going passions and counterfeit self-control
are the subject of the silent satire of the author.
In a story of this kind there is no narrator; therefore we are no more
conscious than in the plays that the author is suppressing himself.
The form of irony peculiarly characteristic of Mérimée is most plainly
observable where we have a narrator, but know nothing of him except
that he has no share in the emotions he describes. Mérimée's method,
which is determined by his natural reserve, is to increase the effect
of the story he is telling by an irony betraying itself in minute
traits; he either with a little curl of the lip allows the touching
incidents to speak for themselves, or he exhibits the painful,
the revolting, or the passionate, in a frame of cold, indifferent
surroundings.
In that little masterpiece, _Le Vase étrusque_, the only one of his
stories in which he treats a quite modern theme sympathetically, he
tells the story of two young beings who love each other secretly. We
hear the young man, who has just returned from a night rendezvous,
talking to himself:
"How happy I am!" he keeps on saying to himself. "At last I have found
the heart which understands mine! Yes, it is my ideal that I have
found--friend and mistress in one.... What character! What passion!
... No, she has never loved before!" And as vanity intrudes itself into
every earthly concern, his next thought is: "She is the most beautiful
woman in Paris;" and in imagination he retraces all her charms.
The narrative continues in this strain for some time before Mérimée
interrupts himself with the remark that a happy lover is almost as
tedious as an unhappy one. Then, when the relation between the two
lovers has reached its most perfect stage, when Saint-Clair's momentary
but fatal fit of jealousy of his beloved's past has resolved itself
into a mere nothing, a mere misunderstanding, and we have witnessed
a love scene which the most subtly tender of writers could hardly
surpass, a scene in which tears of repentance mingle with smiles and
kisses, how do we learn, six lines farther on in the story, that
everything is at an end, that Saint-Clair was killed the following
morning in a duel? We hear of it as we hear of such things in real life:
"Well," said Roquantin to Colonel Beaujeu when he met him at Tartoni's
in the evening; "is this news true?"
"Only too true," answered the Colonel, looking very sad.
"Tell me how it happened."
"Simply enough. Saint-Clair told me that he was wrong, but that he
would rather be shot by Thémines than make an apology to him. I could
not but approve. Thémines wanted to draw lots for the first shot, but
Saint-Clair insisted upon his firing first. Thémines fired. I saw
Saint-Clair wheel round and then fall, dead. I have more than once seen
a soldier, after he had been mortally wounded, turn round in the same
curious way before he fell."
"How extraordinary!" said Roquantin. "And Thémines, what did he do?"
"Oh! what every one does on such occasions. He threw his pistol on the
ground with an exclamation of regret. He flung it with such force that
the trigger broke. _It is an English pistol, a Manton. I don't believe
he will find a gunsmith in the whole of Paris who can make him as good
a one._"
By describing the sympathy of friends, not in the manner of sentimental
authors, but as it expresses itself in real life, Mérimée brings
out the passionate sentiment of the relation between the lovers in
full force; the neutral tint of the frame enhances the effect of the
picture. If the art of icing champagne had not been known before
Mérimée's day, he would have invented it.
Let me give one or two more examples of Mérimée's gift of keeping
entirely aloof from the emotion which he portrays, and which he excites
in the reader. Take the passage in _L'Enlèvement de la Redoute_ which
describes the main attack. "We were soon at the foot of the redoubt.
The palisades had been shattered and the earth torn up by our balls.
The soldiers rushed at these ruins with shouts of: 'Vive l'Empereur!'
_which were louder than one would have expected from men who had been
shouting so long_." The narrator in this case is not Mérimée himself,
but an officer who is relating his first experience of a fight; this
officer is, however, near of kin to his creator; he does not share the
ardour of the fighting soldiers. Instead of praising their enthusiasm
for Napoleon as patriotic or courage-inspiring, he coolly comments upon
the strength of their lungs.