1
Stendhal has left us a picture of Mérimée as "a young man in a grey
frock-coat, very ugly, and with a turned-up nose.... This young man
had something insolent and extremely unpleasant about him. His eyes,
small and without expression, had always the same look, and this look
was ill-natured.... Such was my first impression of the best of my
present friends. I am not too sure of his heart, but I am sure of his
talents. It is M. le Comte Gazul, now so well known; a letter from him,
which came to me last week, made me happy for two days. His mother has
a good deal of French wit and a superior intelligence. Like her son,
it seems to me that she might give way to emotion once a year." There,
painted by a clear-sighted and disinterested friend, is a picture of
Mérimée almost from his own point of view, or at least as he would
himself have painted the picture. How far is it, in its insistence on
the _attendrissement une fois par an,_ on the subordination of natural
feelings to a somewhat disdainful aloofness, the real Mérimée?
Early in life, Mérimée adopted his theory, fixed his attitude, and to
the end of his life he seemed, to those about him, to have walked along
the path he had chosen, almost without a deviation. He went to England
at the age of twenty-three, to Spain four years later, and might seem
to have been drawn naturally to those two countries, to which he was
to return so often, by natural affinities of temper and manner. It
was the English manner that he liked, that came naturally to him; the
correct, unmoved exterior, which is a kind of positive strength, not to
be broken by any onslaught of events or emotions; and in Spain he found
an equally positive animal acceptance of things as they are, which
satisfied his profound, restrained, really Pagan senusality, Pagan
in the hard, eighteenth-century sense. From the beginning he was a
student, of art, of history, of human nature, and we find him enjoying,
in his deliberate, keen way, the studied diversions of the student;
body and soul each kept exactly in its place, each provided for without
partiality. He entered upon literature by a mystification, _Le Théâtre
de Clara Gazul,_ a book of plays supposed to be translated from a
living Spanish dramatist; and he followed it by _La Guzla,_ another
mystification, a book of prose ballads supposed to be translated
from the Illyrian. And these mystifications, like the forgeries of
Chatterton, contain perhaps the most sincere, the most undisguised
emotion which he ever permitted himself to express; so secure did he
feel of the heart behind the pearl necklace of the _décolletée_ Spanish
actress, who travesties his own face in the frontispiece to the one,
and so remote from himself did he feel the bearded gentleman to be, who
sits cross-legged on the ground, holding his lyre or _guzla,_ in the
frontispiece to the other. Then came a historical novel, the _Chronique
du Règne de Charles IX.,_ before he discovered, as if by accident,
precisely what it was he was meant to do: the short story. Then he
drifted into history, became Inspector of Ancient Monuments, and helped
to save Vézelay, among other good deeds toward art, done in his cold,
systematic, after all satisfactory manner. He travelled at almost
regular intervals, not only in Spain and England, but in Corsica,
in Greece and Asia Minor, in Italy, in Hungary, in Bohemia, usually
with a definite, scholarly object, and always with an alert attention
to everything that came in his way, to the manners of people, their
national characters, their differences from one another. An intimate
friend of the Countess de Montijo, the mother of the Empress Eugénie,
he was a friend, not a courtier, at the court of the Third Empire.
He was elected to the Academy, mainly for his _Études sur l'Histoire
Romaine,_ a piece of dry history, and immediately scandalised his
supporters by publishing a story, _Arsène Guillot,_ which was taken for
a veiled attack on religion and on morals. Soon after, his imagination
seemed to flag; he abandoned himself, perhaps a little wearily, more
and more to facts, to the facts of history and learning; learned
Russian, and translated Poushkin and Tourguenieff; and died in 1870,
at Cannes, perhaps less satisfied with himself than most men who have
done, in their lives, far less exactly what they have intended to do.
"I have theories about the very smallest things--gloves, boots, and the
like," says Mérimée in one of his letters; _des idées très-arrêtées,_
as he adds with emphasis in another. Precise opinions lead easily to
prejudices, and Mérimée, who prided himself on the really very logical
quality of his mind, put himself somewhat deliberately into the hands
of his prejudices. Thus he hated religion, distrusted priests, would
not let himself be carried away by any instinct of admiration, would
not let himself do the things which he had the power to do, because
his other, critical self came mockingly behind him, suggesting that
very few things were altogether worth doing. "There is nothing that I
despise and even detest so much as humanity in general," he confesses
in a letter; and it is with a certain self-complacency that he defines
the only kind of society in which he found himself at home: "(1)
With unpretentious people whom I have known a long time; (2) in a
Spanish _venta,_ with muleteers and peasant women of Andalusia." One
day, as he finds himself in a pensive mood, dreaming of a woman,
he translates for her some lines of Sophocles, into verse, "English
verse, you understand, for I abhor French verse." The carefulness with
which he avoids received opinions shows a certain consciousness of
those opinions, which in a more imaginatively independent mind would
scarcely have found a place. It is not only for an effect, but more and
more genuinely, that he sets his acquirements as a scholar above his
accomplishments as an artist. Clearing away, as it seemed to him, every
illusion from before his eyes, he forgot the last illusion of positive
people: the possibility that one's eyes may be short-sighted.
Mérimée realises a type which we are accustomed to associate almost
exclusively with the eighteenth century, but of which our own time can
offer us many obscure examples. It is the type of the _esprit fort:_
the learned man, the choice, narrow artist, who is at the same time the
cultivated sensualist. To such a man the pursuit of women is part of
his constant pursuit of human experience, and of the document, which
is the summing up of human experience. To Mérimée history itself was
a matter of detail. "In history, I care only for anecdotes," he says
in the preface to the _Chronique du Règne de Charles IX._ And he adds:
"It is not a very noble taste; but I confess to my shame, I would
willingly give Thucydides for the authentic memoirs of Aspasia or of
a slave of Pericles; for only memoirs, which are the familiar talk
of an author with his reader, afford those portraits of _man_ which
amuse and interest me." This curiosity of mankind above all things,
and of mankind at home, or in private actions, not necessarily of any
import to the general course of the world, leads the curious searcher
naturally to the more privately interesting and the less publicly
important half of mankind. Not scrupulous in arriving at any end by the
most adaptable means, not disturbed by any illusions as to the physical
facts of the universe, a sincere and grateful lover of variety,
doubtless an amusing companion with those who amused him, Mérimée
found much of his entertainments and instruction, at all events in his
younger years, in that "half world" which he tells us he frequented
"very much out of curiosity, living in it always as in a foreign
country." Here, as elsewhere, Mérimée played the part of the amateur.
He liked anecdotes, not great events, in his history; and he was
careful to avoid any too serious passions in his search for sensations.
There, no doubt, for the sensualist, is happiness, if he can resign
himself to it. It is only serious passions which make anybody
unhappy; and Mérimée was carefully on the lookout against a possible
unhappiness. I can imagine him ending every day with satisfaction, and
beginning every fresh day with just enough expectancy to be agreeable,
at that period of his life when he was writing the finest of his
stories, and dividing the rest of his leisure between the drawing-rooms
and the pursuit of uneventful adventures.
Only, though we are _automates autant qu'-esprit,_ as Pascal tells us,
it is useless to expect that what is automatic in us should remain
invariable and unconditioned. If life could be lived on a plan, and
for such men on such a plan, if first impulses and profound passions
could be kept entirely out of one's own experience, and studied only
at a safe distance, then, no doubt, one could go on being happy, in
a not too heroic way. But, with Mérimée as with all the rest of the
world, the scheme breaks down one day, just when a reasonable solution
to things seems to have been arrived at. Mérimée had already entered
on a peaceable enough _liaison_ when the first letter came to him from
the _Inconnue_ to whom he was to write so many letters, for nine years
without seeing her, and then for thirty years more after he had met
her, the last letter being written but two hours before his death.
These letters, which we can now read in two volumes, have a delicately
insincere sincerity which makes every letter a work of art, not because
he tried to make it so, but because he could not help seeing the form
simultaneously with the feeling, and writing genuine love-letters with
an excellence almost as impersonal as that of his stories. He begins
with curiosity, which passes with singular rapidity into a kind of
self-willed passion; already in the eighth letter, long before he has
seen her, he is speculating which of the two will know best how to
torture the other: that is, as he views it, love best. "We shall never
love one another really," he tells her, as he begins to hope for the
contrary. Then he discovers, for the first time, and without practical
result, "that it is better to have illusions than to have none at all."
He confesses himself to her, sometimes reminding her: "You will never
know either all the good or all the evil that I have in me. I have
spent my life in being praised for qualities which I do not possess,
and calumniated for defects which are not mine." And, with a strange,
weary humility, which is the other side of his contempt for most things
and people, he admits: "To you I am like an old opera, which you are
obliged to forget, in order to see it again with any pleasure." He, who
has always distrusted first impulses, finds himself telling her (was
she really so like him, or was he arguing with himself?): "You always
fear first impulses; do not you see that they are the only ones which
are worth anything and which always succeed?" Does he realise, unable
to change the temperament which he has partly made for himself, that
just there has been his own failure?
Perhaps of all love-letters, these of Mérimée show us love triumphing
over the most carefully guarded personality. Here the obstacle is
not duty, nor circumstance, nor a rival; but (on her side as on his,
it would seem) a carefully trained natural coldness, in which action,
and even for the most part feeling, are relinquished to the control
of second thoughts. A habit of repressive irony goes deep: Mérimée
might well have thought himself secure against the outbreak of an
unconditional passion. Yet here we find passion betraying itself,
often only by bitterness, together with a shy, surprising tenderness,
in this curious lovers' itinerary, marked out with all the customary
sign-posts, and leading, for all its wilful deviations, along the
inevitable road.
It is commonly supposed that the artist, by the habit of his
profession, has made for himself a sort of cuirass of phrases against
the direct attack of emotion, and so will suffer less than most people
if he should fall into love, and things should not go altogether
well with him. Rather, he is the more laid open to attack, the more
helplessly entangled when once the net has been cast over him. He lives
through every passionate trouble, not merely with the daily emotions of
the crowd, but with the whole of his imagination. Pain is multiplied
to him by the force of that faculty by which he conceives delight. What
is most torturing in every not quite fortunate love is memory, and the
artist becomes an artist by his intensification of memory. Mérimée has
himself defined art as exaggeration _à propos._ Well, to the artist his
own life is an exaggeration not _à propos,_ and every hour dramatises
for him its own pain and pleasure, in a tragic comedy of which he is
the author and actor and spectator. The practice of art is a sharpening
of the sensations, and, the knife once sharpened, does it cut into
one's hand less deeply because one is in the act of using it to carve
wood?
And so we find Mérimée, the most impersonal of artists, and one of
those most critical of the caprices and violences of fate, giving in to
an almost obvious temptation, an anonymous correspondence, a mysterious
unknown woman, and passing from stage to stage of a finally very
genuine love-affair, which kept him in a fluttering agitation for more
than thirty years. It is curious to note that the little which we know
of this _Inconnue_ seems to mark her out as the realisation of a type
which had always been Mérimée's type of woman. She has the "wicked
eyes" of all his heroines, from the Mariquita of his first attempt in
literature, who haunts the Inquisitor with "her great black eyes, like
the eyes of a young cat, soft and wicked at once." He finds her at the
end of his life, in a novel of Tourguenieff, "one of those diabolical
creatures whose coquetry is the more dangerous because it is capable
of passion." Like so many artists, he has invented his ideal before he
meets it, and must have seemed almost to have fallen in love with his
own creation. It is one of the privileges of art to create nature, as,
according to a certain mystical doctrine, you can actualise, by sheer
fixity of contemplation, your mental image of a thing into the thing
itself. The _Inconnue_ was one of a series, the rest imaginary; and
her power over Mérimée, we can hardly doubt, came not only from her
queer likeness of temperament to his, but from the singular, flattering
pleasure which it must have given him to find that he had invented with
so much truth to nature.
2
Mérimée as a writer belongs to the race of Laclos and of Stendhal,
a race essentially French; and we find him representing, a little
coldly, as it seemed, the claims of mere unimpassioned intellect, at
work on passionate problems, among those people of the Romantic period
to whom emotion, evident emotion, was everything. In his subjects he
is as "Romantic" as Victor Hugo or Gautier; he adds, even, a peculiar
flavour of cruelty to the Romantic ingredients. But he distinguishes
sharply, as French writers before him had so well known how to do,
between the passion one is recounting and the moved or unmoved way
in which one chooses to tell it. To Mérimée art was a very formal
thing, almost a part of learning; it was a thing to be done with a
clear head, reflectively, with a calm mastery of even the most vivid
material. While others, at that time, were intoxicating themselves
with strange sensations, hoping that "nature would take the pen out
of their hands and write," just at the moment when their own thoughts
became least coherent, Mérimée went quietly to work over something a
little abnormal which he had found in nature, with as disinterested, as
scholarly, as mentally reserved an interest as if it were one of those
Gothic monuments which he inspected to such good purpose, and, as it
has seemed to his biographer, with so little sympathy. His own emotion,
so far as it is roused, seems to him an extraneous thing, a thing to be
concealed, if not a little ashamed of. It is the thing itself he wishes
to give you, not his feelings about it; and his theory is that if the
thing itself can only be made to stand and speak before the reader, the
reader will supply for himself all the feeling that is needed, all the
feeling that would be called out in nature by a perfectly clear sight
of just such passions in action. It seems to him bad art to paint the
picture, and to write a description of the picture as well.
And his method serves him wonderfully up to a certain point, and then
leaves him, without his being well aware of it, at the moment even when
he has convinced himself that he has realised the utmost of his aim. At
a time when he had come to consider scholarly dexterity as the most
important part of art, Mérimée tells us that _La Vénus d'Ille_ seemed
to him the best story he had ever written. He has often been taken at
his word, but to take him at his word is to do him an injustice. _La
Vénus d'Ille_ is a modern setting of the old story of the Ring given to
Venus, and Mérimée has been praised for the ingenuity with which he has
obtained an effect of supernatural terror, while leaving the way open
for a material explanation of the supernatural. What he has really done
is to materialise a myth, by accepting in it precisely what might be a
mere superstition, the form of the thing, and leaving out the spiritual
meaning of which that form was no more than a temporary expression. The
ring which the bridegroom sets on the finger of Venus, and which the
statue's finger closes upon, accepting it, symbolises the pact between
love and sensuality, the lover's abdication of all but the physical
part of love; and the statue taking its place between husband and wife
on the marriage-night, and crushing life out of him in an inexorable
embrace, symbolises the merely natural destruction which that granted
prayer brings with it, as a merely human Messalina takes her lover on
his own terms, in his abandonment of all to Venus. Mérimée sees a cruel
and fantastic superstition, which he is afraid of seeming to take too
seriously, which he prefers to leave as a story of ghosts or bogies,
a thing at which we are to shiver as at a mere twitch on the nerves,
while our mental confidence in the impossibility of what we cannot
explain is preserved for us by a hint at a muleteer's vengeance. "Have
I frightened you?" says the man of the world, with a reassuring smile.
"Think about it no more; I really meant nothing."
And yet, does he after all mean nothing? The devil, the old pagan
gods, the spirits of evil incarnated under every form, fascinated him;
it gave him a malign pleasure to set them at their evil work among
men, while, all the time, he mocks them and the men who believed in
them. He is a materialist, and yet he believes in at least a something
evil, outside the world, or in the heart of it, which sets humanity
at its strange games, relentlessly. Even then he will not surrender
his doubts, his ironies, his negations. Is he, perhaps, at times,
the atheist who fears that, after all, God may exist, or at least who
realises how much he would fear him if he did exist?
Mérimée had always delighted in mystifications; he was always on his
guard against being mystified himself, either by nature or by his
fellow-creatures. In the early "Romantic" days he had had a genuine
passion for various things: "local colour," for instance. But even then
he had invented it by a kind of trick, and, later on, he explains what
a poor thing "local colour" is, since it can so easily be invented
without leaving one's study. He is full of curiosity, and will go far
to satisfy it, regretting "the decadence," in our times, "of energetic
passions, in favour of tranquillity and perhaps of happiness." These
energetic passions he will find, indeed, in our own times, in Corsica,
in Spain, in Lithuania, really in the midst of a very genuine and
profoundly studied "local colour," and also, under many disguises, in
Parisian drawing-rooms. Mérimée prized happiness, material comfort, the
satisfaction of one's immediate desires, very highly, and it was his
keen sense of life, of the pleasures of living, that gave him some
of his keenness in the realisation of violent death, physical pain,
whatever disturbs the equilibrium of things with unusual emphasis.
Himself really selfish, he can distinguish the unhappiness of others
with a kind of intuition which is not sympathy, but which selfish
people often have: a dramatic consciousness of how painful pain must
be, whoever feels it. It is not pity, though it communicates itself to
us, often enough, as pity. It is the clear-sighted sensitiveness of a
man who watches human things closely, bringing them home to himself
with the deliberate, essaying art of an actor who has to represent a
particular passion in movement.
And always in Mérimée there is this union of curiosity with
indifference: the curiosity of the student, the indifference of the
man of the world. Indifference, in him, as in the man of the world,
is partly an attitude, adopted for its form, and influencing the
temperament just so much as gesture always influences emotion. The
man who forces himself to appear calm under excitement teaches his
nerves to follow instinctively the way he has shown them. In time
he will not merely seem calm but will be calm, at the moment when he
learns that a great disaster has befallen him. But, in Mérimée, was
the indifference even as external as it must always be when there is
restraint, when, therefore, there is something to restrain? Was there
not in him a certain drying up of the sources of emotion, as the man of
the world came to accept almost the point of view of society, reading
his stories to a little circle of court ladies, when, once in a while,
he permitted himself to write a story? And was not this increase of
well-bred indifference, now more than ever characteristic, almost the
man himself, the chief reason why he abandoned art so early, writing
only two or three short stories during the last twenty-five years of
his life, and writing these with a labour which by no means conceals
itself?
Mérimée had an abstract interest in, almost an enthusiasm for,
facts; facts for their meaning, the light they throw on psychology.
He declines to consider psychology except through its expression in
facts, with an impersonality far more real than that of Flaubert. The
document, historical or social, must translate itself into sharp action
before he can use it; not that he does not see, and appreciate better
than most others, all there is of significance in the document itself;
but his theory of art is inexorable. He never allowed himself to write
as he pleased, but he wrote always as he considered the artist should
write. Thus he made for himself a kind of formula, confining himself,
as some thought, within too narrow limits, but, to himself, doing
exactly what he set himself to do, with all the satisfaction of one who
is convinced of the justice of his aim and confident of his power to
attain it.
Look, for instance, at his longest, far from his best work, _La
Chronique du Règne de Charles IX._ Like so much of his work, it has
something of the air of a _tour de force,_ not taken up entirely for
its own sake. Mérimée drops into a fashion, half deprecatingly, as if
he sees through it, and yet, as with merely mundane elegance, with
a resolve to be more scrupuously exact than its devotees. "Belief,"
says some one in this book, as if speaking for Mérimée, "is a precious
gift which has been denied me." Well, he will do better, without
belief, than those who believe. Written under a title which suggests
a work of actual history, it is more than possible that the first
suggestion of this book really came, as he tells us in the preface,
from the reading of "a large number of memoirs and pamphlets relating
to the end of the sixteenth century." "I wished to make an epitome of
my reading," he tells us, "and here is the epitome." The historical
problem attracted him, that never quite explicable Massacre of St.
Bartholomew, in which there was precisely the violence of action and
uncertainty of motive which he liked to set before him at the beginning
of a task in literature. Probable, clearly defined people, in the dress
of the period, grew up naturally about this central motive; humour
and irony have their part; there are adventures, told with a sword's
point of sharpness, and in the fewest possible words; there is one of
his cruel and loving women, in whom every sentiment becomes action, by
some twisted feminine logic of their own. It is the most artistic, the
most clean-cut, of historical novels; and yet this perfect neatness of
method suggests a certain indifference on the part of the writer, as
if he were more interested in doing the thing well than in doing it.
And that, in all but the very best of his stories (even, perhaps,
in _Arsène Guillot_ only not in such perfect things as _Carmen,_ as
_Mateo Falcone),_ is what Mérimée just lets us see, underneath an
almost faultless skill of narrative. An incident told by Mérimée at
his best gathers about it something of the gravity of history, the
composed way in which it is told helping to give it the equivalent of
remoteness, allowing it not merely to be, but, what is more difficult,
to seem classic in its own time. "Magnificent things, things after my
own heart--that is to say, Greek in their truth and simplicity," he
writes in a letter, referring to the tales of Poushkin. The phrase is
scarcely too strong to apply to what is best in his own work. Made
out of elemental passions, hard, cruel, detached as it were from
their own sentiments, the stories that he tells might in other hands
become melodramas: _Carmen,_ taken thoughtlessly out of his hands, has
supplied the libretto to the most popular of modern light operas. And
yet, in his severe method of telling, mere outlines, it seems, told
with an even stricter watch over what is significantly left out than
over what is briefly allowed to be said in words, these stories sum up
little separate pieces of the world, each a little world in itself.
And each is a little world which he has made his own, with a labor at
last its own reward, and taking life partly because he has put into
it more of himself than the mere intention of doing it well. Mérimée
loved Spain, and _Carmen,_ which, by some caprice of popularity, is
the symbol of Spain to people in general, is really, to those who
know Spain well, the most Spanish thing that has been written since
_Gil Blas._ All the little parade of local colour and philology, the
appendix on the _Calo_ of the gipsies, done to heighten the illusion,
has more significance than people sometimes think. In this story
all the qualities of Mérimée come into agreement; the student of
human passions, the traveller, the observer, the learned man, meet
in harmony; and, in addition, there is the _aficionado,_ the true
_amateur,_ in love with Spain and the Spaniards.
It is significant that at the reception of Mérimée at the Académie
Française in 1845, M. Etienne thought it already needful to say:
"Do not pause in the midst of your career; rest is not permitted to
your talent." Already Mérimée was giving way to facts, to facts in
themselves, as they come into history, into records of scholarship.
We find him writing, a little dryly, on Catiline, on Cæsar, on Don
Pedro the Cruel, learning Russian, and translating from it (yet, while
studying the Russians before all the world, never discovering the
mystical Russian soul), writing learned articles, writing reports. He
looked around on contemporary literature, and found nothing that he
could care for. Stendhal was gone, and who else was there to admire?
Flaubert, it seemed to him, was "wasting his talent under the pretence
of realism." Victor Hugo was "a fellow with the most beautiful figures
of speech at his disposal," who did not take the trouble to think, but
intoxicated himself with his own words. Baudelaire made him furious,
Renan filled him with pitying scorn. In the midst of his contempt, he
may perhaps have imagined that he was being left behind. For whatever
reason, weakness or strength, he could not persuade himself that it
was worth while to strive for anything any more. He died probably at
the moment when he was no longer a fashion, and had not yet become a
classic.
1901.