SOURCE: "Prosper Mérimée," in Six Masters in Disillusion, Archibald Constable and Co. Ltd., 1909, pp. 26-55.

[In the following excerpt, Thorold evaluates Mérimeé 's literary style.]

Mérimée's literary contribution at first sight seems rather the product of the leisure of an accomplished man of the world than that of a professional man of letters. An accomplished man of the world he certainly was, wearing his immense learning with unobtrusive grace, willing to devote his time and erudition to making a success of country-house theatricals, devoted to little girls and cats, between which branches of the animal kingdom he maintained the existence of a mysterious affinity, a delightful companion, attractive as it would seem by a singular dispensation, to men and women and children alike—he was all this, but he was more also. He possessed a very special and individual view of art, which he was fortunate enough to be able to express almost perfectly. indeed, his style, given his self-imposed limitations, is practically perfect, the only possible criticism on it being that the routine of its bland impeccability gives at times the suggestion of something inhuman. Never to make mistakes is surely to be more or less than man. And, in truth, his view of life of which his style is so perfect an equivalent—here, if ever, le style c'est l'homme—was not that of one who is himself involved in its delicious and absurd complications, its foolish tragedies, its comedies of tears. In his writings, if not in his life, he stands permanently aloof from the passions which he paints so perfectly. Never for an instant is he betrayed into partisanship for any of his puppets. José Lizarrabengoa and the Spanish gipsy, Arsène Guillot and Mme. de Piennes, Julie de Chavarny, Saint-Clair, the Abbé Aubain, Colomba, Don Juan de Marana, types terrible, pathetic, humorous, flit across his purified vision, which remains intent only on noting the beauty of their ever-changing combinations as they pass. His attitude is that of the eternal spectator, of the God whom Mephistopheles revealed to Doctor Faustus. That deity was no doubt immoral, and, from the human point of view which judges deities, so far, unsatisfactory. But to be an immoral God is the achievement of the artist.

Flaubert has left behind him his ideal of perfect anonymity, of the entire self-suppression of the writer in his creation. It was just this that Mérimée attained so supremely.

Take, for instance, the following passage from that flawless piece of work, Carmen:—

Elle avait un jupon rouge fort court qui laissait voir des bas de soie blancs avec plus d'un trou, et des souliers mignons de maroquin rouge attachés avec des rubans couleur de feu. Elle écartait sa mantille afin de montrer ses épaules et un gros bouquet de cassie qui sortait de sa chemise. Elle avait encore une fleur de cassie dans le coin de la bouche, et elle s'avançait en se balançant sur ses hanches comme une pouliche du haras de Cordoue. Dans mon pays une femme en ce costume aurait obligé le monde à se signer. À Séville chacun lui adressait quelque compliment gaillard sur sa tournure; elle répondait à chacun, faisant des yeux en coulisse, le poing sur la hanche, effrontée .comme une vraie bohémienne qu'elle était. D'abord elle ne me plut pas, et je repris mon ouvrage; mais elle, suivant l'usage des femmes et des chats qui ne viennent pas quand on les appelle et qui viennent quand on ne les appelle pas, s'arrêta devant moi et m'adressa la parole: 'Compère,' me dit-elle, à la façon andalouse, 'veux-tu me donner ta chaîne pour tenir les clefs de mon coffre-fort?'—'C'est pour attacher mon épinglette,' lui repondis-je.—'Ton épinglette!' s'écria-t-elle en riant. 'Ah, Monsieur fait de la dentelle, puisqu'il a besoin d'épingles!' Tout le monde qui était là se mit à rire, et moi je me sentais rougir, et je ne pouvais trouver rien à lui répondre. 'Allons, mon cœr,' reprit-elle, 'faismoi sept aunes de dentelle noire pour une mantille, épinglier de mon âme!' et, prenant la fleur de cassie qu'elle avait à la bouche, elle me la lança, d'un mouvement de pouce, juste entre les deux yeux. Monsieur, cela me fit l'effet d'une balle qui m'arrivait. . . . Je ne savais où me fourrer, je demeurais immobile comme une planche. Quand elle fut entrée dans la manufacture, je vis la fleur de cassie qui était tombée à terre entre mes pieds; je ne sais ce qui me prit, mais je la ramassai sans que mes camarades s'en aperçussent et je la mis précieusement dans ma veste. Première sottise!

What splendid objectivity of treatment is here! How grandly the scene moves towards its conclusion—the treasuring of the flower from Carmen's wilful red mouth—and how deftly that conclusion sums up, in a gesture of self-committal, the process in the speaker's mind, never described, but thus inevitably revealed.

Such revelation of character compressed into a trait, fixed in a passing gesture, struck, as it were, once for all, in the clear outline of an antique medal, is the secret of his power of narrative. The daily actions of human beings are in great measure distressingly irrelevant; three parts of what we say and do does not really belong to us—it is more external to us than our clothes, being but the half-conscious reproduction in the mirror of the mind of what we see and hear around us. To discern amid this baffling whirl of quasi-automatic reaction the really significant 'Word,' the authentic movement of the conscious soul with all its most distant, most secret implications, and so to express all this that it reveal itself clearly, finally, with that inevitability of phrase which is the only hall-mark of true literary expression, is to be a great artist. Mérimée's reputation might well rest on this scene of the meeting of Don José and Carmen.

Nothing is further from his mind than any general philosophy of life. 'La métaphysique me plaît,' he writes to a correspondent, 'parceque cela ne finit jamais.' He is content with the concrete episode and confines himself to tracing the psychological connections of moods. In this way, however, he becomes a philosopher, malgré lui. Into the hundred pages of Carmen has gone the whole of Schopenhauer's metaphysic of Love and Death. Arsène Guillot is worth many learned treatises on popular religion and the psychology of the courtesan. Very significant too is his choice of subject. He seems not to have been much interested in those refinements and complications which increasing civilisation has worked into the woof of our passions. In this respect he and Mr. Henry James are at the antipodes of art. His characters are all quite simple, or at least their complexity does not go beyond the barely-veiled cunning of the savage. They are so dominated by the passion that leads them up to the dramatic issue of the story as to appear at times to be but embodiments of it. Not that they ever become mere abstract types. They are filled in with a wealth of detail, of plausible circumstantiality which makes them breathe full-blooded before us. Their hands grow hot or cold in ours, as we meet them at some tragic parting of their ways.

But everywhere and always they are puppets at the mercy of fate, and the cords with which their destiny at last strangles them, are twined out of their own passionate, wilful hearts. Life is a force—a 'Force Ennemie'—which sweeps them on to the inevitable doom of human consciousness in such conditions.

The tragic simplicity of his characters is matched by the simplicity of the issues with which he prefers to deal. Just as they are among the least introspective of the great creations of fiction, so these issues are of the plainest and most direct. Love, jealousy, revenge, unchecked by philosophy or religion, form the staple of his matter. There is hardly one of his tales that does not involve more than one violent death. Appropriately he chooses his mise-en-scène among Andalusian gipsies, or in the brigand-infested maquis of Corsica, or in wild Lithuanian forests, where sorceresses dwell. The naïve immorality of his personages finds thus a congruous setting. For, in truth, Mérimée paints pre-moral man before he had fully emerged from the womb of his great Mother 'red in tooth and claw.'

Of the subsequent process by which, in patient length of centuries, reason developed with its derivatives, religion and civilisation, of the slow, gradual formation of other than purely egotistic values, he has little, if anything, to say: these things do not interest him, they do not possess the dramatic quality which he seeks. Of the world of inner tragedy of a Hamlet or a St. Augustine he knows nothing.

One of his most powerful stories, Colomba, possesses in a high degree this sombre beauty of a humanity that we still feel stirring in the recesses of our inherited being.

Colomba is a Corsican maiden who is a living incarnation of the dominant passion of her island race. The one duty of Corsicans is revenge. They do not seem to have reached, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, that stage of civil development known as the law for composition of blood. So strict is their devotion to duty that one wonders how their bloodthirsty stock has survived. They have come to take a disinterested pleasure in the performance of these sinister actions for their own sake in virtue of a well-known law of social development. One Pietri dies an exceptional and natural death. His son exclaims at his father's funeral: 'Oh, pourquoi n'es-tu pas mort de la malemort (mala morte)? Nous t'aurions vengé!' And one feels his regret to be excusable, indeed inevitable.

Colomba's father has been treacherously murdered about a year before the opening of the story. She suspects the hand of a rival family, the Barracini, who are, however, able to exculpate themselves legally. One may imagine how much value that has in Colomba's eyes. So she sets to work aided by two friendly brigands, who live concealed—latitanti, as Italians still say of their descendants to-day—in the jungle or maquis that covers more than half the island, to weave the web of evidence. She discovers a forgery here, there an altered date in the documents on which the Barracini relied to prove their innocence. Her case complete, she hands over the sacred charge to her brother, an officer in the French army. Ors' Anton, however, has imbibed the prejudices of civilisation during a prolonged residence on the Continent. He doubts his sister's evidence, and, in any case, would be for legal proceedings. A degenerate indeed!

A un demi-mille du village, après bien des détours, Colomba s'arrêta tout-à-coup dans un endroit où le chemin faisait un coude. Là s'élevait une petite pyramide de branchages, les uns verts, les autres desséchés, amoncelés à la hauteur de trois pieds environ. Du sommet on voyait percer l'extrémité d'une croix de bois peinte en noir. Dans plusieurs cantons de la Corse, surtout dans les montagnes, un usage extrêmement ancien, et qui se rattache peut-être à des superstitions du paganisme, oblige les passants à jeter une pierre ou un rameau d'arbre, sur le lieu ou un homme a péri de mort violente. Pendant de longues années, aussi longtemps que le souvenir de sa fin tragique demeure dans la mémoire des hommes, cette offrande singulière s'accumule de jour en jour. On appelle cela l'amas, le mucchio d'un tel. Colomba s'arrêta devant ce tas de feuillage, et arrachant une branche d'arbousier l'ajouta à la pyramide.

Orso,' dit-elle, 'c'est ici que notre père est mort. Prions pour son âme, mon frère!' et elle se mit à genoux. Orso l'imita aussitôt. En ce moment la cloche du village tinta lentement, car un homme était mort dans la nuit. Orso fondit en larmes.

Au bout de quelques minutes Colomba se leva, l'œil sec, mais la figure animée. Elle fit du pouce à la hâte le signe de croix familier à ses compatriotes et qui accompagne d'ordinaire leurs serments solennels; puis, entraînant son frère, elle reprit le chemin du village. Ils rentrèrent en silence dans leur maison. Orso monta dans sa chambre. Un instant après Colomba l'y suivit, portant une petite cassette qu'elle posa sur la table. Elle l'ouvrit et en tira une chemise couverte de larges taches de sang.

'Voici la chemise de votre père, Orso,' et elle le jeta sur ses genoux.

'Voici le plomb qui l'a frappé,' et elle posa sur la chemise deux balles oxydées.

'Orso, mon frère!' cria-t-elle en se précipitant dans ses bras et l'étreignant avec force, 'Orso! tu le vengeras!' et elle l'embrassa avec une espèce de fureur, baisa les balles et la chemise, et sortit de la chambre, laissant son frère comme pétrifié sur sa chaise.

Colomba's designs are at last crowned with success. After a meeting, for purposes of reconciliation, with the Barracini (insisted on by the préfet), at which they are convicted of perjury and corruption on the evidence of a bandit, called M. le Curé, the two sons of the Barracini lie in wait for Orso and attempt to assassinate him. He kills them both in self-defence. The twelve-year-old niece of the bandit, Chilina, carries the news to Colomba and satisfies her of her brother's safety.

'Les autres!' demanda Colomba d'une voix rauque. Chillina fit le signe de la croix avec l'index et le doigt du milieu. Aussitôt une vive rougeur succéda, sur la figure de Colomba, à sa pâleur mortelle. Elle jeta un regard ardent sur la maison des Barracini, et dit en souriant à ses hôtes: 'Rentrons prendre le café.'

That 'Rentrons prendre le café' is magnificent!

The description of the procession bringing home to their father, the bodies of the young Barracini is like a piece of an antique frieze.

Le jour était déjà fort avancé lorsqu'une triste procession entra dans le village. On rapportait à l'avocat Barracini les cadavres de ses enfants, chacun couché en travers d'une mule que conduisait un paysan. Une foule de clients et d'oisifs suivait le lugubre cortège. Avec eux on voyait les gendarmes qui arrivent toujours trop tard, et l'adjoint, qui levait les bras au ciel, répétant sans cesse: 'Que dira M. le préfet?' Quelques femmes, entre autres une nourrice d'Orlanduccio, s'arrachaient les cheveux et poussaient des hurlements sauvages. Mais leur douleur bruyante produisait moins d'impression que le désespoir muet d'un personnage qui attirait tous les regards. C'était le malheureux père, qui allait d'un cadavre à l'autre, soulevait leurs têtes, souillées de terre, baisait leurs lèvres violettes, soutenait leurs membres déjà roidis, comme pour leur éviter les cahots de la route. Parfois on le voyait ouvrir la bouche pour parler, mais il n'en sortait pas un cri, pas une parole. Toujours les yeux fixés sur les cadavres, il se heurtait contre les pierres, contre les arbres, contre tous les obstacles qu'il rencontrait.

And with this we will take leave of Colomba, among the most sombre and tragic of Mérimée's creations. In constructing this type of primitive humanity, at once so terrifying and so beautiful, he returned to the primal sources of Art, for Primus in orbe does fecit timor.

Mérimée was more than a writer of stories, though it is undoubtedly by them that he will live. He composed several volumes of history, published some admirable archaeological studies—the fruits of his labours as Inspector of National Monuments—and wrote several plays. He 'commenced author' as a dramatist with his Cromwell, which Stendhal praised highly. He followed this up with his imaginary Théâtre de Clara Gazul.This volume contained several short dramas, of which the two best are Les Espagnols en Danemark and Le Ciel et L'Enfer, professing on the title-page to be a translation of the work of one Clara Gazul, 'la célèbre comédienne espagnole.' Such literary tricks were much in fashion in those days. Probably no one was deceived, more particularly as the frontispiece displayed, as the portrait of the supposed authoress, a caricature of Mérimée himself in a low dress by his friend Etienne Delecluze. Nevertheless, the cleverness of the postiche was such that a Spaniard was reported to have said: 'Yes, the translation is not bad; but what would you say if you knew the original?' He used his talent for mystification still more cleverly in the La Guzla, which was given to the world as a collection of Dalmatian ballads. He has told us the circumstances in a preface written in 1840. Local colour was the Holy Grail of the young Romantics. But how paint local colour without travel, and how travel without money? Mérimée quotes the recipe which he gave to his friend J. J. Ampère:

Racontons notre voyage, imprimons-en le récit, et avec la somme que cette publication nous rapportera nous irons voir si le pays ressemble à nos descriptions.

Mérimée invented a bard of the name of Maglanovich, whose ballads he professed to translate. He added numerous pseudo-philological notes, a pedantic dissertation on Vampires and the Evil Eye, and a plausible biography of the bard. This time the success was complete. Pouchkine, the Russian poet, was completely taken in, and translated several pieces as curious specimens of the Illyrian genius. Mérimée sums up the episode in a very characteristic conclusion: 'à partir de ce jour je fus dégoûté de la couleur locale, en voyant combien il est aisé de la fabriquer.' When local colour fails, what remains for the sceptical Romantic?

We have seen how Mérimée's scepticism affected his art, influencing him in his choice of subject, driving him back from the problems of civilisation to the more spontaneous interplay of passion and impulse in a less sophisticated humanity, driving him outward from the study of the soul to the observation of fact. That collective process of reason which we call civilisation was a snare useful for impressing the bourgeois; equally the individual process which we call a human character was without intrinsic interest, and derived its value for art from the casual combinations into which it might enter with others on the stage of time. And in all this he was a disciple of Stendhal. But he was a disciple with a difference.

Stendhal, in spite of his genius, could never tell a story, and his style—he never revised—was both clumsy and careless. Mérimée could not write a really bad sentence, and was one of the best raconteurs that ever lived. To the philosophy of Stendhal, which remained substantially his own, he brought a much more strictly disciplined intelligence, and, in spite of his deliberate cynicism, a high degree of that indefinable quality called nobility of heart. The lives of the two men, as well as their literary productions, afford evidence of this. The ideas of Stendhal, for instance, in the matter of love were so well known that the authorship of Casanova's Memoirs was for a short time plausibly attributed to him, and it may fairly be doubted whether he would have been in the least inclined to resist the impeachment of having been the hero of any of the adventures of that egregious Venetian. Mérimée was also all his life an homme à femmes, but he was of too fine a make to find satisfaction in the embraces of the Venus of the coulisse or the carrefour. He was no saint, as the phrase is; but he knew that there are at least fifty thousand ways of enjoying the society of women, and he was capable of pity and self-control.

J'allais être amoureux (he writes to an unknown correspondent) quand je suis parti pour l'Espagne.

La personne qui a causé mon voyage n'en a jamais rien su. Si j'étais resté, j'aurais peut-être fait une grande sottise, celle d'offrir à une femme digne de tout le bonheur dont on peut jouir sur la terre, de lui offrir dis-je, en échange de la perte de toutes ces choses qui lui étaient chères, une tendresse que je sentais moi-même très inférieure au sacrifice qu'elle aurait peut-être fait.

Not all those who proclaim loudly a more romantic view of the matter would be capable of such generous delicacy.

The more intimate side of Mérimée's nature, studiously concealed in his fiction, appears clearly enough in his correspondence. It is a fascinating compound of tenderness and mistrust, of sensitive pride at times overthrown by an irresistible need of emotional expansion and the spontaneous abandonment of a deeply affectionate nature. Much of his sentimental life is rightly buried for ever. The devotional scruples of his mistress brusquely cut short his first liaison. His second lasted eighteen years—the average length of a French government, says M. Filon. This too came to an end, not on account of scruples, but because the beloved grew cold. Mérimée suffered horribly. 'Mes souvenirs même ne me restent plus,' he writes to a friend. He puzzles his head over the reasons for his mistress's change. 'Un remords peut-être, mais je suis presque sûr qu'il n'y a pas de prêtre dans l'affaire.' Ah! his enemy was Time, the one eternal priest who, sooner or later, washes away our loves and hates, our sins and our virtues alike. He himself had not been in this affair quite beyond reproach. The correspondence with Mile. Jenny Dacquin must have been carried on, at least in part, coincidently. This voluminous sheaf of letters, published in 1874 under the title Lettres à une Inconnue, reveals in Mérimée a somewhat exigeant but truly devoted lover, and, in his correspondent, a singularly tiresome mistress. Their characters were too much alike for them to be happy. She was too much of a Mérimée en femme. Both had the same fear of the open sea, and preferred hugging the shores of their respective egotisms; and his shore was lined with bristling rocks and dangerous shoals.

'Le bonheur lui manquait,' says Taine. If happiness failed him, it was not for lack of those external conditions which are usually held sufficient to produce it. He was rich, popular, successful; but happiness is a subjective quality, and there was that in his nature which made him his own worst enemy. He could never let himself go. He was always more afraid of error than anxious for truth. This constant fear of deception led him perhaps into the greatest of all. For, in life, he was by no means all that he might have been, and, in Art, his place, though certainly of the highest, is narrow.