Miscellaneous Studies | Page 6

Graven Images.
The Marbles of Aegina. See 1880.
The Age of Athletic Prizemen. See 1894.

PROSPER MÉRIMÉE*
FOR one born in eighteen hundred and three much was recently
become incredible that had at least warmed the imagination even of the
sceptical eighteenth century. Napoleon, sealing the tomb of the
Revolution, had foreclosed many a problem, extinguished many a hope,
in the sphere of practice. And the mental parallel was drawn by Heine.
In the mental world too a great outlook had lately been cut off. After
Kant's criticism of the mind, its pretensions to pass beyond the limits of
individual experience seemed as dead as those of old French royalty.
And Kant did but furnish its innermost theoretic force to a more general
criticism, which had withdrawn from every department of action,
underlying principles once thought eternal. A time of disillusion
followed. The typical personality of the day was Obermann, the very
genius of ennui, a Frenchman disabused even of patriotism, who has
hardly strength enough to die.
[12] More energetic souls, however, would recover themselves, and
find some way of making the best of a changed world. Art: the passions,
above all, the ecstasy and sorrow of love: a purely empirical knowledge
of nature and man: these still remained, at least for pastime, in a world
of which it was no longer proposed to calculate the remoter issues:--art,
passion, science, however, in a somewhat novel attitude towards the
practical interests of life. The désillusionné, who had found in Kant's
negations the last word concerning an unseen world, and is living, on
the morrow of the Revolution, under a monarchy made out of hand,
might seem cut off from certain ancient natural hopes, and will demand,
from what is to interest him at all, something in the way of artificial
stimulus. He has lost that sense of large proportion in things, that
all-embracing prospect of life as a whole (from end to end of time and
space, it had seemed), the utmost expanse of which was afforded from
a cathedral tower of the Middle Age: by the church of the thirteenth
century, that is to say, with its consequent aptitude for the co-ordination
of human effort. Deprived of that exhilarating yet pacific outlook,
imprisoned now in the narrow cell of its own subjective experience, the
action of a powerful nature will be intense, but exclusive and peculiar.
It will come to art, or science, to the experience of life itself, not as to

portions of human nature's daily food, but as to [13] something that
must be, by the circumstances of the case, exceptional; almost as men
turn in despair to gambling or narcotics, and in a little while the
narcotic, the game of chance or skill, is valued for its own sake. The
vocation of the artist, of the student of life or books, will be realised
with something--say! of fanaticism, as an end in itself, unrelated,
unassociated. The science he turns to will be a science of crudest fact;
the passion extravagant, a passionate love of passion, varied through all
the exotic phases of French fiction as inaugurated by Balzac; the art
exaggerated, in matter or form, or both, as in Hugo or Baudelaire. The
development of these conditions is the mental story of the nineteenth
century, especially as exemplified in France.
In no century would Prosper Mérimée have been a theologian or
metaphysician. But that sense of negation, of theoretic insecurity, was
in the air, and conspiring with what was of like tendency in himself
made of him a central type of disillusion. In him the passive ennui of
Obermann became a satiric, aggressive, almost angry conviction of the
littleness of the world around; it was as if man's fatal limitations
constituted a kind of stupidity in him, what the French call bêtise.
Gossiping friends, indeed, linked what was constitutional in him and in
the age with an incident of his earliest years. Corrected for some
childish fault, in passionate distress, he overhears a half-pitying laugh
at his expense, and has determined, [14] in a moment, never again to
give credit--to be for ever on his guard, especially against his own
instinctive movements. Quite unreserved, certainly, he never was again.
Almost everywhere he could detect the hollow ring of fundamental
nothingness under the apparent surface of things. Irony surely, habitual
irony, would be the proper complement thereto, on his part. In his
infallible self- possession, you might even fancy him a mere man of the
world, with a special aptitude for matters of fact. Though indifferent in
politics, he rises to social, to political eminence; but all the while he is
feeding all his scholarly curiosity, his imagination, the very eye, with
the, to him ever delightful, relieving, reassuring spectacle, of those
straightforward forces in human nature, which are