Miscellaneous Studies | Page 7

also matters of fact.
There is the formula of Mérimée! the enthusiastic amateur of rude,
crude, naked force in men and women wherever it could be found;

himself carrying ever, as a mask, the conventional attire of the modern
world--carrying it with an infinite, contemptuous grace, as if that, too,
were an all-sufficient end in itself. With a natural gift for words, for
expression, it will be his literary function to draw back the veil of time
from the true greatness of old Roman character; the veil of modern
habit from the primitive energy of the creatures of his fancy, as the
Lettres à une Inconnue discovered to general gaze, after his death, a
certain depth of [15] passionate force which had surprised him in
himself. And how forcible will be their outlines in an otherwise
insignificant world! Fundamental belief gone, in almost all of us, at
least some relics of it remain--queries, echoes, reactions, after-thoughts;
and they help to make an atmosphere, a mental atmosphere, hazy
perhaps, yet with many secrets of soothing light and shade, associating
more definite objects to each other by a perspective pleasant to the
inward eye against a hopefully receding background of remoter and
ever remoter possibilities. Not so with Mérimée! For him the
fundamental criticism has nothing more than it can do; and there are no
half-lights. The last traces of hypothesis, of supposition, are evaporated.
Sylla, the false Demetrius, Carmen, Colomba, that impassioned self
within himself, have no atmosphere. Painfully distinct in outline,
inevitable to sight, unrelieved, there they stand, like solitary mountain
forms on some hard, perfectly transparent day. What Mérimée gets
around his singularly sculpturesque creations is neither more nor less
than empty space.
So disparate are his writings that at first sight you might fancy them
only the random efforts of a man of pleasure or affairs, who, turning to
this or that for the relief of a vacant hour, discovers to his surprise a
workable literary gift, of whose scope, however, he is not precisely
aware. His sixteen volumes nevertheless range themselves in three
compact groups. There are his letters [16] -- those Lettres à une
Inconnue, and his letters to the librarian Panizzi, revealing him in
somewhat close contact with political intrigue. But in this age of
novelists, it is as a writer of novels, and of fiction in the form of highly
descriptive drama, that he will count for most:--Colomba, for instance,
by its intellectual depth of motive, its firmly conceived structure, by the
faultlessness of its execution, vindicating the function of the novel as

no tawdry light literature, but in very deed a fine art. The Chronique du
Règne de Charles IX., an unusually successful specimen of historical
romance, links his imaginative work to the third group of Mérimée's
writings, his historical essays. One resource of the disabused soul of
our century, as we saw, would be the empirical study of facts, the
empirical science of nature and man, surviving all dead metaphysical
philosophies. Mérimée, perhaps, may have had in him the making of a
master of such science, disinterested, patient, exact: scalpel in hand, we
may fancy, he would have penetrated far. But quite certainly he had
something of genius for the exact study of history, for the pursuit of
exact truth, with a keenness of scent as if that alone existed, in some
special area of historic fact, to be determined by his own peculiar
mental preferences. Power here too again,--the crude power of men and
women which mocks, while it makes its use of, average human nature:
it was the magic function of history to put one in living [17] contact
with that. To weigh the purely physiognomic import of the memoir, of
the pamphlet saved by chance, the letter, the anecdote, the very gossip
by which one came face to face with energetic personalities: there lay
the true business of the historic student, not in that pretended theoretic
interpretation of events by their mechanic causes, with which he dupes
others if not invariably himself. In the great hero of the Social War, in
Sylla, studied, indeed, through his environment, but only so far as that
was in dynamic contact with himself, you saw, without any manner of
doubt, on one side, the solitary height of human genius; on the other,
though on the seemingly so heroic stage of antique Roman story, the
wholly inexpressive level of the humanity of every day, the spectacle of
man's eternal bêtise. Fascinated, like a veritable son of the old pagan
Renaissance, by the grandeur, the concentration, the satiric hardness of
ancient Roman character, it is to Russia nevertheless that he most
readily turns--youthful Russia, whose native force, still unbelittled by
our western civilisation, seemed to have in it the promise of a more
dignified civilisation to come.