Miscellaneous Studies | Page 8

It was as if old Rome itself were here
again; as, occasionally, a new quarry is laid open of what was thought
long since exhausted, ancient marble, cipollino or verde antique.
Mérimée, indeed, was not the first to discern the fitness for imaginative
service of the career of "the false Demetrius," pretended [18] son of
Ivan the Terrible; but he alone seeks its utmost force in a calm,

matter-of-fact carefully ascertained presentment of the naked events.
Yes! In the last years of the Valois, when its fierce passions seemed to
be bursting France to pieces, you might have seen, far away beyond the
rude Polish dominion of which one of those Valois princes had become
king, a display more effective still of exceptional courage and cunning,
of horror in circumstance, of bêtise, of course, of bêtise and a slavish
capacity of being duped, in average mankind: all that under a mask of
solemn Muscovite court- ceremonial. And Mérimée's style, simple and
unconcerned, but with the eye ever on its object, lends itself perfectly
to such purpose-- to an almost phlegmatic discovery of the facts, in all
their crude natural colouring, as if he but held up to view, as a piece of
evidence, some harshly dyed oriental carpet from the sumptuous floor
of the Kremlin, on which blood had fallen.
A lover of ancient Rome, its great character and incident, Mérimée
valued, as if it had been personal property of his, every extant relic of it
in the art that had been most expressive of its genius-- architecture. In
that grandiose art of building, the most national, the most tenaciously
rooted of all the arts in the stable conditions of life, there were historic
documents hardly less clearly legible than the manuscript chronicle. By
the mouth of those stately Romanesque [19] churches, scattered in so
many strongly characterised varieties over the soil of France, above all
in the hot, half-pagan south, the people of empire still protested, as he
understood, against what must seem a smaller race. The Gothic
enthusiasm indeed was already born, and he shared it--felt intelligently
the fascination of the Pointed Style, but only as a further transformation
of old Roman structure; the round arch is for him still the great
architectural form, la forme noble, because it was to be seen in the
monuments of antiquity. Romanesque, Gothic, the manner of the
Renaissance, of Lewis the Fourteenth:--they were all, as in a written
record, in the old abbey church of Saint-Savin, of which Mérimée was
instructed to draw up a report. Again, it was as if to his concentrated
attention through many months that deserted sanctuary of Benedict
were the only thing on earth. Its beauties, its peculiarities, its odd
military features, its faded mural paintings, are no merely picturesque
matter for the pencil he could use so well, but the lively record of a
human society. With what appetite! with all the animation of George

Sand's Mauprat, he tells the story of romantic violence having its way
there, defiant of law, so late as the year 1611; of the family of robber
nobles perched, as abbots in commendam, in those sacred places. That
grey, pensive old church in the little valley of Poitou, was for a time
like Santa Maria del Fiore to [20] Michelangelo, the mistress of his
affections- -of a practical affection; for the result of his elaborate report
was the Government grant which saved the place from ruin. In
architecture, certainly, he had what for that day was nothing less than
intuition--an intuitive sense, above all, of its logic, of the necessity
which draws into one all minor changes, as elements in a reasonable
development. And his care for it, his curiosity about it, were
symptomatic of his own genius. Structure, proportion, design, a sort of
architectural coherency: that was the aim of his method in the art of
literature, in that form of it, especially, which he will live by, in fiction.
As historian and archaeologist, as a man of erudition turned artist, he is
well seen in the Chronique du Règne de Charles IX., by which we pass
naturally from Mérimée's critical or scientific work to the products of
his imagination. What economy in the use of a large antiquarian
knowledge! what an instinct amid a hundred details, for the detail that
carries physiognomy in it, that really tells! And again what outline,
what absolute clarity of outline! For the historian of that puzzling age
which centres in the "Eve of Saint Bartholomew," outward events
themselves seem obscured by the vagueness of motive of the actors in
them. But Mérimée, disposing of them as an artist, not in love with
half-lights, compels events and actors alike to the clearness he [21]
desired; takes his side without hesitation; and makes his hero a