Miscellaneous Studies | Page 9

Huguenot of pure blood, allowing its charm, in that charming youth,
even to Huguenot piety. And as for the incidents--however freely it
may be undermined by historic doubt, all reaches a perfectly firm
surface, at least for the eye of the reader. The Chronicle of Charles the
Ninth is like a series of masterly drawings in illustration of a
period--the period in which two other masters of French fiction have
found their opportunity, mainly by the development of its actual
historic characters. Those characters--Catherine de Medicis and the
rest--Mérimée, with significant irony and self-assertion, sets aside,
preferring to think of them as essentially commonplace. For him the

interest lies in the creatures of his own will, who carry in them,
however, so lightly! a learning equal to Balzac's, greater than that of
Dumas. He knows with like completeness the mere fashions of the
time--how courtier and soldier dressed themselves, and the large
movements of the desperate game which fate or chance was playing
with those pretty pieces. Comparing that favourite century of the
French Renaissance with our own, he notes a decadence of the more
energetic passions in the interest of general tranquillity, and perhaps
(only perhaps!) of general happiness. "Assassination," he observes, as
if with regret, "is no longer a part of our manners." In fact, the duel, and
the whole [22] morality of the duel, which does but enforce a certain
regularity on assassination, what has been well called le sentiment du
fer, the sentiment of deadly steel, had then the disposition of refined
existence. It was, indeed, very different, and is, in Mérimée's romance.
In his gallant hero, Bernard de Mergy, all the promptings of the lad's
virile goodness are in natural collusion with that sentiment du fer.
Amid his ingenuous blushes, his prayers, and plentiful tears
between-while, it is a part of his very sex. With his delightful,
fresh-blown air, he is for ever tossing the sheath from the sword, but
always as if into bright natural sunshine. A winsome, yet withal serious
and even piteous figure, he conveys his pleasantness, in spite of its
gloomy theme, into Mérimée's one quite cheerful book.
Cheerful, because, after all, the gloomy passions it presents are but the
accidents of a particular age, and not like the mental conditions in
which Mérimée was most apt to look for the spectacle of human power,
allied to madness or disease in the individual. For him, at least, it was
the office of fiction to carry one into a different if not a better world
than that actually around us; and if the Chronicle of Charles the Ninth
provided an escape from the tame circumstances of contemporary life
into an impassioned past, Colomba is a measure of the resources for
mental alteration which may be found even in the modern age. There
was a corner of [23] the French Empire, in the manners of which
assassination still had a large part.
"The beauty of Corsica," says Mérimée, "is grave and sad. The aspect
of the capital does but augment the impression caused by the solitude

that surrounds it. There is no movement in the streets. You hear there
none of the laughter, the singing, the loud talking, common in the
towns of Italy. Sometimes, under the shadow of a tree on the
promenade, a dozen armed peasants will be playing cards, or looking
on at the game. The Corsican is naturally silent. Those who walk the
pavement are all strangers: the islanders stand at their doors: every one
seems to be on the watch, like a falcon on its nest. All around the gulf
there is but an expanse of tanglework; beyond it, bleached mountains.
Not a habitation! Only, here and there, on the heights about the town,
certain white constructions detach themselves from the background of
green. They are funeral chapels or family tombs."
Crude in colour, sombre, taciturn, Corsica, as Mérimée here describes it,
is like the national passion of the Corsican--that morbid personal pride,
usurping the place even of grief for the dead, which centuries of
traditional violence had concentrated into an all- absorbing passion for
bloodshed, for bloody revenges, in collusion with the natural wildness,
and the wild social condition of the island still unaffected even by the
finer [24] ethics of the duel. The supremacy of that passion is well
indicated by the cry, put into the mouth of a young man in the presence
of the corpse of his father deceased in the course of nature--a young
man meant to be commonplace. "Ah! Would thou hadst died
malamorte--by violence! We might have avenged thee!"
In Colomba, Mérimée's best known creation, it is united to a singularly
wholesome type of personal beauty, a natural grace of manner which is
irresistible, a cunning intellect patiently diverting every circumstance to
its