Rousseau and his imitators, and the result in our case was the usual one-an exaggerated reaction. We wished to be strong, and therefore we jeered at sentimentality." It is, nevertheless, self-evident that this hatred of the pathetic, which contrasts so strongly with the extreme sentimentality of most of Mérimée's youthful contemporaries, and this predilection for the violent and the savage, were not purely and simply products of a spirit of contradiction. To gauge the strength of the predilection we have but to glance at the history of Mérimée's development: in another man we should expect to see such a feeling checked in its first outbreaks by the lighter, brighter mood of youth, and tempered in age by waning vigour. But such was not the case with Mérimée. His love of violent solutions is of the same age as his love of pen and ink, and the horrors and terrors with which in the works of his mature manhood his genius produces a tragic effect, become in those of his old age merely gloomy and repulsive. In the Théâtre de Clara Gazul, Mérimée's first book, published when he was only twenty-two, it is amusing to observe the conflict of youth with the inveterate natural bias. towards gloom and violence. Read superficially, the book produces the effect of a tolerably serious work. Professing to be written in the Spanish style, it nevertheless differs in many essential particulars from Spanish dramatic literature. The plays of which it is composed have no mutual resemblance; they do not, like the mantle-and-dagger tragedies, monotonously repeat the same types of character and the same situations, produced by jealousy and a touchy sense of honour; nor do they accept the extremely conventional ideas of morality current in the tragedies in question. Mérimée's characters have distinctly defined individualities; and instead of exhibiting superhuman self-control and resignation, they are carried blindly away by their passions and desires. Still less resemblance is there between these plays of Mérimée's and the great series of romantic and fantastic dramas (some of them breathing the spirit of Catholicism, others lacking it) in which Calderon reaches the zenith of his productive power and displays all his wealth of colour. It is only with certain heavy Spanish dramas, such as Calderon's El alcalde de Zalamea, Las tres justicias in una, El medico de su honra, El pintor de su deshonra, or Moreto's El valiente justiciero, that certain of Mérimée's, for example Inès Mendo, harmonise in their general tone. Taken as a whole, instead of being what it pretends to be, namely serious, the book is arrogantly wanton and audacious; genuine French frivolity and satire peep out beneath the costume of the Spanish actress. Personages are introduced upon the stage whom, as we are told in the preface to Une Femme est un Diable, our nurses taught us to regard with reverence. But the author hopes that "the emancipated Spaniards" will not take this amiss. Clara Gazul is, then, a merry book; the good lady who wrote it is no prude. But what a strange kind of mirth it is! Amongst its manifestations is the free use of the knife. If we try to find a parallel to it, nothing suggests itself but the sportive springs of a young tiger. Mérimée finds it almost impossible to end without killing all his principal characters, and one sword-thrust succeeds the other almost automatically. But he amuses himself by destroying the illusion directly after the catastrophe; the actors rise, and one of them thanks the audience for their kind attention; the whole thing is turned into a jest. Doña Maria. Help! She is poisoned, poisoned by me. I will see to my own punishment; the convent well is not far off. (Exit hurriedly.) Fray Eugenio (to the audience). Do not take it too much amiss that I have caused the death of these two charming young ladies; and graciously excuse the shortcomings of the author. Thus ends the wild play L'Occasion. The wittiest criticism passed on these dramas, and the style in general, is contained in a sentence in Alfred de Musset's Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet: "Souvient l'Espagne, avec ses Castillans, qui se coupent la gorge comme on boit un verre d'eau, ses Andalouses qui font plus vite encore un petit métier moins dépeuplant, ses taureaux, ses toréadors, matadors, &c." It was not in Mérimée's works alone that the Spain of the young Romantic School (to which De Musset himself contributed the pale-faced, brown-necked Andalusian beauty) was so passionate and hasty. But no one took such delight in it all as he. And the themes he chose in his old age are in complete accordance with this taste of his youth. His last tale, Lokis, is the story of a young Lithuanian count of mysterious descent, who from time to time is possessed by, or at least feels that he possesses, the instincts of a wild animal. He goes mad on his wedding-night and kills his bride by biting her throat. The count's character is drawn with delicate skill; the progress of his mental derangement is indicated by a few slight but graphic touches; and Mérimée has evidently enjoyed contrasting this wild young Lithuanian nobleman with a peculiarly worthy and dull German professor (the German of French fiction prior to 1870), a guest in the count's house, who writes every evening to his fiancée, Fraülein Weber, and communicates the horrible catastrophe to the reader in one of his letters. But the impression left by this vampire tale is one of disgust mingled with horror. The masterly treatment, the perfect style, the refined manner in which the loathsome subject is dealt with, remind us of the white kid gloves of the headsman. The story is only of interest to us as a proof of the strength retained by one of its author's original tendencies. Personally characteristic of Mérimée as this tendency undoubtedly was, it is plainly of near kin to a tendency of the whole of that school to which Southey gave the name of the "Satanic." The influence of Byron is unmistakable. By 1830 Frenchmen were thoroughly weary (as Englishmen had been for some time) of the "Immanuelistic literature of the Reaction. The sceptre of literature had passed from the hands of Lamartine into the hands of Victor Hugo, whose Orientales contain most sanguinary pictures of war and destruction. Lamartine himself, the Seraphic poet in chief, had struck a Satanic note in La Chute d'un Ange. And a young poet of Victor Hugo's school was treating gruesome themes in short, artistically finished stories at the same time as Mérimée, and entirely uninfluenced by him. I allude to Petrus Borel, who died poor and unknown. His Dina, la belle Juive, will bear comparison with any of Mérimée's tales of horror. Poor Borel was an enthusiast, an ardent moralist, who, concealing his fervour beneath his realism, desired to inspire indignation with the deeds of violence he described. The refined, polished Mérimée is often only pretending to be bloodthirsty because it amuses him to frighten his readers, especially those of the female sex. But in both cases we have also the genuine Romantic defiance of the "bourgeois." Mérimée has not escaped unpunished for thus yielding up his talent to the service of literary bloodthirstiness. Though he avoided his Nemesis during his lifetime, she overtook him after death. When De Loménie pronounced the customary panegyric in the Académie Française, he concluded by expressing the opinion that what was wanting in Mérimée's life was the peace and joy of the domestic hearth —that he would have been happier as the father of a family, "with four or five children to bring up." And when his friend, Countess Lise Przezdzieska, published, under the title of Lettres à une autre inconnue, a series of his letters to her which were certainly never intended for publication, she devoted the proceeds of her book to the payment of masses for the soul of her anti-Catholic friend. XXIV MÉRIMÉE AT the time when Mérimée made his literary début in the disguise of a Spaniard, the Classic drama had reached the stage when the personages of a play had all, like the pieces on a chessboard, their prescribed duties and moves. There were the stereotyped king, tyrant, princess, conspirators, &c. It mattered not whether the queen who had killed her husband was called Semiramis, Clytemnestra, Johanna of Naples, or Mary Stuart, whether the lawgiver's name was Minos or Peter the Great or Cromwell-their words and actions, thoughts and feelings, were always the same. A young poet of the Classic School, who had treated a subject from Spanish history in a manner which was objected to by the censor, got out of the difficulty by transferring the action of his play with a stroke of the pen from Barcelona to Babylon, and from the sixteenth century to the days before the Flood. "Babylone" had the same number of syllables and rhymed with the same words as "Barcelone," and scarcely any other alteration was necessary.1 The Spain which Mérimée, in the guise of Clara Gazul, shows to his readers, is not the country in which this Barcelona was situated. Nor does he rest content with masquerading as a Spanish lady. The genuine Romanticist, he regards it as the main task of the author to represent the manners and morals of different ages and countries without a touch of varnish or whitewash, bringing out distinctly and strongly what in those days was called "local colour." He therefore transforms himself into an inhabitant of the most dissimilar countries, in all different stages of civilisation. He is in imagination a Moor, a negro, a South American, an Illyrian, a gipsy, a Cossack. But all 1 Guizot: Shakespeare et son temps, 294. |