a little southern island race is to the old Greek female characters than are all those princesses who walked the French stage in buskins, and borrowed the names of Elektra, Antigone, or Iphigenia. But she is perhaps still more nearly related to the heathen daughters of a far-away northern isle, the women of the Icelandic sagas, who brood with such passionate obstinacy over their family feuds, and force the unwilling men to take blood for blood. In this same Colomba, which is Mérimée's most famous work, Romantic "local colouring" celebrates its most signal triumph. The story is pervaded by the genuine aroma of Bonaparte's native isle, and breathes the genuine Corsican spirit. As a proof of the fidelity with which Corsican customs are reproduced, as well as of the popularity of the book, it may be mentioned that when Mérimée was waiting in court to hear the verdict in the Libri case, a Corsican ex-bandit came forward from among the audience and quietly offered, in case of the verdict being given against him, to revenge him by assassinating the president of the court. Better evidence of the correctness of Mérimée's colouring could hardly be required. But Mérimée would not have been Mérimée if he had not (at the very time when he was publishing Colomba) saved his reputation as the enemy of all theories by making merry over this same much-talked-of "local colouring." In the preface, written in 1840, to the second edition of La Guzla, his collection of fictitious. Illyrian popular songs and ballads, he tells that, "in the year of grace 1827," he was a Romanticist with an enthusiasm for local colour, nay, the firm belief that without it there was no salvation. By local colouring he and his comrades meant what in the seventeenth century went by the name of "manners" (mœurs); but they were very proud of their word, and imagined themselves to be the inventors of the thing as well as the word. His devotion to local colouring inspired him with the desire to visit Illyria; want of money was the chief obstacle to his carrying out his wish; the idea occurred to him to write a description of his travels in anticipation and pay for the tour with the profits of his book; but he gave up this bold plan, and instead manufac VOL. V. S tured, with the assistance of a guide-book and the knowledge "of five or six Slavonic words," a collection of "ballads translated from the Illyrian." Every one was deceived.1 A German savant of the name of Gerhardt actually translated Guzla (along with two other volumes of Slavonic poetry) into German, and this, moreover, in the original metre, which he had been able to trace in the French translator's prose. After Mérimée had thus discovered how easily "local colouring" may be obtained, he forgave Racine and the Classicists their lack of it. We are conscious, under all this witty pleasantry, of the distinguished author's vexation with himself for having borne a banner, belonged to a party, even though it was only in literature and as a youth. And the preface, moreover, does not tell the exact truth; for Mérimée's Illyrian prose ballads, though by no means remarkably good in other respects, are distinctly the product of intelligent and careful study, and accurately reproduce the style of Slavonic popular poetry. But Mérimée could never write of himself without selfdepreciation. His prefaces, when he on a rare occasion condescends to enter into direct relations with the public by means of a preface, are distinguished by a nonchalant, apathetic humility, a manner which isolates the man who assumes it more completely than the most exaggerated selfassertion. 1 Goethe alone publicly proclaimed Mérimée to be the author of the Illyrian poems. In one of his letters Mérimée makes some not unreasonably caustic remarks on the explanation given by the great poet of his divination of the personality concealed under the pseudonym Hyacinth Maglanovitch: "It occurred to us that the word Guzla lay concealed in the word Gazul." The fact was that Mérimée, who, like all the other young Romanticists, courted Goethe's favour, had sent him the book along with a letter confiding the secret of its authorship. XXV MÉRIMÉE THE stern or satirical reserve of Mérimée's style is most noticeable in the works which he wrote in his official capacity, in his brief descriptions of French historical monuments, crowded with technical expressions (Notes sur le Midi de la France, &c.). Not a word about himself, not a single personal impression of travel, not one remark addressed to the uninitiated! What a satisfaction there lay in disappointing all the critics who were lying in wait to detect the dilettante and novel-writer in the inspector of historical monuments! Reserve is also apparent in the love of mystification displayed by the author of Le Théâtre de Clara Gazul and the Illyrian ballads. We are reminded of Beyle here, though the tendency took a somewhat different form in his case. Mérimée's pseudonymity was of short duration, but whilst it lasted it was impenetrable. Nothing gave him greater pleasure than to send his readers on a wild-goose chase. He neglected nothing that could give an appearance of authenticity to his pseudonyms. He supplied his works not only with biographies, but with portraits of their supposed authors. To complete the jest, he prefixed to the first edition of Clara Gazul an engraved portrait of himself dressed as a Spanish lady, in a low-necked dress, with a lace mantilla thrown over his head. He who misleads by keeping silence is obliged sooner or later to speak, and the mystifier of the public is in the end compelled to admit it into his confidence and bear its criticism. But there is a more impenetrable kind of armour than either silence or mystification, namely irony, and in it Mérimée, like Beyle, clad himself. There was a satirical vein in his writing from the first; for his ardent admiration for primitive strength of character naturally involved contempt for phrasemongers. Such a play as Les Mécontents, for instance, contains as bitter a satire as ever was penned upon drawing-room revolutionists. A set of Royalist provincial noblemen, old imbeciles whose one passion is to hear themselves speak, concoct a conspiracy against the First Empire; they determine to distribute inflammatory pamphlets, they arrange secret signals, draw up plans of procedure, and quarrel for the presidency at their meetings, but disperse incontinently at the mere sight of a gendarme. A play of much later date, Les deux Héritages ou Don Quichotte (which probably served Émile Augier as a model for some of his dramas), contains an analogous satire upon social and religious hypocrisy, political humbug, the cold, calculating, unchivalrous spirit of a youthful generation, comparing himself with which Mérimée must have been tempted to call himself an idealist and enthusiast. But in these dramatic works, the faulty construction of which is apparent even to the reader, the irony peculiarly characteristic of Mérimée is absent. In them he lays on the colour too thickly; it is as the novelist that he really excels. Far more delicate than the irony of his dramas is, for instance, that of the charming little story L'abbé Aubain, a work which proves the versatility of Mérimée's talent, for in it he writes almost like Edmond About, only with much greater elegance. L'abbé Aubain is a short series of letters, some of them written by a lady who supposes herself to be beloved by a young abbé, the rest by the abbé, who jests constrainedly on the subject of the lady's attachment to him. We make the acquaintance of two weak, refined characters, who lie to each other, to themselves, and to the world, and whose little dainty, easy-going passions and counterfeit self-control are the subject of the silent satire of the author. In a story of this kind there is no narrator; therefore we are no more conscious than in the plays that the author is suppressing himself. The form of irony peculiarly characteristic of Mérimée is most plainly observable where we have a narrator, but know nothing of him except that he has no share in the emotions he describes. Mérimée's method, which is determined by his natural reserve, is to increase the effect of the story he is telling by an irony betraying itself in minute traits; he either with a little curl of the lip allows the touching incidents to speak for themselves, or he exhibits the painful, the revolting, or the passionate, in a frame of cold, indifferent surroundings. In that little masterpiece, Le Vase étrusque, the only one of his stories in which he treats a quite modern theme sympathetically, he tells the story of two young beings who love each other secretly. We hear the young man, who has just returned from a night rendezvous, talking to himself: "How happy I am!" he keeps on saying to himself. "At last I have found the heart which understands mine! Yes, it is my ideal that I have found-friend and mistress in one. What character! What passion! . . . No, she has never loved before!" And as vanity intrudes itself into every earthly concern, his next thought is: "She is the most beautiful woman in Paris;" and in imagination he retraces all her charms. The narrative continues in this strain for some time. before Mérimée interrupts himself with the remark that a happy lover is almost as tedious as an unhappy one. Then, when the relation between the two lovers has reached its most perfect stage, when Saint-Clair's momentary but fatal fit of jealousy of his beloved's past has resolved itself into a mere nothing, a mere misunderstanding, and we have witnessed a love scene which the most subtly tender of writers could hardly surpass, a scene in which tears of repentance mingle with smiles and kisses, how do we learn, six lines farther on in the story, that everything is at an end, that Saint-Clair was killed the following morning in a duel? We hear of it as we hear of such things in real life : "Well," said Roquantin to Colonel Beaujeu when he met him at Tartoni's in the evening; "is this news true?" "Only too true," answered the Colonel, looking very sad. "Tell me how it happened." |