Abbé Aubain and Mosaics

Mérimée's temperament was really that of the scholar, not of the artist, and even his art came to him as a kind of scholarship. He did one thing after another, as if challenging himself to accomplish a certain end, and then, that end accomplished, he no longer cared to repeat it. That is the scholar's way, not the artist's; and the scholar's instinct is seen, too, in that too purely critical attitude which he adopted, towards others and towards himself, working in almost a hostile fashion upon every impulse, so as to destroy his interest in any part of his work but the way in which it was done. He began his career by two very serious mystifications, Le Théâtre de Clara Gazul , a collection of short plays supposed to be translated from the Spanish, and La Guzla , a collection of ballads in prose supposed to be translated from the Illyrian. Later on he was, perhaps, a little too anxious to represent himself as having intended from the first to parody the fierceness and the local colour of the Romantics. Vers l'an de grâce 1827 j'étais romantique , he says ironically, in the preface of 1840, as he reprints his work of thirteen years ago. Nous disions aux classiques : 'Vos Grecs ne sont point des Grecs; vos Romains ne sont point des Romains; vous ne savez pas donner à vos compositions la couleur locale . Point de salut sans couleur locale .' But no doubt he wished from the first to show that he also, by a mere disinterested effort of intelligence, could be as exotic as the Romantics; that Romanticism, like everything else, was a thing that could be done deliberately, done and then dropped. The invention of history and archaeology leads to history and archaeology themselves. Mérimée next produced a piece in dialogue on La Jacquerie , in which there is more and better history than drama; then followed his historical novel, the Chronique du Règne de Charles IX. , in which he set himself, as deliberately as usual, to do more carefully what Walter Scott, then a fashion in France, had done with genius. He produced the most perfect of historical novels, and looked about for some new difficulty to conquer.