To avoid all comradeship with the calculating "men of feeling," and to protect his emotional life from the gaze of the profane, Mérimée had recourse to the expedient of concealing his quivering sensibility under steely irony, as under a coat of mail. He determined rather to appear worse than he was, than to run the risk of being taken for one of these models of all the virtues. With this aim in view he dealt so hardly with himself that he lost his first fresh, simple naturalness, and acquired instead a manner which, though still natural and simple, was, nevertheless, distinctly a cultivated manner. In Le Vase étrusque, the one of his tales which gives most insight into his own intellectual and emotional life, we read of the hero, Saint-Clair: "He was born with a tender and loving heart; but, at an age when one is liable to receive impressions which last for the rest of one's life, too frank a display of his tender-heartedness drew down upon him the ridicule of his companions. He was proud and ambitious, and valued the good opinion of others, as all children do. Thenceforward he made it his study to conceal all the outward manifestations of what he regarded as a dishonourable weakness. He attained his aim, but his victory cost him dear. He succeeded in hiding the emotions of his feeling heart from others, but, by shutting them up in his own breast, he made them a thousand times more painful. In society he acquired the lamentable reputation of being unfeeling and careless, and in solitude his restless imagination created torments for him which were the more unbearable because he would confide them to no one." It is impossible to ignore the direct self-portraiture in this character sketch, though the colouring is too sombre.
[1] Victor Hugo raconté par un témoin de sa vie, ii 159. Eugène de Mirécourt: Mérimée, 25.
[2] A reproduction of the portrait is to be found in Maurice Tourneux's Prosper Mérimée: ses portraits, ses dessins, sa bibliothèque.
[XXII]
BEYLE AND MÉRIMÉE
Thus prepared, Mérimée, at the age of eighteen, made the acquaintance of Henri Beyle, who was twenty years his senior. They met at the house of the famous singer, Madame Pasta, who had left Milan and taken up her residence in Paris. It was inevitable that Beyle should exercise considerable influence over a kindred spirit so much his junior. Direct proof of this influence can hardly be given, for, before he met Beyle, Mérimée had written nothing; but, if we compare the works of the two authors, the resemblance between some of their peculiarities is striking; and the comparison is further instructive because it serves to throw Mérimée's own special characteristics into strong relief. I consider it impossible that Mérimée can have influenced Beyle, unless, indeed, we reckon as influence the communication of general information; for Beyle is undoubtedly indebted to Mérimée for many of the observations on the subject of art in his Mémoires d'un Touriste. Of the two minds Beyle's was obviously the first matured; therefore, when the younger of the two friends begins his biographical notice of the elder with the assertion that, in spite of their friendship, they had hardly had two ideas in common in the course of their lives, this obvious exaggeration may reasonably be attributed to the writer's anxiety to prevent his readers from applying certain of his remarks on Beyle to himself.
Beyle and Mérimée resemble each other, in the first instance, in their love of fact. All Mérimée's readers know that what he presents them with is the bare, accurately demonstrable fact, the exactly drawn detail. All that he cares for in history, as he himself confesses in his Chronique du Règne de Charles IX., are the anecdotes; and of these he prefers the kind which illustrate the manners and types of character of the period. Exactly the same can be said of Beyle. Anecdote is positively the natural form of his thought; he thinks in anecdotes. He paints the individual in anecdotes, the period in biographies. His aversion for the vague leads him to write the kind of history which seems to him most full of life, in other words, to communicate fact in the form of a novel, or of a short, realistic drama. And the pithy, short anecdotes which he relates are never commonplace, but invariably the striking expression of some essential fact. In so far the resemblance to Mérimée is marked. When a modern admirer of Beyle (Paul Heyse) praises his short Italian tales, "in which strong, reckless passions assert themselves without any self-deception, and take their course with a fiery, or cold, heedlessness of consequences, prepared in the last resort to have recourse to the knife," we feel that these expressions might, without the alteration of a word, be applied to Mérimée's stories.
Nevertheless, a story as communicated by Mérimée conveys such a different meaning from a story as communicated by Beyle, that it is easy to determine the limits of the elder man's influence upon the younger. Beyle's salient characteristic is the tendency to generalise. The trait of character which is exhibited in any given action, is to him only an instance; it illustrates a psychological law, or is the evidence of certain social conditions or racial peculiarities, which it is of great consequence to him to elucidate. When, for example, he fills his book De l'Amour_to repletion with anecdotes, he does it merely for the purpose of showing, in a practical and impressive manner, what he means by the different names which he gives to the different varieties of the passion and their different stages of development. To obtain the reader's assent to the conclusions he draws, he presents his material, his arguments, in the form of anecdotes. In his novels this tendency to generalise has almost a distracting effect. He too frequently explains to his reader: "She acted in such and such a manner because she was an Italian; a Parisian would of course have acted very differently."