No traces of anything similar are to be found in Mérimée's writings; no reflections or divagations—strictly accurate, bold representation of his fact, and nothing more. When he has chosen his subject, which is most frequently some survival of ancient savagery that has attracted his attention as an old coin among modern ones attracts the eye of the connoisseur, or an old building in a modern town the eye of the traveller, his whole aim is to make the curious phenomenon stand out in as strong relief as possible from the insipid dead-level of his own day; he removes everything which might prevent the strange survival of the past from producing its full effect; but such a proceeding as tracing its connection with the general condition of the society or country of which it bears the impress, never occurs to him. To see things in their whole bearing is not his affair: the bird's-eye view he leaves to others. He seeks and finds a curious phenomenon in the world of reality, delineates it, and in the process of reproduction imparts to it some of his own life; but he never regards it as anything but the curious phenomenon. And he is as strictly matter-of-fact in interpretation as in delineation. Note, for example, how he protests (in his Portraits historiques et littéraires) against any symbolic interpretation of Don Quixote, in which work he refuses to see anything but a masterly parody of the romances of chivalry. "Let us leave to solemn German professors," he exclaims, "the honour of the discovery that the Knight of La Mancha symbolises poetry and his squire prose. The interpreter will always discover in the works of a man of genius a thousand poetical intentions of which their author was entirely ignorant." Contrast with this kind of criticism the following fine passage from Sainte-Beuve. "This book, originally a purely topical work, has become part of the literature of the world. It has conquered the imagination of humanity. Every reader has worked his will with it, has shaped it to his taste.... Cervantes did not think of this, but we do. Each one of us is a Don Quixote to-day, a Sancho Panza to-morrow. In every one of us there is more or less of this discordant union of a high-flying ideal with the plain common-sense which keeps close to the ground. With many it is actually only a question of age; a man falls asleep Don Quixote and awakes Sancho Panza." Beyle would have endorsed these sentiments; Mérimée was kept from doing so by his antipathy to generalisation.
Their love of the fact in its simplicity produced in both Beyle and Mérimée a strong aversion for French classic rhetoric; and both are distinguished from all contemporary French Romanticists by the fact that they do not substitute lyric poetry for that rhetoric. Beyle never wrote a line of poetry; he had no ear whatever for rhythm. In spite of the enthusiastic admiration which he imagined he felt for the Italian poets, he regarded metre as merely an assistance to memory, and could see no reason for it in a composition not intended to be learned by rote. Mérimée is characterised by a similar dislike of verse. He had such a repugnance to the effeminate, languishing music of rhyme, that the numerous poems cited in his writings are, without exception, rendered in prose; he preferred letting them lose all their character to translating them in verse. The explanation naturally suggests itself that he did not feel capable of writing poetry. But I am rather of opinion that it was his pride which would not allow him to submit his poetry to the criticism of the public. His Lettres à une inconnue show that he could write English verse, so the question can hardly have been one of inability. But such talent as he had, he did not cultivate; an aversion to display of feeling, a shy reservedness, produced the same practical result as Beyle's want of ear.
In this matter, however, as in various others, Mérimée outdoes his master. In the depths of Beyle's soul there was a lyric tendency; it finds its way to the surface in his persistent enthusiasm for Napoleon, for Italy, for the sixteenth century, for Cimarosa and Rossini, Correggio and Canova, and in all the superlatives which flow almost as abundantly from his pen as from Balzac's. Mérimée, on the other hand, not content with banishing the lyric form from his works, entirely abjures the spirit; he walls himself in; no prose is less lyrical than his.
In order to obtain an adequate impression of his literary matter-of-factness, let us for a moment compare his tales, not with Beyle's, but with George Sand's first novels, which were written about the same time. What George Sand offers us in hers is, principally, such a masterly revelation of the inner life of a young woman, with its modesty and its enthusiasm, its impulse to self-devotion and its susceptibility to passion, as no woman had ever given to the world before; but in the deepest recesses of her soul there is a purpose; she has a wrong to avenge, wrath to satisfy; she does not see the sufferings of the female sex from the standpoint of an outsider; she does not try to conceal that her heart has bled. Mérimée, on the other hand, has no cause, no theory, no political or social bias whatever. He has no enthusiasms and believes in nothing, neither in a philosophic system, nor in a school of art, nor in a religious truth; scarcely even in the general progress of humanity. The sceptical man-of-the-world, he hardens his heart against all reformers, missionaries, improvers of the world, and saviours of humanity; he does not answer the question whether or not he agrees with them; he turns a deaf ear to it. George Sand shows what marriage is in France, and asks her public with a quivering voice: "What do you say to this? Is it to be endured?" Mérimée writes La double Méprise and ends his tale without moving a muscle of his face.
As a rest from overpowering emotion George Sand goes back to primitive human nature, and with simple, beautiful touches delineates (as in Mauprat) the power and the happiness of faithful love, or produces (as in the peasant stories and Jean de la Roche) simple, touching, ideal representations of the innate nobility of the human soul. Mérimée does not believe in the ideal, and has no talent for the idyll. There is a sombre, dusky tone over everything he paints; the impulse of the soul towards a purity which it loves, or a heroism which it admires, is foreign to his art. In her inmost heart George Sand is the lyric poet. Whether she makes the passion of love the centre of her book, concedes it every right and gives it her whole sympathy even when it inspires an unworthy character (as in that remarkable and profoundly suggestive tale, Valvèdre), or whether she is carried away by her admiration for the courage and strength of character of the best of her own sex, she always shares the emotions and passions of her characters, rejoices, weeps, sighs, and smiles with them. Mérimée, on the contrary, resembles Beyle in giving an impersonal, dramatic expression to his ideas and feelings, and surpasses him in the artistic skill with which he does it. He has been at great trouble to shut up his feelings in his own breast, has imposed silence upon them, the absolute silence of the prison cell, and never, never once, does he give expression to them in his own name. He gives voice to them only through fully responsible characters, and that but sparingly. The characters thus evolved stand out before us with unusual vividness, and their language is peculiarly laconic and vigorous. The more intense and tender Mérimée's emotion originally was, the prouder is its outward bearing. There is nothing feminine in him. Even in his female characters it is not their femininity which he brings out. Beyle, a marked contrast to him in this respect, makes, in writing to him, the true and apt observation, that his novels are wanting in "delicate tenderness."[1] His women are masculine and logical in their passions; almost all of them are powerful individualities; even the most frivolous and immoral meet death with quiet fortitude (Arsène Guillot, Julie de Chaverney, Carmen). None of them have the melting Correggio-like quality which Beyle imparted to his female characters.
Beyle's more lyric style and profounder understanding of true womanliness are principally due to the fact that he was at heart an imaginative enthusiast. His matter-of-factness is only skin deep. Hence enthusiasm itself was a favourite theme of his, whereas it was one which Mérimée avoided. Compare them, for instance, as delineators of battle scenes; compare the two best prose descriptions of battles in existence at that time, Mérimée's famous L'Enlèvement de la Redoute and Beyle's equally famous account of the battle of Waterloo. They present a striking contrast. In Beyle's pages we have a youth's enthusiasm for Napoleon and thirst for military glory depicted with a touch of irony, but also with genuine sympathy; in Mérimée's we have only the dark side of war—the half-mechanical assault on a redoubt, and the tumult of battle, which he paints with as masterly a hand as Gérôme's, without thought of patriotism, enthusiasm, or any more elevated sentiment than soldier-like stoicism and hope of promotion.
Beyle and Mérimée resemble each other in their attitude to religion, which was a peculiar one for Romanticists. The French Romanticists were originally as little inimical to Roman Catholicism as the German. Several of them began life as good Catholics, and the attitude of the rest was, generally speaking, one either of respect or indifference. But both Mérimée and Beyle were from the very first thoroughly pagan in thought and feeling. And Mérimée's free-thought, as well as Beyle's, was of the ardent type. He was not naïve enough to cherish a species of enmity towards a personal God, but he shared Beyle's detestation of the representatives of religion. His dislike of Christianity is, however, far more indirectly expressed than Beyle's, which is incessantly forcing itself on our notice. He does not, like Beyle, hate Catholicism; he only smiles at it. He never puts out more than a finger tip from under his black domino. It amuses him to describe insinuating Catholic priests; and when his characters have occasion to speak of baptism, confession, or any other religious ceremony, he is apt to make them do it "in a sanctimonious, nasal tone." But when the words are his own, we never have more than such cautious, subtle irony as is contained in the following passage. "It was a religious book which Madame de Pienne had brought with her; and I do not intend to tell you its title, in the first place because I do not wish to injure its author, in the second, because you would probably accuse me of desiring to draw some opprobrious inference regarding such books in general. Suffice it to say that the work in question was written by a young man of nineteen, with the special aim of restoring hardened sinners of the female sex to the bosom of the Church, that Arsène was terribly exhausted, and that she had not closed her eyes the whole of the previous night. Whilst the third page was being read, that happened which would have happened whatever the book had been—Mademoiselle Guillot closed her eyes and fell asleep."
Here again the difference between Beyle and Mérimée is mainly conditioned by the fact that the former was far less sceptical than the latter. Beyle was a materialist of the school of the Encyclopedists, and as such had firm beliefs. He had his philosophy—Epicureanism, to which he adhered faithfully; his method—psychological analysis; his religion—the worship of beauty in life, in music, in the plastic arts, and in literature. Mérimée has no philosophy; one cannot imagine anything less dogmatic than his half-stoical, half-sensual turn of mind; and he has no religion; he worships nothing. He avoids enthusiasm as carefully as if it were a disease. We are impressed by this fact in reading his remarks on Leonidas and the battle of Thermopylæ in the famous essay on Grote's History of Greece. He tells how he himself some years before had spent three days at Thermopylæ, and confesses that, "prosaic as he is," it was not without emotion that he climbed the little height where the last of the Three Hundred fell. But he did not allow himself to be overcome by his emotion. He examined the Persian arrow-heads, and found that they were of flint—these Asiatics, therefore, were but poor savages in comparison with the Europeans; if we have cause to marvel at anything, it is that they made their way through the Pass at all. He proceeds to criticise Leonidas severely for having occupied this impregnable position himself, leaving the other pass, which was much more difficult to defend, in charge of a coward. The death of Leonidas was undoubtedly the death of a hero; but let us picture to ourselves, if we can, his return to Sparta after having surrendered the key of Hellas to the Barbarians. Mérimée comes to the conclusion that Herodotus has written history as a poet, and moreover as a Greek poet, whose chief aim it is to throw the beautiful into strong relief; and he ends with the question: Can it be said that in this case the fiction is of more value than the truth? Ninety-nine men out of a hundred would unhesitatingly answer: Yes. Mérimée does not. He is writing in 1849, and with recent historical tragedies in his mind he answers: "Possibly. But it was by misrepresenting Thermopylæ, misrepresenting the ease with which three hundred free men could resist three million slaves, that the orators of Italy persuaded the Piedmontese to pit themselves alone against the Austrians." Compare with this sceptic spirit of Mérimée's the enthusiastic and simple faith with which Beyle retails the untrustworthy legend of Beatrice Cenci.
The period of 1830 was a time when the most eminent authors of France were very much on their guard against any excess in the matter of patriotism. The newly aroused appreciation of the merits of foreign literatures led, by a natural reaction, to contempt for their own and its classic authors, and even at times for the French spirit generally. The first, tolerably foolish, attack made by the Romantic School on Racine is a well-known episode. French classic literature was declared to be a literature only suitable for the schoolroom. Victor Hugo, who was by no means generally lacking in national pride, exclaimed, in the preface to Les Orientales: "Other nations say, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare. We say, Boileau." Hugo's youth had been spent in Spain, and he treated Spanish themes in his first dramas (Inez de Castro, Hernani), retaining the Spanish division of the play into days instead of acts. Spain and Italy were the Promised Land of the budding Romanticists. Alfred de Musset wrote Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie; Théophile Gautier never wearied of showering maledictions on the cold climate and colourless customs of France, called Spain his true fatherland, &c., &c.
Beyle and Mérimée both exemplify in a very marked degree this protest against national vanity. In Beyle's mouth the word "French" was almost a term of contumely; his satirical appellation for Frenchmen was les vainvifs; his books teem with such ejaculations as: "Could anything be more comical than to ascribe depth of character to a Parisian?" He calls his country, "le plus vilain pays du monde, que les nigauds appellent la belle France." We have seen that he eventually renounced his nationality. Mérimée, who was almost as much in love with Spanish as Beyle with Italian customs, had the essentially Romantic leaning to the foreign, the exotic; and he too, like his older friend, considered one of the leading traits of French national character to be that constant attention to the opinion of others (le qu'en dira-t-on) which destroys all originality, makes a joyless thing of life, and forms the best foundation for the hypocrisies of society. His general opinion of his countrymen was a tolerably low one, and he took no pains to conceal the fact from them. But, unlike Beyle, he in the end proclaimed his allegiance to the old gospel, the old creed, of patriotism. The step was not an easy one for a man who hated patriotic phrase-mongering like the plague; it took nothing less than the downfall of France to draw any expression of love for his country from his lips. But in a letter dated September 13, 1870, he writes: "All my life long I have endeavoured to keep free from prejudices, and to be a cosmopolitan rather than a Frenchman; but all these philosophic draperies are of no avail. I bleed to-day from these stupid Frenchmen's wounds, I weep for their humiliations, and, ungrateful and foolish as they are, I love them in spite of everything."