In his estimate of Beyle's character, Mérimée (in this agreeing with Sainte-Beuve) decides that one of its most marked traits was his fear of being duped. "Thence arose," he writes, "that artificial hardness, that overdone analysis of the low motives of all generous actions, and that resistance to the first impulses of the heart, all of which, in my opinion, was more assumed than real. The aversion and contempt with which sentimentality inspired him often led him into the contrary exaggeration, to the great scandal of those who, not knowing him intimately, took all that he said of himself literally." This fear of being duped, with all its consequences as here described, was quite as characteristic of Mérimée himself as of Beyle; only that Mérimée, being of a more refined nature, had to do more violence to himself in the process of acquiring that cynical tone which in the end became as natural to him in intercourse with men as was insinuating gallantry in intercourse with women. He too, as a young man, enjoyed being considered a monster of immorality; and it was only when some comic incident, such as that of the country lady's refusing to travel alone with him in the diligence,[2] showed him what his reputation really was, that he felt a few days' remorse for his folly. Horror of hypocrisy actually made Mérimée a hypocrite, inducing him to feign vice and hard-heartedness; and his fear of being deceived not only led him to deceive others, but to cheat himself out of many pure and simple pleasures. It is not only on the stage, as Gorgias says, that the dupe is often wiser than the man who is never duped. He who does not live in constant fear of treachery has more courage, is more productive, realises more of the possibilities which lie latent in his soul.
In Mérimée's case the constant fear of exposing himself had two bad consequences which it had not in Beyle's. In the first place, it produced in him in course of time a kind of official stiffness. As a member of the Academy and of the Senate, and as the trusted favourite of the Imperial family, he had to appear in public and make speeches on occasions when he could not but inwardly laugh at the figure he cut and at his own words. Beyle never placed himself in a position which obliged him to speak with respect of things he scorned, or to pay compliments to blockheads. It was a sincere feeling which he expressed in the words: "When I see a man strutting about a drawing-room with any number of orders on his coat, I involuntarily think of all the meannesses and the contemptible, nay, often treacherous actions which he must have committed to have amassed so many proofs of them."
In the second place, the fear in question made Mérimée so severely critical of himself as an author that he became unproductive. Beyle's motto was: "No day without its line." Mérimée never wrote much, and at last stopped altogether. His demands of himself in the matter of plasticity and technical perfection were so excessive that he preferred withdrawing from the contest with his own ideal to risking defeat. It seemed to him that it was better to rest contented with what he had done than to stake his reputation as an artist on any new work. And it made it the easier for him to refrain, that he was by nature of a reserved, retiring disposition, and not impelled by any uncontrollable impulse to constant production.
It was in vain that Beyle reproached him for "laziness." Amongst the causes of that laziness there was one which Beyle did not understand, and which constituted the main difference between the two men. Beyle was a psychologist and a poet, but not an artist; Mérimée was an artist to his finger-tips. It is as the artist and as the artist alone that he is great; and his superiority to Beyle lies in his artistic skill. It was he who gave imperishable artistic form to that wealth of intellectual material which Beyle brought to light. And the laziness was anything but absolute idleness. It found expression in essays, descriptions of historical monuments, translations from the Russian, and modest but careful historical research and historical writings. Mérimée was a philologist and an archaeologist, a scholar and a scientist. His art may be likened to an oasis lying in the midst of his arid technical studies; it borders on science on every side, and the passage from it to historical writing is an easy one; for there comes a moment when the love of fact and the passion for accuracy and precision can no longer find satisfaction in merely imaginary portraiture. In this particular the history of Mérimée's personal career as an author resembles the history of the Romantic School; he reflects a great movement on a small scale. For in France as well as in Germany, scientific criticism and historical research followed in the path which the literary criticism of the Romanticists had opened up for imaginative literature. When the poets had done with the foreign and medieval material, the scientists began to deal with it in the spirit which poetry had evoked.
As Mérimée's fiction was always in a manner the offspring of his researches, as many of his stories, such as Carmen, La Vénus d'Ille, and Lokis, are even sportively set in a framework of archæological or philological investigation, it was natural enough that science should gradually make its way from the outside to the heart of his work. In his position as a scientific man lies the last great difference between him and Beyle. Mérimée is not a scientist of the first rank; he has the second-class qualities of thoroughness and trustworthiness, but lacks the spark of inspiration which he possesses as an author. He has, however, the distinctive sign of the true man of science; he never speaks of what he does not understand; he never indulges in random conjectures or ingenious paradoxes; he progresses step by step. At times he may be dry and wooden, but he never makes a mistake.
If Mérimée is the sober, uninspired man of science, Beyle is the inspired scientific dilettante, with all the signs of genius, but also all the signs of dilettantism. His books teem with daring assertions, indemonstrable conjectures, theories regarding nations with whose languages he was unfamiliar, amateurish paradoxes like that which places Werner's Luther in the forefront of German drama. His essays are as entertaining and suggestive as Mérimée's are tiresome and dry; but Mérimée's conclusions are founded upon rock, Beyle's too often built upon sand.
Thus, both as the scientist and the author, Mérimée marks an advance upon Beyle. He is a man of a narrower and less fertile mind; but the contents of his mind are infinitely better ordered, and he is master of a highly perfected artistic style.
[1] "Souvent vous ne me semblez pas assez délicatement tender; or il faut cela dans un roman pour me toucher."
[2] Lettres à une inconnue, i. 72.