[XXIII]
MÉRIMÉE
Mérimée's earliest attitude as the dramatist and novelist is an attitude of literary aggressiveness. Although by nature an observer, he does not, like Balzac, set himself the task of representing, in all its breadth, the world he sees around him; neither is it his ambition that posterity shall study in his works the customs and ideas of his period; he desires to challenge a prevailing taste; and with the object of irritating and rousing his fellow-countrymen, he generally chooses themes which have as little connection as possible with modern civilised society.
It was natural that his hostility should first vent itself upon literary sentimentality. The shy, proud youth was penetrated with the idea that it is the duty of the author to communicate his ideas to the public, but that his dignity as a man requires him to keep his feelings to himself. But in this opinion he received no support from the French literary men of the day. Ever since Rousseau's novels, not to mention his Confessions, had prepared the way for orgies of half-real, half-fictitious emotion and a communicativeness which kept back nothing, a series of authors, from Chateaubriand to Lamartine and Sainte-Beuve, had dissected themselves for the entertainment of the public, initiated their readers into the secrets of their hearts, in short, unreservedly satisfied the low curiosity of the vulgar herd. And with what aim? To win its sympathy. Mérimée was far too proud to desire it. "For Heaven's sake no confessions!" he says to himself the first time he puts pen to paper. And to avoid all risk of becoming sentimental or morbid, he conceals himself completely behind the characters he describes, allows them and their destinies free play, and never expresses his opinion of their conduct. Beyle, who had quite as strong an aversion for sentimentality, was unable to refrain from putting in his word; Mérimée makes himself invisible, inaudible, untraceable. But his temperament makes it impossible for him to do this in any other way than by confining himself to the representation of intense, determined characters, who follow their impulses without much deliberation or talk, are carried away by their passions, and suddenly, unexpectedly, proceed to action. "To me," says Mérimée's South American sea-captain in La Famille Carvajal, "all these tragedy heroes are phlegmatic, passionless philosophers. If one of them kills his rival in a duel or any other manner, remorse overpowers him immediately and makes him as soft as a woollen mitten. I have seen twenty-seven years' service, I have killed forty-one Spaniards, and I don't know what such a feeling is.... Characters, emotions, actions—everything seems unnatural to us when we read these plays aloud in the mess-room. They are all princes, who vow that they are madly in love, and dare not so much as touch the tips of their mistresses' fingers, but keep these ladies a boat's hook length off. We sailors go to work more boldly in such matters."
Mérimée does not write for the "bourgeois," into whose eyes the slightest emotion brings tears; he addresses himself to people of stronger nerves, who require more violent shocks to move them. Therefore away with the regulation lengthy introductions, and all the preparations and omens of tragedy! Human beings with blood in their veins do not deliberate so long; and nervous weakness is not an interesting spectacle to any but the neurotic. If a woman loves, what can be more natural than that she should say so, and, regardless of every other consideration, make the intervals between the first avowal, the first kiss, and the first embrace as short as possible? If a man hates with a manly hatred, what more natural than that he should put an end to his torment and his enemy's life with a stab or a shot? It is, undoubtedly, natural, when the race which the author chooses to depict is not an effete, but a vigorous one; and this is the explanation of Mérimée's tendency to give to every feeling the character of a fierce passion, to dwell upon what is cruel and hard, to make death—not tragedy death, but real death, in all its cold, hard pitilessness—the dénouement of every tale which he sends out from his artist's workshop. It explains what may be summed up in a word as l'atroce in his writings.
He is familiar with death. If the old designations were applicable in his case, we should call him a great tragic author; but Mérimée does not believe in what dogmatic upholders of Aristotelian principles call tragic expiation. Concerning the representation of death in the works of other authors he seems to say with Schiller:
"Aber der Tod, Ihr Herrn, ist so ästhetisch doch nicht."
Deepest down in his soul lies the love of strength. But he does not, like Balzac, love strength in the shape of strong desire, strong passions; he loves it in the form of original force of character and of stirring, decisive event; and therefore he naturally begins by feeling and reproducing the poetry of decisive event, long before he is mature enough to represent that of simple, strong character. Of all events, death is the most decisive; and hence it is that he falls in love with death—not, be it observed, with death as it is conceived of by spiritualists and believers, not with death as a purifying passage to another existence, but as a violent, sudden, bloody termination. Like Sièyes, he is for la mort sans phrase.
The idea not unnaturally suggests itself that a certain want of feeling, a certain tendency to cruelty, in Mérimée the man, probably lay at the root of this literary hard-heartedness. It can, however, almost be proved from direct assertions of his own, that the most extravagant manifestations of the quality were originally called forth by his strong aversion to sentimentality in literature. In his essay on the friend of his youth, Victor Jacquemont, we come upon the following passage: "I have never known a more truly feeling heart than Jacquemon's. His was a loving, tender nature; but he took as much pains to conceal his sensibility as others do to dissimulate their evil inclinations. In our youth we had been repelled by the false sentiment of Rousseau and his imitators, and the result in our case was the usual one—an exaggerated reaction. We wished to be strong, and therefore we jeered at sentimentality."