[XXIV]
MÉRIMÉE
At the time when Mérimée made his literary début in the disguise of a Spaniard, the Classic drama had reached the stage when the personages of a play had all, like the pieces on a chessboard, their prescribed duties and moves. There were the stereotyped king, tyrant, princess, conspirators, &c. It mattered not whether the queen who had killed her husband was called Semiramis, Clytemnestra, Johanna of Naples, or Mary Stuart, whether the lawgiver's name was Minos or Peter the Great or Cromwell—their words and actions, thoughts and feelings, were always the same. A young poet of the Classic School, who had treated a subject from Spanish history in a manner which was objected to by the censor, got out of the difficulty by transferring the action of his play with a stroke of the pen from Barcelona to Babylon, and from the sixteenth century to the days before the Flood. "Babylone" had the same number of syllables and rhymed with the same words as "Barcelone," and scarcely any other alteration was necessary.[1] The Spain which Mérimée, in the guise of Clara Gazul, shows to his readers, is not the country in which this Barcelona was situated. Nor does he rest content with masquerading as a Spanish lady. The genuine Romanticist, he regards it as the main task of the author to represent the manners and morals of different ages and countries without a touch of varnish or whitewash, bringing out distinctly and strongly what in those days was called "local colour." He therefore transforms himself into an inhabitant of the most dissimilar countries, in all different stages of civilisation. He is in imagination a Moor, a negro, a South American, an Illyrian, a gipsy, a Cossack. But all things remote and foreign do not possess an equal degree of attraction for him. Indeed he is actually repelled by culture and polish. As Théophile Gautier preferred to visit each country at the season of year when its climate is most characteristic—Africa in summer, Russia in winter—so Mérimée preferred imaginary excursions to the regions whose inhabitants have the least regard for human life, the strongest passions, the wildest and most determined characters, and the most violent original prejudices. He does not confine himself to the present. He is keenly interested in the barbarities of the peasant wars of the Middle Ages; he conjures up the age of Charles IX., and writes a masterly account of the massacre of St. Bartholomew. He is as familiar with fourteenth-century Spain and seventeenth-century Russia as with ancient France and ancient Rome. As the archaeologist and historian he has examined inscriptions and monuments, buildings, ornaments, and weapons, and has studied documents and manuscripts in many languages of which the ordinary literary man knows nothing. This gives his descriptions a truthfulness which was uncommon in his day.
It is his passion for strength in its primitive nakedness which endows him with the historical sense. Hence the heroes of his historical works are always the wildest and most daring characters—Sulla, Catilina, Don Pedro the Cruel of Castile, the first pseudo-Demetrius, &c., &c. His conscientious accuracy and his distrust of the part played by imagination in science rob his historical works proper of life (he is most successful in Don Pedro I. and Épisode de l'Histoire de la Russie); but he at once imparts life to any period which he treats as the imaginative artist. After Vitet had shown, in his masterly Scènes historiques, how real history can be presented in a free dramatic rendering, Mérimée gave France, in La Jaquerie, the picture of a much earlier and more savage age than that which his forerunner and teacher had subjected to poetic treatment. He aptly indicates the spirit of his work in the ironically applied speech of Molière's Mascarille, which he affixes to it as motto: "C'est mon talent particulier, et je travaille à mettre en madrigaux toute l'histoire romaine." He has entered with wonderful understanding into the customs and follies, views and prejudices, which constituted the spirit of that far-off age. Let us take one character as an instance—Isabella, daughter of the Baron d'Apremont, a typical high-minded, amiable young girl of the feudal period. Her heart is pure, her morals are of the strictest, she is merciful to the suffering and the vanquished. To the brave and faithful man-at-arms who goes through fire and water for her sake she is very gracious; she begs her father to give her this serf, and in gratitude to him for having saved her life she makes him her equerry; she even embroiders him a purse. But he dares to love her; and then everything is at an end. She overwhelms him with contemptuous reproaches, repulses him with scorn, and considers herself degraded by his having dared to lift up his eyes to her. Compare this lady with one of Ingemann's noble maidens; imagine how the latter, scorning all the prejudices of her day, would have valued the noble heart which beat under the simple jerkin; and note the difference between an idealistic and a bold, historically accurate representation of a coarse and vigorous age. One more example—the scene which takes place at night in front of a lonely hut in the forest, to which the brutal English freebooter-chief, Siward, has conveyed Isabella, whom he has carried off after the assault in which her father has been killed. The whole is nothing but the conversation of two troopers who are holding the saddled horses at the door, and pass the time in talking of the act of violence which is being committed within. But the impression produced is so vivid that it stamps on our minds a picture of the whole age. It is, however, a fault in this work, that the author, in his aversion for sentimentality, has crowded together so many cruel and horrible actions, that in the general savagery the differences which undoubtedly existed then, as now, between society as a whole and single individuals, are overlooked.
The separate personages in his Chronique du Règne de Charles IX. stand out much more clearly from the background. They have strongly marked characteristics without on that account being modern (except perhaps George Mergy); indeed Mérimée has bestowed such attention on details that each chapter in its graphic coherence forms a little whole, and the work in its entirety produces the effect of a mosaic design of character portraits and pictures of society. In the last of his semi-historical works, Les Débuts d'un Aventurier, we observe that what attracts him in the false Demetrius is the primitive cunning, the rough, vigorous Cossack character, and not those mental conflicts, ensuing on the fraud, which fascinated Schiller. Mérimée may be said to leave off where Schiller begins. The manners and customs of a definite group of human beings at a definite period are of far more interest to him than what these human beings have in common with universal humanity; hence here as elsewhere in his historical fiction, it is not the intellectual or emotional side of life which he shows us, but its character side—the results of strong, concentrated will-power. When he writes of modern times, he describes gipsy or brigand life, as in Carmen, a vendetta, as in Colomba, a horrible murder on the wedding-night, as in La Vénus d'Ille and Lokis. Or if he lays his plot within the pale of modern society proper, he either describes peculiarities of those classes which labour under social disadvantages—the bold language and irregular ideas of young ballet-dancers and actresses, the erotic temptations of Catholic priests; or contents himself with anything in the life of the upper classes that means character—a passionate love-affair terminated by a duel, a case of adultery which leads to the suicide of one of the parties concerned, any thoroughly scandalous story which it delights him to cast in the teeth of the effete, hypocritical society of the day. He feels himself in his element amidst merciless strokes of fate, terrible vicissitudes, violent passions which, when they are fortunate, override the conventions of society, and when unfortunate, are called crimes. Hence it was that modern Russian literature was so sympathetic to him. The works of Pushkin which he translated, La dame de Pique and Les Bohémiens, have themes closely akin to those which he treated himself.
Two characteristic feelings lie at the root of Mérimée's disinclination to apprehend and treat the trenchant catastrophes in human life as tragic catastrophes; the one is a kind of fear that the trenchancy which he loves will lose its edge by the introduction of a reconciling element; the other is his disbelief in a greater, comprehensive whole, of which the single incident forms a part. When he produces, as he at times does, a genuinely tragic effect, it happens almost against his will, and is the result of a more mature and profound understanding of the human soul, and of a sympathy, growing with his growing experience of life, for cases in which there is a necessary connection between character and destiny. In his romance of the days of Charles IX., when he makes the one brother fall by the hand of the other, he, the scorner of the symbolic, as a matter of fact represents all the folly and horror of the religious and civil war in one melodramatically tragic, symbolical picture. And when, in the little tale La Partie de Trictrac, the unfortunate officer who has cheated on one solitary occasion becomes so miserable in the consciousness of his shame that he is driven to commit suicide, the story imperceptibly assumes the character of a tragedy of honour.
In another little work of art, La double Méprise, Mérimée endeavours to represent the web of chance events, of conflicting and wrongly comprehended instincts, which make life so meaningless, and even what is saddest as foolish as it is sad and hideous; but as he unfolds the inner history of the painful incident, and as we by degrees learn that that which seemed foolish was inevitable, it ceases to be foolish. The gist of the story is that a young married woman, Julie de Chaverny, whose dissatisfaction with her married life is developing into actual unhappiness, is led by a chain of ideas and emotions, slight in themselves, but welded together like links of iron, to give herself to a man whom she in reality does not love, and then to take her own life. Mérimée's art displays itself in this case in the calm assurance with which he takes his reader's hand and leads him through the labyrinth of all these ideas and emotions to a climax which is as inevitable as it is illogical. Two inimitable passages are the conversation in which Darcy arouses Julie's enthusiastic admiration by the modesty and humour with which he unwillingly recounts his own gallant deeds, and the conversation in the carriage, during which every utterance of Julie's, her resistance even more than her confessions, brings her nearer to her fall. The situation is summed up in the following classic sentence, prepared for by everything that has gone before: "The unfortunate woman believed at this moment in all sincerity that she had always loved Darcy; that she had felt the same ardent attachment to him during all the six years of his absence as she did at that instant." Mérimée understood what a power, what a tragic motive force in human life, inevitable illusion or self-deception is. It is the source to which not only half of human happiness, but a considerable proportion of human misery may be traced.
But Mérimée approaches nearer than this to tragedy proper, where the fateful element sinks deep into the character, mingling with it as a poison mingles with the blood. Think of Carmen. From the day of José's first meeting with Carmen, the gipsy girl, the course of his life is changed; and he, the honest, good-hearted man, becomes of inevitable necessity, for her sake, a robber and a murderer. Nay, the author, whose aim as a young Romanticist was to hold as far aloof as possible from the poets who wrote tragedy in the ancient Greek style, approaches, in Colomba, with his modern Corsican heroine, nearer to Greek tragedy than any of his fellow-countrymen who hymned the fate of one or other of "Agamemnon's imperishable race." Not without reason has Colomba been compared to Elektra. Like Elektra, she broods, to the exclusion of every other thought, on the unavenged death of her father; like Elektra, she incites her brother to take a bloody revenge; and she is even less of the stereotyped tragedy heroine than Sophocles' young girl, for, clad though she is in the steel panoply of appalling prejudices, she bears herself simply and lovably. She is at once bloodthirsty and childlike, hard-hearted and girlish; a fierce grace is her characteristic trait. It is easy for us now to see how much more nearly akin this fresh, vigorous daughter of a little southern island race is to the old Greek female characters than are all those princesses who walked the French stage in buskins, and borrowed the names of Elektra, Antigone, or Iphigenia. But she is perhaps still more nearly related to the heathen daughters of a far-away northern isle, the women of the Icelandic sagas, who brood with such passionate obstinacy over their family feuds, and force the unwilling men to take blood for blood.
In this same Colomba, which is Mérimée's most famous work, Romantic "local colouring" celebrates its most signal triumph. The story is pervaded by the genuine aroma of Bonaparte's native isle, and breathes the genuine Corsican spirit. As a proof of the fidelity with which Corsican customs are reproduced, as well as of the popularity of the book, it may be mentioned that when Mérimée was waiting in court to hear the verdict in the Libri case, a Corsican ex-bandit came forward from among the audience and quietly offered, in case of the verdict being given against him, to revenge him by assassinating the president of the court. Better evidence of the correctness of Mérimée's colouring could hardly be required. But Mérimée would not have been Mérimée if he had not (at the very time when he was publishing Colomba) saved his reputation as the enemy of all theories by making merry over this same much-talked-of "local colouring." In the preface, written in 1840, to the second edition of La Guzla, his collection of fictitious Illyrian popular songs and ballads, he tells that, "in the year of grace 1827," he was a Romanticist with an enthusiasm for local colour, nay, the firm belief that without it there was no salvation. By local colouring he and his comrades meant what in the seventeenth century went by the name of "manners" (mœurs); but they were very proud of their word, and imagined themselves to be the inventors of the thing as well as the word. His devotion to local colouring inspired him with the desire to visit Illyria; want of money was the chief obstacle to his carrying out his wish; the idea occurred to him to write a description of his travels in anticipation and pay for the tour with the profits of his book; but he gave up this bold plan, and instead manufactured, with the assistance of a guide-book and the knowledge "of five or six Slavonic words," a collection of "ballads translated from the Illyrian." Everyone was deceived.[2] A German savant of the name of Gerhardt actually translated Guzla (along with two other volumes of Slavonic poetry) into German, and this, moreover, in the original metre, which he had been able to trace in the French translator's prose. After Mérimée had thus discovered how easily "local colouring" may be obtained, he forgave Racine and the Classicists their lack of it.
We are conscious, under all this witty pleasantry, of the distinguished author's vexation with himself for having borne a banner, belonged to a party, even though it was only in literature and as a youth. And the preface, moreover, does not tell the exact truth; for Mérimée's Illyrian prose ballads, though by no means remarkably good in other respects, are distinctly the product of intelligent and careful study, and accurately reproduce the style of Slavonic popular poetry. But Mérimée could never write of himself without self-depreciation. His prefaces, when he on a rare occasion condescends to enter into direct relations with the public by means of a preface, are distinguished by a nonchalant, apathetic humility, a manner which isolates the man who assumes it more completely than the most exaggerated self-assertion.