[1] Guizot: Shakespeare et son temps, 294.
[2] Goethe alone publicly proclaimed Mérimée to be the author of the Illyrian poems. In one of his letters Mérimée makes some not unreasonably caustic remarks on the explanation given by the great poet of his divination of the personality concealed under the pseudonym Hyacinth Maglanovitch: "It occurred to us that the word Guzla lay concealed in the word Gazul." The fact was that Mérimée, who, like all the other young Romanticists, courted Goethe's favour, had sent him the book along with a letter confiding the secret of its authorship.
[XXV]
MÉRIMÉE
The stern or satirical reserve of Mérimée's style is most noticeable in the works which he wrote in his official capacity, in his brief descriptions of French historical monuments, crowded with technical expressions (Notes sur le Midi de la France, &c.) Not a word about himself, not a single personal impression of travel, not one remark addressed to the uninitiated! What a satisfaction there lay in disappointing all the critics who were lying in wait to detect the dilettante and novel-writer in the inspector of historical monuments!
Reserve is also apparent in the love of mystification displayed by the author of Le Théâtre de Clara Gazul and the Illyrian ballads. We are reminded of Beyle here, though the tendency took a somewhat different form in his case. Mérimée's pseudonymity was of short duration, but whilst it lasted it was impenetrable. Nothing gave him greater pleasure than to send his readers on a wild-goose chase. He neglected nothing that could give an appearance of authenticity to his pseudonyms. He supplied his works not only with biographies, but with portraits of their supposed authors. To complete the jest, he prefixed to the first edition of Clara Gazul an engraved portrait of himself dressed as a Spanish lady, in a low-necked dress, with a lace mantilla thrown over his head.
He who misleads by keeping silence is obliged sooner or later to speak, and the mystifier of the public is in the end compelled to admit it into his confidence and bear its criticism. But there is a more impenetrable kind of armour than either silence or mystification, namely irony, and in it Mérimée, like Beyle, clad himself.
There was a satirical vein in his writing from the first; for his ardent admiration for primitive strength of character naturally involved contempt for phrasemongers. Such a play as Les Mécontents, for instance, contains as bitter a satire as ever was penned upon drawing-room revolutionists. A set of Royalist provincial noblemen, old imbeciles whose one passion is to hear themselves speak, concoct a conspiracy against the First Empire; they determine to distribute inflammatory pamphlets, they arrange secret signals, draw up plans of procedure, and quarrel for the presidency at their meetings, but disperse incontinently at the mere sight of a gendarme. A play of much later date, Les deux Héritages ou Don Quichotte (which probably served Émile Augier as a model for some of his dramas), contains an analogous satire upon social and religious hypocrisy, political humbug, the cold, calculating, unchivalrous spirit of a youthful generation, comparing himself with which Mérimée must have been tempted to call himself an idealist and enthusiast.