The Chronique de Charles IX.
Mérimée's largest and most ambitious attempt at pure prose fiction—the Chronique de Charles IX—has been rather variously judged. That the present writer once translated the whole of it may, from different points of view, be regarded as a qualification and a disqualification for judging it afresh. For a mere amateur (and there are unfortunately[233] only too many amateur translators) it might be one or the other, according as the executant had been pleased or bored by his occupation. But to a person used to the manner, something of an expert in literary criticism, and brought by the writing of many books to an even keel between engouement and disgust, it certainly should not be a disqualification. I do not think that the Chronique, as a romance of the Dumas kind, though written long before Dumas so fortunately deserted the drama for the kind itself, is entirely a success. It has excellent characters, if not in the actual hero, in his two Dalilahs—the camp-follower girl, who is a sort of earlier Carmen, and the great lady—and in his fear-neither-God-nor-Devil brother; good scenes in the massacre and in other passages also. But as a whole—as a modernised roman d'adventures—it does not exactly run: the reader does not devour the story as he should. He may be—I am—delighted with the way in which the teller tells; but the things which he tells are of much less interest. One cannot exactly say with that acute critic (if rather uncritical acceptor of the accomplished facts of life and death and matrimony), Queen Gertrude of Denmark, "More matter with less art," for there is plenty of matter as well as amply sufficient and yet not over-lavish art. But one is not made to take sufficient interest in the particular matter supplied.
The semi-dramatic stories. La Jacquerie.
The other considerable and early attempt in historical romance, La Jacquerie, is not in pure novel form, but it may fitly introduce some notice of its actual method, in which Mérimée frequently, Gautier more than once, and a third eminent man of letters to be noticed presently most of all, distinguished themselves. This was what, in Old French, would have been called the story par personnages—the manner in which the whole matter is conveyed, not by récit, not by the usual form of mixed narrative and conversation, but by dramatic or semi-dramatic dialogue only, with action and stage direction, but no connecting language of the author to the reader. The early French mysteries and miracles—still more the farces—were not altogether unlike this; we saw that some of the curious intermediate work of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries took it, and that both of Crébillon's most felicitous, if not most edifying exercises are in dialogue form. The admiration of the French Romantics for the "accidented" and "matterful" English, Spanish, and German drama naturally encouraged experiment in this kind. Gautier has not very much of it, though there is some in Les Jeune-France, and his charming ballets might be counted in. But Mérimée was particularly addicted thereto. La Jacquerie is injured to some tastes by excessive indulgence in the grime and horror which the subject no doubt invited. We do not all rejoice in the notion of a Good Friday service, "extra-illustrated" by a real crucifixion alive of a generous Jacques who has surrendered himself; or in violence offered (it is true, with the object of securing marriage) to a French heiress by an English captain of Free Companions. Even some of those who may not dislike these touches of haut goût, may, from the coolest point of view of strict criticism, say that the composition is too décousu, and that, as in the Chronique, there is little actual interest of story. But the phantasmagoria of gloom and blood and fire is powerfully presented. The earlier Théâtre de Clara Gazul,[234] one of the boldest and most successful of all literary mystifications, belongs more or less to the same class, which Mérimée never entirely deserted.
Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement, etc.
The best of all these is, to my thinking, undoubtedly the Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement. It is also, I believe, the only one that ever was tried on the actual stage—it is said without success—though surely this cannot have been the form that it took in La Périchole, not the least amusing of those levities of Offenbach's which did so disgust the Pharisees of academic music and so arride the guileless public. Le Carrosse itself is a charming thing—very, very merry and by no means unwise—without a drop of bad blood in it, and, if no better than, very nearly as good as it should be from the moral point of view. La Famille Carvajal has the same fault of gruesomeness as La Jacquerie, with less variety, and Une Femme est un Diable, a fresh handling of something like the theme of Le Diable Amoureux and The Monk, if better than Lewis, is not so good as Cazotte. But L'Occasion is almost great, and I think Le Ciel et l'Enfer absolutely deserves that too much lavished ticket. Indeed Doña Urraca in this, like La Périchole in Le Carrosse, seems to me to put Mérimée among the greatest masters of feminine character in the nineteenth century, and far above some others who have been held to have reached that perilous position.
At the same time, this hybrid form between nouvelle and drame has some illegitimate advantages. You can, some one has said, "insinuate character," whereas in a regular story you have to delineate it; and though in some modern instances critics have seemed disposed to put a higher price on the insinuation than on the delineation, not merely in this particular form, I cannot quite agree with them. All the same, Mérimée's accomplishments in this mixed kind are a great addition to his achievements in the story proper, and, as has been confessed before, I should be slow to deny him the place of the greatest "little master" in fiction all round, though I may like some little masterpieces of others better than any of his.
Musset: charm of his dramatised stories; his pure narration unsuccessful.
By an interesting but not at all inexplicable contrast the only writer of prose fiction (except those to whom separate chapters have been allotted and one other who follows him here) to be in any way classed with Mérimée and Gautier as a man of letters generally—Alfred de Musset—displays the contrast of values in his work of narrative and dramatic form in exactly the opposite way to (at least) Mérimée's. Musset's Proverbes, though, I believe, not quite successful at first, have ever since been the delight of all but vulgar stage-goers: they have, from the very first, been the delight of all but vulgar readers for their pure story interest. Even some poems, not given as intended dramas at all, possess the most admirable narrative quality and story-turn.