This is the simplicity and naturalness, not of Mérimée, but of José Maria himself; and the story that follows shows absolutely no other author than the condemned bandit. There is no consciousness in reading it of the perfection that mars the very perfection of Colomba, nor suspicion of premeditated pathos as in the supremely pathetic Arsène Guillot. Form and pathos are no more thought of by the author than by José Maria himself. And, therefore, as Taine says, “dissertations on primitive and savage instinct, learned essays like Schopenhauer’s on love and death, are not worth its hundred pages.”
As if he himself recognised the finality of his art in this identity of it with nature, Mérimée laid aside his pen after writing it, and wrote no more stories for twenty years; in truth, wrote no more, for as his biographer Filon expresses it, when he took up his pen again, he found it irremediably rusted.
The Taking of the Redoubt resembles Carmen in this, that the author so completely effaces his personality from the teller of the story, that one finds it easier to suppose than not that the incident was related to him, as he says in the prefatory note, by the officer to whom it happened, and that he merely wrote it down from memory. The concession, however, concedes nothing, as long as the word “memory” is retained in the explanation. For what it stands for here is an imagination that could make the carelessly dropped incident its own, and turn upon it a marvellous sight (lens-eye and light, all in one), until what we read was as clear to Mérimée as it is to us now. Then he wrote it down in the pages that are without a match in the thousands of descriptions of battles that have been written. As one does not go to another for words to describe what one sees oneself, so we need no interpreter of our sensations when we read The Taking of the Redoubt. It is for us alone, as Mérimée seems to tell us, to read it or not to read it, to see what took place or not see it.
In the list of Mérimée’s stories Mateo Falcone stands immediately before The Taking of the Redoubt. Both were published in the same year, in 1829, which was the twenty-sixth of the author’s age. It is so seldom mentioned now in English without Walter Pater’s judgment upon it, “perhaps the cruellest story in the world,” that that might well be added to the name as a sub-title. It would be so, perhaps, if Mérimée had not related it. He himself, despite the cold impassivity that he had schooled himself into maintaining as an author,—he himself shows here and there a trace of the emotion that he arouses in us. The temptation, fall, and punishment of the little child touch indeed the most sensitive nerve in the human heart; the one that can give the keenest pain; that cuts through the heart like a knife. The story would be well-nigh unbearable in another hand than Mérimée’s, or had he told it in a clean, clear thrust of reality, as in The Taking of the Redoubt. But he retards the action in the beginning with details and diverts the attention with local colour; not, however, be it remarked, such local colour as he saw with his own eyes, in Spain, but the kind that he learned how to make so easily in the days of Clara Gazul and La Guzla, that he lost, as he confesses, all respect for it. Mateo, Gianetto, Gamba, and Giuseppa belong also to the domain of the not seen, not known. But the child, the unfortunate Fortunato, stands out against the artificial background of place, time, and circumstance, with a vividness of reality that, as in The Taking of the Redoubt, would make the reality seem vague and indistinct beside it. A few pages of this story might be cited as the highest point that Mérimée attained as an artist.
He himself considered The Venus of Ille the best story he ever wrote. The preference is characteristic of him. It contains all the elements of the mysterious and horrible for which he had an inherent passion; and he relates it as he loved to relate the extraordinary, in the tone of skeptical raillery that is the surest as well as the subtlest way of sowing in a reader distrust in the integrity of his common sense. This tone, also, was an inherent quality of Mérimée’s; it represented the attitude of his mind towards the illusions of his imagination, which he explains in one of his Lettres Inédites: “You cannot imagine, madame, the difference there is between the things which it pleases me to suppose and those which I admit to be true. I please myself in imagining goblins and fairies. I make my own hair stand on end by relating ghost stories to myself. But, notwithstanding the physical effect I experience, I am not prevented from not believing in ghosts; on this point my incredulity is so great that even if I were to see a ghost, I would not believe in it any the more.”
The old mediæval legend was exhumed by Mérimée, as he unearthed the bronze statue of the maleficent Venus, in the little village under the shadow of the Canigou,—in all its beauty and terror, in all its ferocity, one might say, of pagan Christian. He altered nothing of it, and added only what as a visiting archæologist, his rôle in the story, he could not omit: the details of his rather curious experience; the impression made upon him by the statue, as a woman of seductive wickedness and cruel, imperious passions, a type of woman that, as his biographer comments, “none in the Paris of his day (the home of such divinities) understood so well as he.”
The ascent to the dramatic catastrophe of the story is so natural, easy, and pleasant (the preparations for a wedding and its celebration are of all pleasant things in the world what a reader loves most to dally with); the means employed by the writer are so natural—for there is not the faintest suggestion of or appeal to the morbid—that we arrive at the crisis well prepared to lose none of its weird and terrible intensity, and the thrill and the shudder that arise in us then are as real as Mérimée’s own physical tribute to the power of his imagination.
Such stories have an intrinsic value that renders them independent of an author’s name and reputation, even of his time and country. They are as easily detached from him, and with as little loss to themselves, as precious stones are from the name and place of the mine that once held them. This supreme distinction of a story is, nevertheless, what commends it to the assiduous seekers after the secret of literary perfection; the philosopher’s stone of the world of letters. Mérimée, on the whole, has stood the biographical and critical tests applied to him well, both as man and artist, and, although the secret of his art in truth went to the grave with him, this much at least has been found out, that he was worthy to be the author of his stories.
