PROSPER 11ERIMEE.
AS our readers know, a great stir was made in Paris recently by the appearance of two thick volumes of letters which Prosper Merimee had written to an unknown lady. Who the
unknown lady was, even the publishers could not tell, and many were the guesses at those Paris dinner-tables which Merimee had often brightened by his cynical and brilliant wit. But Merimee himself had filled so high a position in the Academy, and some of his attachments were said to have been so romantic, that the gayest and most gossiping city in the world could speak of nothing else than the mysterious letters for more than the nine days allotted to the scrutiny of mystery or scandal. Yet no one seems to have been able to lift the veil. Just when the curiosity was subsiding, it was again quickened by the report that the letters which the " Unconnue " herself had written to Merimee were about to be printed, and M. Michel Levy, the publisher, felt it needful to deny the report, in the name of the lady herself. Thus the gossip of Paris has taken a new start. We shall make no attempt to solve
a mystery which is infinitely unimportant. The lady had a suffi- cient reason for hiding her name in the fact that she published the letters at all for she has grossly betrayed the sanctities of private friendship. Written with the careless ease of confidence, Merimee's epistles give such glimpses of his own character, and speak so freely of other people, that a man who was a paragon of reserve would have felt outraged if he had known that the loose epistolary talk of thirty years would be told to Paris a couple of seasons after he was dead. Flung off from the point of the pen, the writing could not possess the polish and the exquisite fitness of phrase which a consummate literary artist gave to all his handiwork. It is, in truth, so loose and pointless in comparison with " Colomba " and "Carmen," that Merimee's wsthetic conscience would have smitten him with shame if be had learned that it was to be published ; such shame as common men would feel if they were to be con- victed of burglary or murder,—for to Merimee a bad phrase was more disgraceful than a bad deed.
That fact will explain why the French speak of Marimee with what may seem an unmeasured admiration. Here he has been read by students, and some of his novels are sought at Mudie's ; but that is all. He is less known, for example, than Edmond About, who, as Edmcnd About himself would cheer- fully admit, is incomparably inferior to Merimee in originality of conception, in dramatic power, and even in the art of writing classic French. He is not so well known as Prevost- Paradol, whose considerable ability and whose command of Orleanist sources of admiration have given him a fame which puzzles those who merely read his books, it is leas surprising that in England Medal& should not be so well known as Balzac, Victor Hugo, and George Sand, for even his most fervent devotees would scarcely contend that he was the equal in genius of those great writers. But French critics seem to agree in believing that no writer of his time bids fairer to be read as well as remembered in the future. Such is the verdict which M. Taine gives in his calm and judicial preface to the " Lettres a une Unconnue," and it is based on the fact that Merimee's tastes and powers make him essentially a classic. His writing has no tinge of what is merely local or temporary, and he carefully avoided all those arts which give popularity at the expense of future fame. Merimee knew that he could gain crowds of readers by writing in a loud and lurid style. Again he saw that temptation of dwelling, even in works of art, on the philosophical ideas which may be floating about the air. Thackeray does so, and gives us the philosophy of cynicism. Balzac does so, and we get such a philosophy as Solomon might have penned after seeing the French Revolution, ruining himself on the Stock Exchange, living in Parisian cafes for twenty years, and, on the morrow of a night's debauch, writing under the stimulus of a tremendous head- ache. George Eliot does so, and her fine narrative or pungent dialogue is stopped to let us hear a little diluted Comtism, lifted above dogmatism by the sense of mystery which lives even in those religious natures that choke themselves with proposi- tions. But Mediae saw that nothing is so fleeting as the fashions of philosophy. Ideas which seem grand to us will seem common- place to our children. Speculations which set us reflecting will
appear too absurd to merit a glance fifty or even twenty years hence. Therefore, Merimee, although one of the most richly cul- tivated and keenest minds of the day, rigorously stripped his stores of all "thinking."
All his pains, all his skill, all his art would no doubt have left a poor result, if he had not been a born writer of romance ; but that he was in a high degree. His ima- gination was vivid, and his genius was so essentially dramatic that it almost seemed easier for him to sink his identity than to keep it. His feelings, his thoughts, his knowledge of details, all naturally turn themselves into the form either of dialogue—in which there is not a trace of Merlin& himself—or of direct narrative, in which there is not a trace of the acute and sceptical scholar. It is true that he has written no fiction of the highest order, and that only the blind idolatry of the Academy can give him a place beside novelists of first-rate natural power.
It is also true that he has created no great character, such as those to which even lesser men than Shakespeare have given a more real existence than all save a few historic figures. Merimee could not do that, because be lacked breadth of sympathy, and the power of seeing what is really grand, and the vigour of faculty which can carve out heroic proportions. Hence, in spite of what the Academy may say, he belongs to the second class of novelists. But it would not be easy to name any one of that class who is clearly his superior. Few are equal to him in native power, and he stands first of all in the consummate art with which he uses his materials.
The list of these works is small. We need not specify the historical studies into which he put the results of his great scholar- ship ; for they seem to be written on the principle that the hues of romance should be banished from history, that it should be a chain of facts and arguments, as plainly stated as the re- cords of a merchant's invoice, and in fact, that it should be as dull as an old almanack. Thus Merimee the historian is as different from Merimee the novelist as Hallam is from Hawthorne ; and five hundred years hence a keen critic might ridicule the idea that the two Merimees were the same man. Merin-lee will be remembered on account of his dramas and his novels alone, and the series is not long. First comes a collection of short Spanish dramas, which he wrote when be was a young man, and which he pretended to be translations from the writings of a gifted Spanish lady named Clara Gazul. He coolly gave a short and circumstantial account of her life, every word, of course, being a pure invention. "Clara Gazul " was taken for a reality, how- ever; her genius was gravely discussed by the critics, and a Spaniard, ashamed to confess any ignorance of so gifted a country- woman, declared that, although the French translation of the dramas was good, it was far inferior to the original. Merimee afterwards manufactured an Hungarian bard, songs and all. The deception made dupes of the German as well as the French critics, and set them wondering why so brilliant a writer had never been heard of beyond Hungary. Merimee was so skilled a literary forger that he is said, when a raw youth, to have played a practical joke on Cuvier, by manufacturing for him an original letter of Robes- pierre, which delighted that bunter of autographs as well as truth. The deception was not found out until a rival collector held the wonderful autograph up to the light, and saw that the water-mark on the paper bore a date later than that of Robespierre's death. Merimde's elaborate hoaxes respecting the Spanish dramatist and the IIungarian bard were made with a keener eye for the truth of local details. They are so full of local colour, that they seemed to betray a leaning towards the Romantic school, and in truth they gave it a strong push forward in France. But Merimde's heart and intellect, as we have said, went wholly to the less coloured classic style, and he had caught the devices of the Romantic school so easily, that he held it cheap.
His " opinions " are seen in his series of short stories, and particu- larly in " Carmen " and " Colomba." The one story pictures the gipsies and smugglers of Spain ; the other, the banditti of Corsica and the effects of the blood-feud. Although a polished Parisian, Meritnee was strangely fond of mixing with outcasts, and he found a particularly strong attraction in the Spanish gypsies. He liked to visit their tents, to sit at their fires, to hear their stories, to tell them stories out of his own head; and we may be sure that so wonderful a romancer beat them at their .own trade. This pastime was the easier to him because he was a master, not only of pure Spanish, but of Spanish patois, and because h.; had a considerable acquaintance even with tho dialect which the gipsies use when talking to each other. "Carmen" is the result of the experience which he gained from contact with his wild friends. But it is more than a picture of gipsy life ; it is also a picture of the social effects which spring from the tribal instinct. He wanted to show how immense is its force, both for good and evil ; how overmastering is its influence on the members of a gipsy band ; how it can make a person act at one time like a hero, and at another like a fiend ; and how the abso- lute devotion and self-sacrifice of the martyr may be seen in a Spanish gipsy, who, although a smuggler, a liar, a thief, a murderer, and a hired cut-throat, will yet die for his gang. Merimee does siot indeed state such a proposition, or even hint it, but he brings it out with ghastly vividness by the sheer power of story- telling. Carmen, a gipsy woman, is a paragon of fascinating wicked- mess, and she drags down to ruin a stupid, good-natured fellow, who styles himself Don Jose. For her he spoils his prospects of rising as a soldier, stabs one of his officers in a fit of wild passion, and deserts. For her lie becomes a smuggler and an outlaw. For her he .quarrels with one of his companions, challenges him to fight, and kills him. She hangs on him with the weight of a millstone, and all the time she is a brilliant, laughing, sneering devil. There is aio crime that she is not ready to prompt or commit,—none but one, and that is treachery to her tribe, and to her tribal oaths. Don Jose, on the other hand, is infatuated in his devotion until she gives him cause for jealousy, and then he strikes her. That blow destroys her love for him, and frees her from the duty of following him wherever he goes. But it does not free her from the duty of waiting to be killed, if it should be his sovereign will to take her life, and she obeys that savage code of wifely duty with a savage stoicism. Don Jose commands her to go with him to America, 'in order that they may there begin a new life; but she refuses, with the quiet resolution of one for whom death has no fears. Don Jose then goes to a hermit, and pays the holy man to say a mass for a soul that is about to pass away. Returning to the spot at which he left Carmen, he finds her sitting there awaiting doom. They journey together for a time in silence, until, drawing his sword, Don Jose bids her choose whether she will go with him or die. She calmly says that she chooses to die, and he strikes her dead. Then he gives himself up to the first body of gendarmes that he meets, and while lying in gaol, on the eve of execution, he tells the story to Merimee. It is a terrible picture of a being who seems abso- lutely devoid of moral sense, and yet is capable of as intense devo- tion to an ideal as the loftiest notes of the moral sense can prescribe ; .a mysteriously mutilated being, defying all the precepts of the moral 'law as it is understood in Churches and interpreted in senates, yet capable, when her profound tribal instincts are moved by intense emotion, of calmly waiting for the sternest fate that the gods can bring ; a being guided purely by a mysterious instinct, built up by centuries of transmitted qualities, and brought to a climax in one hour of tremendous agony, which seems to scorch away with 'its heat a whole life of crime, and leave a certain memory of .good. The character is not one of those that are remembered by the mob of readers, yet there are few more powerful conceptions in the literature of our time, and we know of none in which the materials have been employed with more dramatic vividness.
We need say less about " Colomba," because the story is better known in England. It is a Corsican tale of two families, who are the lords of their native village, and who have been at feud with each other for generations. At the end of the war which was cut abort by Waterloo the head of one is a colonel and the other • a lawyer. They quarrel as their fathers and grandfathers have .done before them, and the colonel is shot by an unknown hand. Suspicion falls on the lawyer, and to Colomba, the daughter of the murdered man, the suspicion is a certainty. She is beautiful, gentle, and womanly ; but she is a Corsican, and the first duty of a Corsican is revenge. So she flings her whole heart into the task of vengeance, and she thinks it must be executed by her brother, a soldier in the French Army. But he has learned soft European ways during his campaign in Europe ; he looks with dis- gust on the savagery of the Corsican blood-feud, which exacts life for life, and he turns away with terror from the fierce promptings of his beautiful sister. The Barriccini family are guilty, for all that. The young man turns away the more emphatically, because his clear intellect tells him that Colomba's belief in the guilt of their hereditary foe rests on insufficient evidence. Yet the fates fight against him ; for the quarrel between the two families +deepens, and the two sons of the lawyer lie in wait to shoot him. They fire, and wound him ; he fires, and kills both. Thus blood is washed out by blood. The story is told with wonderful force, simplicity, and vividness. So far, indeed, it is Merimee's masterpiece. But the tale draws a further intensity from its revelation of the savage instinct of revenge striking clean through the mass of civilised ideas of duty, like a piece of primary rock pushing its way into the daylight through soil and foliage. Colombo, represents the old wild instincts of tribal days warring with the instincts which have been generated by the teaching of Christianity and the relations of civilised society.
Most of Merimee's other tales are like " Colomba " and "Carmen," in so far as they picture with consummate artistic simplicity elementary feelings which may take new forms in different ages and different men, but which never die. They reveal nothing of Merimee as a man. But the newly-published letters do, and we know of him from other sources. And Meriindo as a man is hardly less striking a figure than Merimee as an artist. But we must defer the task of tracing its strange and subtle and melancholy lines.
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