Chapter XXIII: Mérimée

Mérimée's earliest attitude as the dramatist and novelist is an attitude of literary aggressiveness. Although by nature an observer, he does not, like Balzac, set himself the task of representing, in all its breadth, the world he sees around him; neither is it his ambition that posterity shall study in his works the customs and ideas of his period; he desires to challenge a prevailing taste; and with the object of irritating and rousing his fellow-countrymen, he generally chooses themes which have as little connection as possible with modern civilised society.

It was natural that his hostility should first vent itself upon literary sentimentality. The shy, proud youth was penetrated with the idea that it is the duty of the author to communicate his ideas to the public, but that his dignity as a man requires him to keep his feelings to himself. But in this opinion he received no support from the French literary men of the day. Ever since Rousseau's novels, not to mention his _Confessions_, had prepared the way for orgies of half-real, half-fictitious emotion and a communicativeness which kept back nothing, a series of authors, from Chateaubriand to Lamartine and Sainte-Beuve, had dissected themselves for the entertainment of the public, initiated their readers into the secrets of their hearts, in short, unreservedly satisfied the low curiosity of the vulgar herd. And with what aim? To win its sympathy. Mérimée was far too proud to desire it. "For Heaven's sake no confessions!" he says to himself the first time he puts pen to paper. And to avoid all risk of becoming sentimental or morbid, he conceals himself completely behind the characters he describes, allows them and their destinies free play, and never expresses his opinion of their conduct. Beyle, who had quite as strong an aversion for sentimentality, was unable to refrain from putting in his word; Mérimée makes himself invisible, inaudible, untraceable. But his temperament makes it impossible for him to do this in any other way than by confining himself to the representation of intense, determined characters, who follow their impulses without much deliberation or talk, are carried away by their passions, and suddenly, unexpectedly, proceed to action. "To me," says Mérimée's South American sea-captain in _La Famille Carvajal_, "all these tragedy heroes are phlegmatic, passionless philosophers. If one of them kills his rival in a duel or any other manner, remorse overpowers him immediately and makes him as soft as a woollen mitten. I have seen twenty-seven years' service, I have killed forty-one Spaniards, and I don't know what such a feeling is.... Characters, emotions, actions--everything seems unnatural to us when we read these plays aloud in the mess-room. They are all princes, who vow that they are madly in love, and dare not so much as touch the tips of their mistresses' fingers, but keep these ladies a boat's hook length off. We sailors go to work more boldly in such matters."

Mérimée does not write for the "bourgeois," into whose eyes the slightest emotion brings tears; he addresses himself to people of stronger nerves, who require more violent shocks to move them. Therefore away with the regulation lengthy introductions, and all the preparations and omens of tragedy! Human beings with blood in their veins do not deliberate so long; and nervous weakness is not an interesting spectacle to any but the neurotic. If a woman loves, what can be more natural than that she should say so, and, regardless of every other consideration, make the intervals between the first avowal, the first kiss, and the first embrace as short as possible? If a man hates with a manly hatred, what more natural than that he should put an end to his torment and his enemy's life with a stab or a shot? It is, undoubtedly, natural, when the race which the author chooses to depict is not an effete, but a vigorous one; and this is the explanation of Mérimée's tendency to give to every feeling the character of a fierce passion, to dwell upon what is cruel and hard, to make death--not tragedy death, but real death, in all its cold, hard pitilessness--the dénouement of every tale which he sends out from his artist's workshop. It explains what may be summed up in a word as _l'atroce_ in his writings.

He is familiar with death. If the old designations were applicable in his case, we should call him a great tragic author; but Mérimée does not believe in what dogmatic upholders of Aristotelian principles call tragic expiation. Concerning the representation of death in the works of other authors he seems to say with Schiller:

"Aber der Tod, Ihr Herrn, ist so ästhetisch doch nicht."

Deepest down in his soul lies the love of strength. But he does not, like Balzac, love strength in the shape of strong desire, strong passions; he loves it in the form of original force of character and of stirring, decisive event; and therefore he naturally begins by feeling and reproducing the poetry of decisive event, long before he is mature enough to represent that of simple, strong character. Of all events, death is the most decisive; and hence it is that he falls in love with death--not, be it observed, with death as it is conceived of by spiritualists and believers, not with death as a purifying passage to another existence, but as a violent, sudden, bloody termination. Like Sièyes, he is for _la mort sans phrase_.

The idea not unnaturally suggests itself that a certain want of feeling, a certain tendency to cruelty, in Mérimée the man, probably lay at the root of this literary hard-heartedness. It can, however, almost be proved from direct assertions of his own, that the most extravagant manifestations of the quality were originally called forth by his strong aversion to sentimentality in literature. In his essay on the friend of his youth, Victor Jacquemont, we come upon the following passage: "I have never known a more truly feeling heart than Jacquemon's. His was a loving, tender nature; but he took as much pains to conceal his sensibility as others do to dissimulate their evil inclinations. In our youth we had been repelled by the false sentiment of Rousseau and his imitators, and the result in our case was the usual one--an exaggerated reaction. We wished to be strong, and therefore we jeered at sentimentality."

It is, nevertheless, self-evident that this hatred of the pathetic, which contrasts so strongly with the extreme sentimentality of most of Mérimée's youthful contemporaries, and this predilection for the violent and the savage, were not purely and simply products of a spirit of contradiction. To gauge the strength of the predilection we have but to glance at the history of Mérimée's development: in another man we should expect to see such a feeling checked in its first outbreaks by the lighter, brighter mood of youth, and tempered in age by waning vigour. But such was not the case with Mérimée. His love of violent solutions is of the same age as his love of pen and ink, and the horrors and terrors with which in the works of his mature manhood his genius produces a tragic effect, become in those of his old age merely gloomy and repulsive.

In the _Théâtre de Clara Gazul_, Mérimée's first book, published when he was only twenty-two, it is amusing to observe the conflict of youth with the inveterate natural bias towards gloom and violence. Read superficially, the book produces the effect of a tolerably serious work. Professing to be written in the Spanish style, it nevertheless differs in many essential particulars from Spanish dramatic literature. The plays of which it is composed have no mutual resemblance; they do not, like the mantle-and-dagger tragedies, monotonously repeat the same types of character and the same situations, produced by jealousy and a touchy sense of honour; nor do they accept the extremely conventional ideas of morality current in the tragedies in question. Mérimée's characters have distinctly defined individualities; and instead of exhibiting superhuman self-control and resignation, they are carried blindly away by their passions and desires. Still less resemblance is there between these plays of Mérimée's and the great series of romantic and fantastic dramas (some of them breathing the spirit of Catholicism, others lacking it) in which Calderon reaches the zenith of his productive power and displays all his wealth of colour. It is only with certain heavy Spanish dramas, such as Calderon's _El alcalde de Zalamea, Las tres justicias in una, El medico de su honra, El pintor de su deshonra_, or Moreto's _El valiente justiciero_, that certain of Mérimée's, for example _Inès Mendo_, harmonise in their general tone. Taken as a whole, instead of being what it pretends to be, namely serious, the book is arrogantly wanton and audacious; genuine French frivolity and satire peep out beneath the costume of the Spanish actress. Personages are introduced upon the stage whom, as we are told in the preface to _Une Femme est un Diable_, our nurses taught us to regard with reverence. But the author hopes that "the emancipated Spaniards" will not take this amiss.

_Clara Gazul_ is, then, a merry book; the good lady who wrote it is no prude. But what a strange kind of mirth it is! Amongst its manifestations is the free use of the knife. If we try to find a parallel to it, nothing suggests itself but the sportive springs of a young tiger. Mérimée finds it almost impossible to end without killing all his principal characters, and one sword-thrust succeeds the other almost automatically. But he amuses himself by destroying the illusion directly after the catastrophe; the actors rise, and one of them thanks the audience for their kind attention; the whole thing is turned into a jest.

_Doña Maria._

Help! She is poisoned, poisoned by me. I will see to my own
punishment; the convent well is not far off. (_Exit hurriedly._)

_Fray Eugenio_ (_to the audience_).

Do not take it too much amiss that I have caused the death of
these two charming young ladies; and graciously excuse the
shortcomings of the author.

Thus ends the wild play _L'Occasion_. The wittiest criticism passed on these dramas, and the style in general, is contained in a sentence in Alfred de Musset's _Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet_: "Souvient l'Espagne, avec ses Castillans, qui se coupent la gorge comme on boit un verre d'eau, ses Andalouses qui font plus vite encore un petit métier moins dépeuplant, ses taureaux, ses toréadors, matadors, &c."

It was not in Mérimée's works alone that the Spain of the young Romantic School (to which De Musset himself contributed the pale-faced, brown-necked Andalusian beauty) was so passionate and hasty. But no one took such delight in it all as he. And the themes he chose in his old age are in complete accordance with this taste of his youth.

His last tale, _Lokis_, is the story of a young Lithuanian count of mysterious descent, who from time to time is possessed by, or at least feels that he possesses, the instincts of a wild animal. He goes mad on his wedding-night and kills his bride by biting her throat. The count's character is drawn with delicate skill; the progress of his mental derangement is indicated by a few slight but graphic touches; and Mérimée has evidently enjoyed contrasting this wild young Lithuanian nobleman with a peculiarly worthy and dull German professor (the German of French fiction prior to 1870), a guest in the count's house, who writes every evening to his _fiancée_, Fräulein Weber, and communicates the horrible catastrophe to the reader in one of his letters. But the impression left by this vampire tale is one of disgust mingled with horror. The masterly treatment, the perfect style, the refined manner in which the loathsome subject is dealt with, remind us of the white kid gloves of the headsman. The story is only of interest to us as a proof of the strength retained by one of its author's original tendencies.

Personally characteristic of Mérimée as this tendency undoubtedly was, it is plainly of near kin to a tendency of the whole of that school to which Southey gave the name of the "Satanic." The influence of Byron is unmistakable. By 1830 Frenchmen were thoroughly weary (as Englishmen had been for some time) of the "Immanuelistic" literature of the Reaction. The sceptre of literature had passed from the hands of Lamartine into the hands of Victor Hugo, whose _Orientales_ contain most sanguinary pictures of war and destruction. Lamartine himself, the Seraphic poet in chief, had struck a Satanic note in _La Chute d'un Ange_. And a young poet of Victor Hugo's school was treating gruesome themes in short, artistically finished stories at the same time as Mérimée, and entirely uninfluenced by him. I allude to Petrus Borel, who died poor and unknown. His _Dina, la belle Juive_, will bear comparison with any of Mérimée's tales of horror. Poor Borel was an enthusiast, an ardent moralist, who, concealing his fervour beneath his realism, desired to inspire indignation with the deeds of violence he described. The refined, polished Mérimée is often only pretending to be bloodthirsty because it amuses him to frighten his readers, especially those of the female sex. But in both cases we have also the genuine Romantic defiance of the "bourgeois."

Mérimée has not escaped unpunished for thus yielding up his talent to the service of literary bloodthirstiness. Though he avoided his Nemesis during his lifetime, she overtook him after death. When De Loménie pronounced the customary panegyric in the Académie Française, he concluded by expressing the opinion that what was wanting in Mérimée's life was the peace and joy of the domestic hearth--that he would have been happier as the father of a family, "with four or five children to bring up." And when his friend, Countess Lise Przezdzieska, published, under the title of _Lettres à une autre inconnue_, a series of his letters to her which were certainly never intended for publication, she devoted the proceeds of her book to the payment of masses for the soul of her anti-Catholic friend.