Chapter 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.

But in these dramatic works, the faulty construction of which is apparent even to the reader, the irony peculiarly characteristic of Mérimée is absent. In them he lays on the colour too thickly; it is as the novelist that he really excels. Far more delicate than the irony of his dramas is, for instance, that of the charming little story _L'abbé Aubain_, a work which proves the versatility of Mérimée's talent, for in it he writes almost like Edmond About, only with much greater elegance. _L'abbé Aubain_ is a short series of letters, some of them written by a lady who supposes herself to be beloved by a young abbé, the rest by the abbé, who jests constrainedly on the subject of the lady's attachment to him. We make the acquaintance of two weak, refined characters, who lie to each other, to themselves, and to the world, and whose little dainty, easy-going passions and counterfeit self-control are the subject of the silent satire of the author.

In a story of this kind there is no narrator; therefore we are no more conscious than in the plays that the author is suppressing himself. The form of irony peculiarly characteristic of Mérimée is most plainly observable where we have a narrator, but know nothing of him except that he has no share in the emotions he describes. Mérimée's method, which is determined by his natural reserve, is to increase the effect of the story he is telling by an irony betraying itself in minute traits; he either with a little curl of the lip allows the touching incidents to speak for themselves, or he exhibits the painful, the revolting, or the passionate, in a frame of cold, indifferent surroundings.

In that little masterpiece, _Le Vase étrusque_, the only one of his stories in which he treats a quite modern theme sympathetically, he tells the story of two young beings who love each other secretly. We hear the young man, who has just returned from a night rendezvous, talking to himself:

"How happy I am!" he keeps on saying to himself. "At last I have found the heart which understands mine! Yes, it is my ideal that I have found--friend and mistress in one.... What character! What passion! ... No, she has never loved before!" And as vanity intrudes itself into every earthly concern, his next thought is: "She is the most beautiful woman in Paris;" and in imagination he retraces all her charms.

The narrative continues in this strain for some time before Mérimée interrupts himself with the remark that a happy lover is almost as tedious as an unhappy one. Then, when the relation between the two lovers has reached its most perfect stage, when Saint-Clair's momentary but fatal fit of jealousy of his beloved's past has resolved itself into a mere nothing, a mere misunderstanding, and we have witnessed a love scene which the most subtly tender of writers could hardly surpass, a scene in which tears of repentance mingle with smiles and kisses, how do we learn, six lines farther on in the story, that everything is at an end, that Saint-Clair was killed the following morning in a duel? We hear of it as we hear of such things in real life:

"Well," said Roquantin to Colonel Beaujeu when he met him at Tartoni's in the evening; "is this news true?"

"Only too true," answered the Colonel, looking very sad.

"Tell me how it happened."

"Simply enough. Saint-Clair told me that he was wrong, but that he would rather be shot by Thémines than make an apology to him. I could not but approve. Thémines wanted to draw lots for the first shot, but Saint-Clair insisted upon his firing first. Thémines fired. I saw Saint-Clair wheel round and then fall, dead. I have more than once seen a soldier, after he had been mortally wounded, turn round in the same curious way before he fell."

"How extraordinary!" said Roquantin. "And Thémines, what did he do?"

"Oh! what every one does on such occasions. He threw his pistol on the ground with an exclamation of regret. He flung it with such force that the trigger broke. _It is an English pistol, a Manton. I don't believe he will find a gunsmith in the whole of Paris who can make him as good a one._"

By describing the sympathy of friends, not in the manner of sentimental authors, but as it expresses itself in real life, Mérimée brings out the passionate sentiment of the relation between the lovers in full force; the neutral tint of the frame enhances the effect of the picture. If the art of icing champagne had not been known before Mérimée's day, he would have invented it.

Let me give one or two more examples of Mérimée's gift of keeping entirely aloof from the emotion which he portrays, and which he excites in the reader. Take the passage in _L'Enlèvement de la Redoute_ which describes the main attack. "We were soon at the foot of the redoubt. The palisades had been shattered and the earth torn up by our balls. The soldiers rushed at these ruins with shouts of: 'Vive l'Empereur!' _which were louder than one would have expected from men who had been shouting so long_." The narrator in this case is not Mérimée himself, but an officer who is relating his first experience of a fight; this officer is, however, near of kin to his creator; he does not share the ardour of the fighting soldiers. Instead of praising their enthusiasm for Napoleon as patriotic or courage-inspiring, he coolly comments upon the strength of their lungs.

It is not at all surprising that this style, this tone, which adds so remarkably to the impression of the reality of the thing described, should have been again and again taken as a sign of the author's want of feeling. As a matter of fact it is no more so than his choice of horrible subjects is a proof of his cruelty. On the contrary, the irony of the style is often only the transparent veil covering compassion and indignation. Study this irony in the little tale _Tamango_, where to the superficial reader the mere choice of subject would be apt to suggest the author's love of the revolting--for what is more horrible than the slave trade and the ill-usage of slaves, or than shipwreck, starvation, and murder? And all this, moreover, told with an ironic smile!

But we feel what the irony signifies when we come upon such a passage as the following:

"The captain, to ratify the bargain, shook hands with the more than half-intoxicated negro chief; and the slaves were immediately delivered to the French sailors, who quickly exchanged the long wooden forks with which the negroes had fettered them, for collars and handcuffs of iron--_a proof of the superiority of European civilization_."

And its real quality is still more distinctly perceptible in the lines which tell of the captain's attempt to make the pretty negress obedient by flogging her:

"With these words the captain went below, sent for Aycha, and tried to console her; but neither caresses nor blows (_for a man loses patience at last_) made the beautiful negress amenable."

The cold composure with which the fact is recognised that such is human nature, and that such things happen, actually heightens the impression of indignation produced by the deed of violence. We do not lay the book aside unmoved. We perceive that what at first seemed coldness, is but the petrified eruption of the inward fire of the artist's soul. We comprehend that an emotion underlies the sober, severe style of these tales, and that it is this emotion which gives them their impressiveness.

Of all Mérimée's stories, _Arsène Guillot_ is the one in which the ironical style of the narrative and a strength of feeling which has freed itself from the bonds of prejudice, are most perfectly fused together. The conventional virtue of the pious fashionable lady is contrasted with the absolute ignorance of the doctrines of Christianity and morality displayed by the poor girl whose own mother has sold her. In a moment of despair Arsène jumps out of the window and breaks her leg and several of her ribs. The action of the story passes in her sick-room. The usual irony in the relation of the events prevents compassion and emotion from overstepping the bounds of artistic moderation. Towards the close, however, in the description of Arsène's death, the heart is permitted to speak unrestrainedly, and its simple language communicates a charm to the dying grisette hardly inferior to that which transfigures De Musset's dying Bernerette. At the very end artistic irony again asserts itself. For the line: "Pauvre Arsène, elle prie _pour nous!_" traced in pencil in a woman's delicate handwriting on Arsène's gravestone, informs us in all its brevity that the austere lady has yielded to the same temptation as the ignorant child, that after Arsène died like a heroine, her patroness inherited her lover. Irony is in this case almost too coarse a word. Expressions are lacking to describe these delicate shades. That faintly ironical pencilled line contains in its six words a Mériméan, that is to say, a laconic, sermon on tolerance.

D'Haussonville has preserved for us some remarks made by Mérimée to Émile Augier on the subject of a little story, _La Chambre bleue_, which the former wrote specially for the Empress, in 1869. They show how this peculiar style of narration, which was originally an unconscious expression of the author's character, in time became a conscious mannerism. Mérimée said: "The story has one great fault, which is due to the fact that in the course of writing it I altered the originally planned ending. As it was my first intention to make the tale end tragically, I _naturally_ began it in a gay tone; then I changed my mind and brought about a cheerful dénouement. I ought to have re-written the first part in a tragic tone, but it was too much trouble; I left it as it was." The method which was originally the stylistic expression of a deeply emotional and very proud soul, became towards the end of the author's life a calculated, excessive use of contrast as a means of producing artistic effect.