Chapter XXVI: Mérimée and Gautier

In a letter, dated 22nd November 1821, Mérimée the painter writes: "I have a big son of eighteen, of whom I should like to make a lawyer. He has such a gift for drawing that, though he has never copied anything, he sketches like a young student." Like many of the other notable French Romanticists, Prosper Mérimée never entirely gave up pictorial art. He painted in water-colours; but it was especially as the draughtsman that he was both indefatigable and gifted. His talent for drawing seems to have been near akin to his gift of literary style.

Prosper Mérimée and Théophile Gautier are the two authors of the generation of 1830 who supplement each other in the matter of style. Mérimée's strength lies in purity of line, Gautier's in glowing colour. Gautier seems to write with a brush rather than with a pen; he loves draperies and effects of light. His exuberant style is Venetian; it is velvet and brocade, which he bestrews with tinsel and spangles. Mérimée's simple, but extremely elegant presentment is in low-toned monochrome; it resembles an etching. His style, however, possesses a quality which no brilliancy of language can surpass--it is transparent; through it we see his vigorous, wild figures and characters as if they were alive. His defiant sharpness of outline reminds us of a painting or etching by Jacques Callot, an artist with whom he has much in common. One of Callot's youths, stepping out briskly with his long leather-sheathed sword dangling by his side, his plumed hat set jauntily on the side of his head, his buff coat fitting closely to his figure, his wide top-boots showing off his strong leg, his shining spurs clanking as he hastens to look on, with proud, defiant mien, at some deed of violence--such a figure would make an admirable frontispiece for a work like the _Chronique du Règne de Charles IX._

The final evidence of Mérimée's discreet reserve is to be found in the classically elegant severity of his style. It is smooth and bright as polished steel--not an ornament, not a flower, not a fanciful decoration of any kind; every figure is of beaten metal, accurately proportioned, and as correctly attired as it is life-like. No contemporary French author displayed such aristocratic conservatism in the matter of new words and expressions as Mérimée, not even Charles Nodier. Mérimée used the language which he found ready to his hand, and set his mark upon every sentence he wrote, without employing a single out-of-the-way word, or a single ordinary word in an unusual manner. But he shunned conventional expressions, phrases which throw a veil over the thought, beneath which it looks larger and more important. What especially distinguishes him is his sure touch, his gift of producing with some simple, almost worn-out, word exactly the impression which he desires. Hugo's style is graphic and pathetic, Gautier's (and that of his followers) is sensuous and loaded with imagery--both tried to produce an effect by word-architecture. The masters were justified in the attempt; but the attempts of their imitators and pupils too often recall those magnificent aqueducts which the Romans built with a prodigious expenditure of money and labour to connect one height with another, because they did not know that the force of the water itself was sufficient to raise it from the valley. We admire these mighty erections, but our admiration would have been greater if instead of them we had found simple pipes carried along the ground. The artificial, high-flown expression is like the aqueduct, the simple word that goes straight to the point, like the humble pipe. Mérimée's style, like the pipe, keeps close to the ground, has no useless ornament and no unnecessary loftiness; there is no strength wasted. It is not on this account a style destitute of charm, but it has no other except that of exactly adequate strength. There is not a word too much, and every sentence is in the service of the whole. The old motto, _Ne quid nimis_, might have been the author's device.

Mérimée's aim in evolving such a style evidently was to make his small works of art, by the renunciation of everything superfluous, as invulnerable as possible to the tooth of time. His endeavour reminds us of what is told of Donatello. The characteristic position of that artist's incomparable St. George--arms and hands close to the body--is said to have been chosen after a careful investigation of the condition of the famous statues of antiquity with the view of ascertaining which parts of them had suffered most, and why. In much the same way, Mérimée has tried to insure his works against the change in taste which time brings about, by keeping them free from every ornamental projection, everything in the nature of a digression.

Yet it was not his style which prevailed and became that of the next generation of writers. It was not Mérimée but Gautier, who, as a stylist, was the founder of a school. And I am not of the number of those who regret that a more luxuriant and sensuous style was victorious, and that later French authors have aimed, not merely at making their periods distinct and faultlessly correct, but also at imparting to them, when possible, melody, colour, fragrance. The treatment of language introduced by Gautier, continued by Flaubert and the Goncourt brothers, and transmitted by them to Zola and Daudet, has undoubtedly its weak side; and this the most prominent recent master of the descriptive style has not been slow to recognise and acknowledge. Zola himself writes:

"The worst of it is, that I have arrived at the conviction that the jargon of our period, that part of our style which is merely fashionable and must become antiquated, will be known as one of the most atrocious jargons of the French language. It is possible to predict this with almost mathematical certainty. What is most liable to become antiquated is imagery. As long as it is new, the metaphor or simile charms. When it has been employed by one or two generations it becomes a commonplace, a disgrace to the author who employs it. Look at Voltaire, with his dry style, his vigorous period, destitute of adjectives, which relates and does not paint; he remains eternally young. Look at Rousseau, who is our father--look at his imagery, his passionate rhetoric; he has written pages which are perfectly intolerable.... A cheerful fate awaits us who have outbidden Rousseau, us, who on the top of literature pile all the other arts--paint and sing our periods, chisel them as if they were blocks of marble, and require of words to reproduce the perfume of things. All this titillates our nerves: we think it exquisite, perfect. But what will our great-grandchildren say to it? Their ideas will undoubtedly be different, and I am convinced that certain of our works will fill them with astonishment; almost everything in them will be antiquated."

The writer of this melancholy, self-condemnatory criticism obviously goes too far. It is highly probable that our descendants will not think much of our books; but it is not the style in which they are written that will be most to blame for that. Zola's utterance is, however, remarkable as the evidence of a literary colourist in favour of the sober, unimaginative style of which Mérimée is undoubtedly one of the greatest masters in our own century. The best of his works are masterpieces of literature. Seldom, indeed, have short prose pieces been written in such a style. It is the thing itself that stands before us, in clear sunlight, un-obscured by even the faintest mist of sentimentality. It would be unreasonable to regard it as a fault in the author of picturesque prose that his imagery loses by repetition, that he does not stand the ordeal of repeated re-reading; one might just as well blame a composer because his melodies become intolerable by being played on all the street organs. One thing, however, is undeniable--that a severe, unadorned style like Mérimée's survives the works written in the florid style, as surely as the bronze statue survives the blossoming tree.

Curiously enough, Mérimée's contemporaries at first set him down as a naturalist. In some lines in which he naïvely classes him with Calderon, the young Alfred de Musset gives us an excellent idea of the original impression made by his writings. It appeared to his contemporaries that he simply produced casts:

"L'un comme Calderon et comme Mérimée,
Incruste un plomb brûlant sur la réalité,
Découpe à son flambeau la silhouette humaine,
En emporte le moule, et jette sur la scène
Le plâtre de la vie avec sa nudité.
Pas un coup de ciseau sur la sombre effigie,
Rien qu'un masque d'airain, tel que Dieu l'a fondu."

"Not a stroke of the chisel" is comical, as applied to the work of the most energetic stylist of the period; but so much is clear--Alfred de Musset regarded Mérimée as above everything an imitator of nature. This conception was due to a fact which has already been alluded to, namely, that in Romanticism in its earliest stage there was an element of naturalism. The young Romanticists did not at once perceive the gulf between the two. The poetry of the plumed hat and the Toledo blade was undoubtedly more to their taste than the real life which they saw around them; but reality, too, might be represented poetically when there was colour and character in it, and passion and fire and exotic fragrance; and all this it had in Mérimée's books. The germs of naturalism are to be found in Mérimée as they are in the other Romanticists; but in them all the love of art was stronger than the inclination to imitate nature. Mérimée, nevertheless, with his partiality for brutal subjects and his artificial coldness, distinctly prognosticates the tendency of the succeeding literary generation. In Taine's _Vie et Opinions de M. Graindorge_ (1867) we find a remark on the social life of the day, which applies equally to literature: "Depuis dix ans une nuance de brutalité complète l'élégance." We are conscious of it in almost all the most famous writers of the Second Empire--in the younger Dumas, in Flaubert, whom one might call the Mérimée of the next generation, and in Taine himself, who is delighted, like Mérimée, when he has "a fine murder" to describe, and who makes his Graindorge give the reader exact instructions in the most practical method of cutting the throat with a razor.[1]

To-day Mérimée passes for a Classicist. His perspicuous, transparent style, his determined avoidance of lyrical digressions, of metaphor and rhetoric, seem to insure him a place outside the Romantic School. But we have seen how, in a certain sense, all the French Romanticists are at the same time Classicists; and the fact that this is peculiarly observable in Mérimée's case does not give him a position altogether apart from theirs.

When we remember, moreover, that he, as well as Hugo and De Vigny, was influenced by Scott; that there is a distinct trace of Byronism, of the "Satanic," in some of his work; that, sober sceptic as he was, he wrote works (such as _La Vision de Charles XI._) in Hoffmann's style; that he was Beyle's pupil; and that he almost always, in true Romantic fashion, chose foreign, unmodern subjects, we cannot but recognise in the author possessing so many features in common with the French Romanticists, a true child of the age.

Even if we deny him absolute artistic originality, his figure stands out sufficiently from among the gifted literary group of 1830. The others gallop into the lists clad in gaudily-decorated coats of mail, with gilded helmets and waving pennons. He is the Black Knight in the great Romantic tourney.

[1] "Quand Cromwell passe en Irlande, il marque le nombre et la qualité des gens massacrés, et puis c'est tout. Et cependant quels beaux massacres! Quelle occasion pour pénétrer le lecteur de la froide fureur qui poussait les épées des fanatiques!"--Taine: _Essay on Guizot_.