(1803-1870)
The stories here presented are a selection from that brilliant series which shine like a constellation in French literature of the last century, blazoning Mérimée’s name across it. Each one has been tested and judged by successive generations of readers and critics. The authoritative appraisers of literary values, French and English, have been pronouncing upon them from the time of their publication until now, when they are still pronouncing upon them, as upon new productions. Their interest, nevertheless, is still fresh, their charm as attractive as ever, and inexplicable, as charm must be. The prediction that was made in their day having been fulfilled so far, it does not seem hazardous to renew it, at our own risk, that they may be placed alongside of those classics of fiction that meet so natural a soil in the human mind that we can no more foresee their ceasing to give pleasure to readers in course of time than we can foresee the flowers in the gardens ceasing to give pleasure to lovers of flowers.
Carmen, with which the book begins, was the last one written of the series. It might, however, be said to antedate them all, for the first impulsive, perhaps instinctive, love of Mérimée’s imagination was for the passionate drama of Spain, and his first production, The Plays of Clara Gazul, was so vivid an imitation of it that it mystified the critics of the time, who had yet to learn the extreme susceptibility of Mérimée’s mind to exotic influences; a susceptibility that the author indulged, if he did not foster, throughout life.
It was not until 1830 (after the publication of Mateo Falcone and The Taking of the Redoubt) that Mérimée saw Spain with the eyes of his body, and became naturalised in that part of it, that, as he describes it, “was bounded on the north by a gitana and on the south by a carbine,” whose patois he spoke fluently, in whose ventas he was at home, where he confesses to have committed a thousand follies. In his letters addressed from Madrid and Valencia, during this first voyage to Spain, those who are curious about such questions can read the account of Mérimée’s introduction to Carmen,—that is, to José Maria, the contrabandist and bandit, and to the toreador. As for Carmen herself, “that servant of the devil,” as José Maria describes her only too well, although she does not figure in the letters, we may infer that she did in some of the “thousand follies.” The story was not, however, written until fifteen years later than this, after many subsequent visits to its birthplace. A postscriptum, dated 1842, is attached to the letters, giving an account of the death of the toreador and of José Maria.
Mérimée had so long before this story proved himself the most exquisite master, in his day, of the art of simplicity and naturalness in writing, that he would seem to have left no farther room to himself for advance in perfection, no margin for additional praise for this his last story; and yet it has a quality of its own that distinguishes it from every preceding one.
“Señor,” said José Maria, “one becomes a rascal without thinking of it; a pretty girl steals your wits, you fight for her, an accident happens, you have to live in the mountains, and from a smuggler you become a robber before you know it.”
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.
