From The Fortnightly Review. BY WALTER PATER. scep 131 of the thirteenth century, that is to say, with its consequent aptitude for the coordination of human effort. Deprived of FOR one born in 1803 much was rethat exhilarating yet pacific outlook, imcently become incredible that had at least prisoned now in the narrow cell of its own warmed the imagination even of the subjective experience, the action of a tical eighteenth century. Napoleon, seal-powerful nature will be intense, but excluing the tomb of the Revolution, had sive and peculiar. It will come to art, or foreclosed many a problem, extinguished science, to the experience of life itself, not many a hope, in the sphere of practice. as to portions of human nature's daily And the mental parallel was drawn by the circumstances of the case exceptional; food, but as to something that must be by Heine. In the mental world too a great almost as men turn in despair to gambling outlook had lately been cut off. After Kant's criticism of the mind, its pretenor narcotics, and in a little while the narsions to pass beyond the limits of individ. cotic, the game of chance or skill, is valued ual experience seemed as dead as those for its own sake. The vocation of the of old French royalty. And Kant did but furnish its innermost theoretic force to a artist, of the student of life or books, will be realized with something-say of more general criticism which had with-fanaticism, as an end in itself, unrelated, drawn from every department of action unassociated. The science he turns to underlying principles once thought eterwill be a science of crudest fact; the pas nal. A time of disillusion followed. The sion extravagant, a passionate love of passion, varied through all the exotic phases of French fiction as inaugurated by Balzac; the art exaggerated, in matter or form, or both, as in Hugo or Baudelaire. The development of these conditions is the mental story of the nineteenth century, especially as exemplified in France. typical personality of the day was Obermann, the very genius of ennui, a Frenchman disabused even of patriotism, who has hardly strength enough to die. More energetic souls, however, would recover themselves, and find some way of making the best of a changed world. Art: the passions, above all, the ecstasy and sorIn no century would Prosper Mérimée row of love; a purely empirical knowledge have been a theologian or metaphysician. of nature and man; these still remained, But that sense of negation, of theoretic at least for pastime, in a world of which it insecurity, was in the air, and conspiring was no longer proposed to calculate the with what was of like tendency in himself remoter issues; art, passion, science, how-made of him a central type of disillusion. ever, in a somewhat novel attitude towards In him the passive ennui of Obermann the practical interests of life. The désillusionné, who had found in Kant's negations the last word concerning an unseen world, and is living, on the morrow of the Revolution, under a monarchy made out of hand, might seem cut off from certain ancient natural hopes, and will demand, from what is to interest him at all, some. thing in the way of artificial stimulus. He bas lost that sense of large proportion in things, that all-embracing prospect of life as a whole (from end to end of time and space, it had seemed), the utmost expanse of which was afforded from a cathedral tower of the Middle Age; by the church • A lecture delivered at the Taylor Institution, Ox ford, and at the London Institution. became a satiric, aggressive, almost angry conviction of the littleness of the world around; it was as if man's fatal limitations constituted a kind of stupidity in him, what the French call bêtise. Gossiping friends, indeed, linked what was constitu tional in him and in the age with an incident of his earliest years. Corrected for some childish fault, in passionate distress, he overhears a half-pitying laugh at his expense, and has determined, in a moment, never again to give credit- to be forever on his guard, especially against his own instinctive movements. Quite unreserved, certainly, he never was again. Almost everywhere he could detect the hollow ring of fundamental nothingness under the apparent surface of things. Irony surely, habitual irony, would be the proper sculpturesque creations is neither more complement thereto, on his part. In his nor less than empty space. infallible self-possession, you might even So disparate are his writings that at fancy him a mere man of the world, with first sight you might fancy them only the a special aptitude for matters of fact. random efforts of a man of pleasure or Though indifferent in politics, he rises to affairs, who, turning to this or that for the social, to political eminence; but all the relief of a vacant hour, discovers to his while he is feeding all his scholarly curi- surprise a workable literary gift, of whose osity, his imagination, the very eye, with scope, however, he is not precisely aware. the, to him ever delightful, relieving, re- His sixteen volumes nevertheless range assuring spectacle, of those straightfor- themselves in three compact groups. ward forces in human nature, which are There are his letters - those "Lettres à also matters of fact. There is the formula une Inconnue," and his letters to the libraof Mérimée; the enthusiastic amateur of rian Panizzi, revealing him in somewhat rude, crude, naked force in men and close contact with political intrigue. But women wherever it could be found; him in this age of novelists, it is as a writer of self carrying ever, as a mask, the conven- novels, of fiction in the form of highly detional attire of the modern world-scriptive drama, that he will count for carrying it with an infinite, contemptuous most; "Colomba," for instance, by its grace, as if that, too, were an all-sufficient intellectual depth of motive, its firmly end in itself. With a natural gift for words, conceived structure, by the faultlessness for expression, it will be his literary func- of its execution, vindicating the function tion to draw back the veil of time from of the novel as no tawdry light literature, the true greatness of old Roman charac- but in very deed a fine art. The "Chroter; the veil of modern habit from the nique du Règne de Charles IX.,” an unuprimitive energy of the creatures of his sually successful specimen of historical fancy, as the "Lettres à une Inconnue " romance, links his imaginative work to the discovered to general gaze, after his third group of Mérimée's writings, his death, a certain depth of passionate force historical essays. One resource of the which had surprised him in himself. And disabused soul of our century, as we saw, how forcible will be their outlines in an would be the empirical study of facts, the otherwise insignificant world! Funda- empirical science of nature and man, surmental belief gone, in almost all of us, at viving all dead metaphysical philosoleast some relics of it remain-queries, phies. Mérimée, perhaps, may have had echoes, reactions, after-thoughts; and they in him the making of a master of such help to make an atmosphere, a mental science, disinterested, patient, exact; atmosphere, hazy perhaps, yet with many scalpel in hand, we may fancy, he would secrets of soothing light and shade, asso- have penetrated far. But quite certainly ciating more definite objects to each other, he had something of genius for the exact by a perspective pleasant to the inward study of history, for the pursuit of exact eye against a hopefully receding back- truth, with a keenness of scent as if that ground of remoter and ever remoter pos- alone existed, in some special area of hissibilities. Not so with Mérimée. For toric fact determined by his own peculiar him the fundamental criticism has nothing mental preferences. Power here too again, more than it can do; and there are no half the naked power of men and women which lights. The last traces of hypothesis, of mocks, while it makes its use, of aversupposition, are evaporated. Sylla, the age human nature; it was the magic funcfalse Demetrius, Carmen, Colomba, that tion of history to put one in living contact impassioned self within himself, have no with that. To weigh the purely physiogatmosphere. Painfully distinct in out-nomic import of the memoir, of the pamline, inevitable to sight, unrelieved, there phlet saved by chance, the letter, the they stand, like solitary mountain forms anecdote, the very gossip by which one on some hard, perfectly transparent day. came face to face with energetic personWhat Mérimée gets around his singularly 'alities; there lay the true business of the historic student, not in that pretended A lover of ancient Rome, its great chartheoretic interpretation of events by their acter and incident, Mérimée valued, as if mechanic causes, with which he dupes it had been personal property of his, every others if not invariably himself. In the extant relic of it in the art that had been great hero of the "Social War," in Sylla, most expressive of its genius architecstudied, indeed, through his environment, ture. In that grandiose art of building, but only so far as that was in dynamic the most national, the most tenaciously contact with himself, you saw, without rooted of all the arts in the stable condiany manner of doubt, on one side, the tions of life, there were historic docusolitary height of human genius; on the ments hardly less clearly legible than the other, though on the seemingly so heroic manuscript chronicle. By the mouth of stage of antique Roman story, the wholly those stately Romanesque churches, scatinexpressive level of the humanity of tered in so many strongly characterized every day, the spectacle of man's eternal varieties over the soil of France, above all bêtise. Fascinated, like a veritable son of in the hot, half-pagan south, the people of the old pagan Renaissance, by the gran-empire still protested, as he understood, deur, the concentration, the satiric hard- against what must seem a smaller race. ness of ancient Roman character, it is to The Gothic enthusiasm indeed was alRussia nevertheless that he most readily ready born, and he shared it- felt intelliturns youthful Russia, whose native gently the fascination of the pointed style; force, still unbelittled by our western civ- but only as a further transformation of old ilization, seemed to have in it the promise Roman structure, the round arch is for of a more dignified civilization to come. him still the great architectural form, la It was as if old Rome itself were here forme noble, because it was to be seen again; as, occasionally, a new quarry is in the monuments of antiquity. Romanlaid open of what was thought long since esque, Gothic, the manner of the Renaisexhausted ancient marble, cipollino or sance, of Lewis the Fourteenth: they were verde antique. Mérimée, indeed, was all, as in a written record, in the old abbey not the first to discern the fitness for im- church of Saint-Savin, of which Mérimée aginative service of the career of "the was instructed to draw up a report. false Demetrius," pretended son of Ivan Again, it was as if to his concentrated the Terrible; but he alone seeks its ut- attention through many months that demost force in a calm, matter-of-fact, care-serted sanctuary of Benedict were the fully ascertained presentment of the naked events. Yes! In the last years of the Valois, when its fierce passions seemed to be bursting France to pieces, you might have seen, far away beyond the rude Polish dominion of which one of those Valois princes had become king, a display more effective still of exceptional courage and" Mauprat," he tells the story of romantic cunning, of horror in circumstance, of bêtise, of course, of bêtise and a slavish capacity of being duped, in average mankind; all that under a mask of solemn Muscovite court-ceremonial. And Mérimée's style, simple and unconcerned, but with the eye ever on its object, lends itself perfectly to such purpose to an almost phlegmatic discovery of the facts, in all their crude natural coloring, as if he but held up to view, as a piece of evidence, some harshly dyed Oriental carpet from the sumptuous floor of the Kremlin, on which blood had fallen. only thing on earth. Its beauties, its peculiarities, its odd military features, its faded mural paintings, are no merely picturesque matter for the pencil he could use so well, but the lively record of a human society. With what appetite! with all the animation of Georges Sand's violence having its way there, defiant of an in necessity which draws into one all minor changes, as elements in a reasonable development. And his care for it, his curiosity about it, were symptomatic of his own genius. Structure, proportion, design, a sort of architectural coherency; that was the aim of his method in the art of literature, in that form of it, especially, which he will live by, in fiction. 66 regret, "is no longer a part of our man. ners.' In fact, the duel, and the whole morality of the duel, which does but enforce a certain regularity on assassination, what has been well called le sentiment du fer, the sentiment of deadly steel, had then the disposition of refined existence. It was, indeed, very different, and is, in Mérimée's romance. In his gallant hero, Bernard de Mergy, all the promptings of the lad's virile goodness are in natural collusion with that sentiment du fer. Amid his ingenuous blushes, his prayers, and plentiful tears between while, it is a part of his very sex. With his delightful, fresh-blown air, he is forever tossing the sheath from the sword, but always as if into bright natural sunshine. A winsome, yet withal serious and even piteous figure, he conveys his pleasantness, in spite of its gloomy theme, into Mérimée's one quite cheerful book. As historian and archæologist, as a man of erudition turned artist, he is well seen in the Chronique du Règne de Charles IX.," by which we pass naturally from Mérimée's critical or scientific work to the products of his imagination. What economy in the use of a large antiquarian knowledge! what an instinct, amid a hundred details, for the detail that carries physiognomy in it, that really tells! And again what outline, what absolute clarity of outline! For the historian of that puzzling age which centres in the "Eve of Saint Bartholomew," outward events Cheerful, because, after all, the gloomy themselves seem obscured by the vague- passions it presents are but the accidents ness of motive of the actors in them. But of a particular age, and not like the mental Mérimée, disposing of them as an artist, conditions in which Mérimée was most not in love with half-lights, compels events apt to look for the spectacle of human and actors alike to the clearness he de- power, allied to madness or disease in the sired; takes his side without hesitation; individual. For him, at least, it was the and makes his hero a Huguenot of pure office of fiction to carry one into a differblood, allowing its charm, in that charm-ent if not a better world than that actually ing youth, even to Huguenot piety. And around us; and if the "Chronicle of as for the incidents however freely it Charles the Ninth " provided an escape may be undermined by historic doubt, all from the tame circumstances of contemreaches a perfectly firm surface, at least porary life into an impassioned past, for the eye of the reader. The "Chron." Colomba" is a measure of the resources icle of Charles the Ninth " is like a series of masterly drawings in illustration of a period- the period in which two other masters of French fiction have found their opportunity, mainly by the development of its actual historic characters. Those characters-Catherine de Medicis and is grave and sad. The aspect of the capital the rest Mérimée, with significant irony does but augment the impression caused by and self-assertion, sets aside, preferring the solitude that surrounds it. There is no to think of them as essentially common- movement in the streets. You hear there place. For him the interest lies in the none of the laughter, the singing, the loud creatures of his own will, who carry in talking, common in the towns of Italy. Somethem, however, so lightly! a learning times, under the shadow of a tree on the equal to Balzac's, greater than that of promenade, a dozen armed peasants will be Dumas. He knows with like complete-playing cards, or looking on at the game. The ness the mere fashions of the time-how courtier and soldier dressed themselves, and the large movements of the desperate game which fate or chance was playing with those pretty pieces. Comparing that favorite century of the French Renaissance with our own, he notes a decadence of the more energetic passions in the interest of general tranquillity, and perhaps (only perhaps !) of general happiness. "Assassination," he observes, as if with for mental alteration which may be found even in the modern age. There was a corner of the French Empire, in the manners of which assassination still had a large part. "The beauty of Corsica,' says Mérimée, All Corsican is naturally silent. Those who walk stand at their doors; every one seems to be the pavement are all strangers; the islanders on the watch, like a falcon on its nest. around the gulf there is but an expanse of tanglework; beyond it, bleached mountains. Not a habitation! Only, here and there, on the heights about the town, certain white constructions detach themselves from the background of green. They are funeral chapels or family tombs. Crude in color, sombre, taciturn, Corsica, as Mérimée here describes it, is like the | humble manoir of his ancestors. From national passion of the Corsican― that his first step among them the villagers of morbid personal pride, usurping the place Pietranera, divided already into two rival even of grief for the dead, which centuries camps, are watching him in suspense of traditional violence had concentrated Pietranera, perched among those deep into an all-absorbing passion for blood- forests where the stifled sense of violent shed, for bloody revenges, in collusion with death is everywhere. Colomba places in the natural wildness, and the wild, social his hands the little chest which contains condition of the island still unaffected the father's shirt covered with great spots even by the finer ethics of the duel. The of blood. "Behold the lead that struck supremacy of that passion is well indi- him!" and she laid on the shirt two cated by the cry put into the mouth of a rusted bullets. "Orso! you will avenge young man in the presence of the corpse him!" She embraces him with a kind of his father deceased in the course of of madness, kisses wildly the bullets and naturea young man meant to be com- the shirt, leaves him with the terrible relmonplace. "Ah! Would thou hadst died ics already exerting their mystic power malamorte-by violence! We might upon him. It is as if in the nineteenth have avenged thee!" In Colomba, Méri- century a girl, amid Christian habits, had mée's best-known creation, it is united to gone back to that primitive old pagan a singularly wholesome type of personal version of the story of the Grail, which beauty, a natural grace of manner which identifies it not with the most precious is irresistible, a cunning intellect patiently blood, but only with the blood of a murdiverting every circumstance to its design; dered relation crying for vengeance. and presents itself as a kind of genius, Awake at last in his old chamber at Pieallied to fatal disease of mind. The inter- tranera, the house of the Barricini at the est of Mérimée's book is that it allows us to other end of the square, with its rival watch the action of this malignant power tower and rudely carved escutcheons, on Colomba's brother, Orso della Rebbia, | stares him in the face. His ancestral as it discovers, rouses, concentrates, to the enemy is there, an aged man now, but leaping-point, in the somewhat weakly with two well-grown sons, like two stupid diffused nature of the youth, the dormant dumb animals, whose innocent blood will elements of a dark humor akin to her soon be on his so oddly lighted conown. Two years after his father's murder, science. At times, his better hope seemed presumably at the instigation of his an- to lie in picking a quarrel and killing at cestral enemies, the young lieutenant is least in fair fight, one of these two stupid returning home in the company of two dumb animals; with rude ill-suppressed humorously conventional English people, laughter one day, as they overhear Colomhimself now half Parisianized with an im- ba's violent utterances at a funeral feast, mense natural cheerfulness, and willing to for she is a renowned improvisatrice. believe an account of the crime which re- "Your father is an old man,” he finds lieves those hated Barricini of all com- himself saying, "I could crush with my plicity in its guilt. But from the first, hands. 'Tis for you I am destined, for Colomba, with "voice soft and musical," you and your brother!" And if it is by is at his side, gathering every accident course of nature that the old man dies not and echo and circumstance, the very light- long after the murder of these sons (selfest circumstance, into the chain of neces- provoked after all), dies a fugitive at Pisa, sity which draws him to the action every as it happens, by an odd accident, in the one at home expects of him as the head of presence of Colomba, no violent death by He is not unaware. Her very Orso's own hand could have been more silence on the matter speaks so plainly. to her mind. In that last hard page of You are forming me! he admits. Mérimée's story, mere dramatic propriety "Well!' Hot shot, or cold steel!'-you itself for a moment seems to plead for the see I have not forgotten my Corsican." forgiveness, which, from Joseph and his More and more as he goes on his way brethren to the present day, as we know, with her, he finds himself accessible to the has been as winning in story as in actual damning thoughts he has so long com-life. Such dramatic propriety, however, bated. In horror, he tries to disperse was by no means in Mérimée's way. them by the memory of his comrades in the regiment, the drawing-rooms of Paris, the English lady who has promised to be bis bride, and will shortly visit him in the his race. 66 "What I must have is the hand that fired the shot," she had sung, "the eye that guided it; ay! and the mind moreover the mind, which had conceived the deed!" |