Page:The Writings of Prosper Merimee-Volume 1.djvu/71

the supposed satirist of love and materialist in it. They will not mistake the constant and apparently irresistible attraction of this esprit fort to the supernatural, and the fact that in no single instance where the supernatural is introduced is it introduced to be ridiculed, or degraded, or rationalised, or even smiled at. Perhaps they will go even farther and maintain that Mérimée, for all his open breach with the personnel of the Romantic movement, for all his jokes at local colour, and the rest, all his expressed distaste for poetry, all the fanfaronnade in which these dreaders of dupery so often indulge, remained to the very last a Romantic, pure, hardened, immutable in every quality except that mere outward extravagance which is at best and worst but a very separable accident of Romanticism. Gautier, though much more of a poet and therefore more of an idealist than Mérimée, is less really a Romantic; Hugo, himself, putting extravagances aside and once more allowing for poetry, is not more so. The extreme outward precision of Mérimée's style, its horror of the bombastic and the dishevelled, has no doubt deceived some as to the presence in him of the Romantic passion, the Romantic colour, the Romantic vogue. But they are all there; to be seen by whoso chooses, or at any