French Poets and Novelists (London: Macmillan & Co., 1878)/Mérimée's Letters
MÉRIMÉE'S LETTERS.
The many readers who take pleasure in clever French books have found themselves of late deploring the sadly diminished supply of this commodity. The past few years have brought forth no new literary names of the first rank in France and have witnessed the decline and extinction of most of the elder talents. It is a long time now since a French book has made a noise on valid grounds. Here, at last, however, is a publication which, in six weeks, has reached a fourth edition and which most people of taste are talking about. But, though new in subject, the two volumes to which we allude belong to the literature of thirty years ago. They are the last contribution to literature of a writer whose reputation was made in the early part of the century. We recently heard it declared by a competent critic that they contain the best writing (as simple writing) that has appeared in France since Voltaire. This is strong language; but the reader of the easy, full-flavoured, flexible prose to which Mérimée treats his correspondent will certainly feel the charm that prompted it. Prosper Mérimée's title to fame has hitherto consisted in a couple of dozen little tales, varying from ten to a hundred pages in length. They have gradually come to be considered perfect models of the narrative art; and we confess our own admiration for them is such that we feel like declaring it a capital offence in a young story-teller to put pen to paper without having read them and digested them. It was a very handsome compliment to pure quality (to the sovereignty of form) when Mérimée, with his handful of little stories, was elected to the French Academy. The moral element in his tales is such as was to be expected in works remarkable for their pregnant concision and for a firmness of contour suggesting hammered metal. In a single word they are not sympathetic. Sympathy is prolix, sentiment is diffuse, and our author, by inexorably suppressing emotion, presents his facts in the most salient relief. These facts are, as a general thing, extremely disagreeable—murder and adultery being the most frequent and the catastrophe being always ingeniously tragical. Where sentiment never appears, one gradually concludes that it does not exist; and we had mentally qualified this frigid artist as a natural cynic. A romancer with whom bloodshed and tears were so abundant and subjective compassion so rare had presumably a poor opinion of the stock from which heroes and heroines spring. Many years ago M. Mérimée ceased to publish stories and devoted himself to archæology and linguistics. We have often wondered how during all these years he employed his incisive imagination. The "Lettres à une Inconnue" inform us.
They consist of a series of familiar—often singularly familiar—epistles, addressed during more than thirty years to a lady of whom nothing is generally known. The letters begin apparently about 1838; the last is written in September 1870, two hours before the author's death, in the prime of his country's recent disasters. Love-letters we suppose they are properly to be called; but the reader may judge from a few extracts whether they seem superficially to belong to this category. In his private as well as his public compositions Mérimée was an enemy to fine phrases; and here, instead of burning incense at the feet of his beloved, he treats her to such homely truths as these: "The cakes you eat with such appetite to cure you of the backache you got at the opera surprised me still more. But it isn't that among your defects I don't place coquetry and gluttony in the first rank." "The affection that you have for me is only a sort of jeu d'esprit. You are all esprit. You are one of those 'chilly women of the North.' You only live by your head." He is forever accusing her of coquetry, heartlessness, duplicity, mendacity. "Why, after we have been what we are to each other so long, do you take several days to answer the simplest question?" After her marriage he tells her it is all nonsense for her to say that she is a better person than she was before. "You seem to me prettier; but you have acquired, on the other hand, a pretty dose of selfishness and hypocrisy." It is true that in the beginning of their acquaintance he disclaims the ambition of being her lover. "Perhaps you'll gain a real friend; and I, perhaps, shall find in you what I have been looking for so long—a woman with whom I am not in love and in whom I can have confidence." One doubts whether he was gratified. "You grow every day more imperious and you have scandalous refinements of coquetry." And yet one wonders, too, whether to attribute to friendship or love this vigorous allusion to a walk with his correspondent: "For myself, contrary to my habit, I have no distinct recollections. I am like a cat who licks his whiskers a long time after drinking milk." We owe our knowledge of these letters to the lady herself, who has published them with a frankness more common in France than among ourselves. She has, however, taken every pains to draw the veil about her identity, and it may be said on her behalf that it is none of our business who she was or what she was. But only a very unimaginative reader will spare his conjectures. There is something extremely provoking to curiosity in the image, however shadowy, of a woman clever enough to have all this cleverness addressed to her. The author tells her early in the book that she has "a nature so raffinée"—something more than our "refined"—"as to be for him the summing-up of a civilization." It is not, apparently, without reason that he writes to her: "Between your head and your heart I never know which is to carry the day. You don't know yourself; but you always give the victory to your head." She had a head worth favouring. Constantly busy himself with philological studies, he recommends her to learn Greek as a pastime, and tells her how to set to work. It soon appears that she has taken his advice, and in the course of time we find her enjoying Homer and the tragedians. Later, when, with the privilege of a twenty years' friendship, he utters all the crudities that come into his head—and they grow very numerous as he grows older—he scolds her for being alarmed at what she finds in Aristophanes. The burden of his complaint from the first is her reserve, her calculations, her never obeying the first impulse. She had carried so far refusing to see him, for fear of getting tired of him, that he estimates that they have spent but three or four hours together in the course of six or seven years. This is Platonism with a vengeance and Mérimée makes an odd figure in it. He constantly protests, and begs for a walk in the Champs Elysées or a talk in the gallery of the Louvre. The critic to whom we just alluded and whose impression differs from our own in that these volumes have made him like the writer more than before, rather than less, maintains that we have a right to be very severe toward the heroine. She was cold, he affirms; she was old-maidish and conventional; she had no spontaneous perceptions. When Mérimée is not at hand to give her a cue her opinions are evidently of the flimsiest. When she travels he exhorts her almost fiercely to observe and inquire, to make a note of everything curious in manners and morals, and he invariably scolds her for the inefficiency of her compte-rendu. This is probably true enough. She had not the unshrinking glance of her guide, philosopher and friend. But we confess that our own sentiment with regard to her partakes of vague compassion. Mérimée's tone and general view of things, judged in a vivid moral light, were such as very effectually to corrupt a pliable and dependent nature; and what we perceive in his correspondent's reserve—her reluctance, in common phrase to make herself cheap—is the natural effort to preserve a certain ideal dignity in her own eyes. "Each time we meet," he declares, in 1843, "it seems as if there were a new formation of ice to break through. Why don't I find you the same as I left you? If we met oftener, this wouldn't happen. I am like an old opera for you, which you need to forget to hear it again with any pleasure." He numbers this annoying self-possession, apparently, among the machinations of what he calls her "infernal coquetry." His conception of the feminine character, though it had sunk a deep shaft in a single direction, was strikingly narrow. In the later letters, where he appears altogether in his dressing-gown and slippers, he is for ever berating his old friend for her "prudery." He can think of no other name for the superficiality of her investigation of certain points of harem-life, during a sojourn in Algiers; and he showers the same accusation upon her when, on his having lent her books unfamiliar to most women, she alludes to their peculiar character in returning them. One is anxious to know where he drew the line between "prudery" and modesty, or whether he really thought the distinction not worth making. And yet it was not that his friendship had not a masculine delicacy of its own. He says innumerable tender things, in which his ardour is anything but cynical. Here is an allusion to a Spanish greeting with which she had begun a letter: "I wish I had seen you when you were writing amigo de mi alma. When you have your portrait taken for me, say that to yourself, instead of 'petite pomme d'api,' as the ladies say who wish to make their mouths look pretty." The nearest approach in the book to the stuff that love letters are generally made of is an allusion to the pains of the tender passion. "Several times it has come into my head not to answer you and to see you no more. This is very reasonable and a great deal can be said for it. The execution is more difficult."
Gradually, however, sentiment of the tenderer sort disappears—but by absorption, as one may say, and not by evanescence. After a correspondence of ten years the writer's devotion may be taken for granted. His letters become an irremissible habit, an intellectual need, a receptacle for his running commentary on life. The second volume of the "Lettres à une Inconnue" contains less that is personal to the lady, and more allusions to other people and things, more anecdotes and promiscuous reflections. Mérimée became more and more a man of the world. He was member of two Academies, inspector and conservator of national monuments (a very active post, apparently), a senator of the Empire and an intimate friend of his sovereigns. He travels constantly from Moscow to Madrid, makes regular archæological surveys through the length and breadth of France, and pays frequent visits to England. He meets every one and knows most people—most great people, at least. In the midst of these things he despatches constant notes to his correspondent, flashing his lantern fitfully over his momentary associates and over events of the hour. There is a multitude of entertaining opinions, characterizations and anecdotes; but we lack space for quotations. Everything he says is admirably said; his phrase, in its mingled brevity and laxity, is an excellent "fit" for his thought. He tells anecdotes as vividly as Madame de Sévigné and in much fewer words. His judgments are rarely flattering and his impressions rarely genial; and, as proper names have been retained throughout, with unprecedented audacity, many of his opinions must have aroused a sufficiently inharmonious echo. He goes again and again to England; but familiarity seems to breed something very much akin to contempt. "I am beginning to have enough of ce pays-ci. I am satiated with perpendicular architecture and the equally perpendicular manners of the natives. I passed two days at Cambridge and at Oxford in the houses of 'reverends,' and, the matter well considered, I prefer the Capuchins. I gave (at Salisbury) half-a-crown to a person in black who showed me the cathedral, and then I asked him the address of a gentleman to whom I had a letter from the Dean. It turned out that it was to him the letter was addressed. He looked like a fool, and I too; but he kept the money." The most interesting thing throughout the later letters is not, however, the witty anecdotes and the raps at the writer's confrères, but the development of his scepticism and cynicism. He took his stand early in life on his aversion to florid phrases (one must remember, in palliation, that he was a Frenchman of the so-called generation of 1830), and he fell a victim ultimately to what we may call a dogmatization of his temperament. His dislike for fine names led him at last to a total disbelief in fine things. He had found a great many pretty puppets stuffed with sawdust or nothing at all; so he concluded that all sentiment was hollow and flattered himself that he had pricked the bubble. We have noted but a single instance of his speaking of a case of moral ardour without raillery more or less explicit; and even here it is a question to what extent the ardour is in fact moral. "Since there have been so many romances and poems of the passionate or would-be passionate sort every woman pretends to have a heart. Wait a little yet. When you have a heart in good earnest, you will let me know. You will regret the good time when you lived only by your head, and you will see that the evils you suffer from now are but pin-pricks compared to the dagger-blows that will rain down on you when the time of passions comes." M. Taine, in a masterly preface to these volumes, has laid his finger on the weak spot in Mérimée's character. "For fear of being dupe, he mistrusted in life, in love, in science, in art; and he was dupe of his mistrust. One is always dupe of something." This latter sentence may be true; but Mérimée's fallacy was, of all needful illusions, the least remunerative while it lasted, for it eventually weakened an intellect which had every reason for being strong. The letters of his latter years are sad reading. His wit loses none of its edge; but what the French call sécheresse had utterly invaded his soul. His health breaks down, and his short notes are hardly more than a record of reiterated ailments and contemptuous judgments. Most forms of contempt are unwise; but one of them seems to us peculiarly ridiculous—contempt for the age one lives in. Men with but a tithe of Mérimée's ingenuity have been able, and have not failed, in every age, to make out a deplorable case for mankind.
Poor Mérimée, apparently, long before his death, ceased to enjoy anything but the sunshine and a good dinner. His imagination faded early, and it is certainly a question whether this generous spirit, half-sister, at least, to Charity, will remain under a roof in which the ideal is treated as uncivilly as Mérimée treated it. He was constantly in the Imperial train at Fontainebleau, Compiègne and Saint Cloud; but he does little save complain of the discomforts of grandeur in general and of silk tights in especial. He was, however, as the event proved, a sincere friend of the Emperor and Empress, and not a mere mercenary courtier. He always speaks kindly of them and sharply of every one else except Prince Bismarck, whom he meets at Biarritz and who takes his fancy greatly. The literature of the day he considers mere rubbish. Half a dozen of his illustrious contemporaries come in for hard knocks; but M. Renan and his paysages are his pet aversion. The manners of the day are in his opinion still worse and the universal world is making a prodigious fool of itself. The collapse of the Empire, in which he believed as much as he believed in anything, set the seal to his pessimism, and he died, most consentingly, as one may suppose, as the Germans were marching upon Paris. His effort had been to put as little as possible of his personal self into his published writings; but fortune and his correspondent have betrayed him, and after reading these letters we feel that we know him. This fact, added to their vigour, their vivacity and raciness, accounts for their great success. There had been lately a great many poems and novels, philosophies and biographies, abounding in more or less fantastic simulacra of human creatures; but here is a genuine, visible, palpable man, with a dozen limitations but with a most distinct and curious individuality.