Page:The Writings of Prosper Merimee-Volume 1.djvu/68

ways now) "statuesque." But with all the respect due to the representative persons just named, both as critics and friends, I venture to think both mistaken. Mérimée's style is as nearly as possible faultless, and it is also, in appearance, severely restrained. But its faultlessness is never of the kind which is itself faulty by nullity—of the kind that almost all great critics and creators, from Longinus to Tennyson, have scouted and eschewed. Nor do its restraint and its polish ever imply or reach impotence or insignificance. The old simile of the ice-covered volcano, which has been applied elsewhere to its author, is almost more applicable to him as a pure writer than in any other function, and the white light of his style is made up of easily analysable and distinguishable spectra of the most vivid and iridescent colour. It is in this heat and this colour—kept below and behind, but only a little behind and below the surface of the foreground—that his great idiosyncrasy consists. I can hardly think of any other writer who quite comes up to him in this respect, though there are points of resemblance in Cardinal Newman. The very polished styles are, as a rule, wanting in life and warmth, the very clear styles, in colour and energy. But Mérimée's lacks none of these good things, while