Abbé Aubain and Mosaics. Prosper Merimee
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relates the famous story of his childish resolve to keep his emotions to himself, after the discovery that even his parents could turn them into ridicule. "Il était né avec un cœur tendre et aimant," says Mérimée of the hero of his Vase Etrusque, "mais, à un age où l'on prend trop facilement des impressions qui durent toute la vie, sa sensibilité trop expansive lui avait attiré les railleries de ses camarades." In the exterior which Mérimée so carefully made for himself, it is not necessary to decide how much was genuine at the beginning and how much became genuine through force of habit. It made, at all events, the art of his stories; and we have only to turn to another page of the Goncourts' Journal to see how precisely that art corresponds with what struck those acute observers in the manner of his conversation. "Il cause en s'écoutant avec de mortels silences, lentement, mot par mot, goutte à goutte, comme s'il distillait ses effects, faisant tomber autour de ce qu'il dit une froideur glaciale." It is such an icy coldness that disengages itself from the finest of his stories; from Mateo Falcone, for instance, perhaps his masterpiece, in its intensity of effect and in its economy of means. It amused him to tell moving and pitiful things so relentlessly, getting the same pleasure in the anticipation of what his readers would feel that he got from the actual looks and words of the people to whom he talked in the drawing-rooms. He counted on a certain repugnance in those who most admired him, as men of his disposition count on the help of a certain instinctive dislike in those of whom they are most anxious to make themselves masters.
In his stories, with their force, clearness, concise energy, Mérimée is without charm; "as if," says Walter Pater, in his remarkable and closely packed essay, "in theological language, he were incapable of grace." "Gifted as he was with pure mind," with a style "the perfection of nobody's style," he is a kind of hard taskmaster, who is at least sure of getting his own way, sure of never loosening his hold. He has, above all things, a mastery over effect; and he has none of those preoccupations of the poet, of the thinker, or of the "inspired" writer, which so often come to shake the equilibrium of that to which they add a heavy and toppling burden of splendour. Each of his stories is a story, nothing more or less, and in each he does exactly what he set out to do, even the dry, scholarly digressions, as they may sometimes seem, being only a part of the plan, of the building up of the illusion. He is interested in his characters only as they come into the light of a crisis; they live for him only in that moment; all the rest is so much detail, so much psychology in the abstract, with which he has nothing to do. Maupassant was to follow him, while thinking that he followed Flaubert, in this rigorous art of cutting your coat to your cloth. It was Mérimée, really, who perfected the short story in France, who left it a model for the writers of every nation.
Towards the end of his life Mérimée became deeply interested in Russia, and it was through his translations and studies that Tourguenieff became almost a French writer. In Tourguenieff he had partly a follower, but one who gave a new, more profound, more essentially human character to the short story, which has since been developed so fruitfully in Russia. To the Russian, to Tourguenieff, to Tolstoi, to Gorki, the soul is interesting in itself, for its own sake. Mérimée only pays heed to it when it does something interesting, when it precipitates itself into action. That is why so many Russian stories, with all their charm and meaning, remain nebulous, and why Mérimée's are always hard, firm, each complete as a drama. Look at Gorki, and how easily he loses the thread of his narrative or how often he forgets to have a thread to follow, so significant to him is the mere existence of these people, among whose actions he is embarrassed to choose. Take the first act of his play, Les Petits Bourgeois, and see how little selection or composition there is, with what an assemblage of little intimate details, each closely observed, but each observed without relation to any other or to the movement of the whole. Mérimée gives us no detail which has not its almost mathematical significance, but in this orderly arrangement of life it sometimes happens that we are left with a sense of something out of which life has been trimmed dead.
"In history," says Mérimée, in the preface to his Chronique du Règne de Charles IX., "I care only for anecdotes." It was the anecdote which he cared for also in fiction, and with him, as with Stendhal, from whom he got the word and perhaps some of his taste for the thing, the anecdote was a somewhat more formal variety of what was afterwards to be called the document. Mérimée as a writer stands somewhere between Choderlos de Laclos or Crébillon fils, and the generation of "Realists" which was to follow him. He has the naïve immorality, the deliberate frivolity of the eighteenth century; but he is frivolous with the gravity of a scholar. Genuinely interested in those questions which women discuss among themselves, he knew how to work artistically upon his own interest, giving it an ironical turn, which saves it from the criticism of his intelligence. And in those anecdotes, to which he reduces history, and out of which he makes the more living history of his fiction, he finds as much of the soul of great passions and profound emotions as he cares to consider. The document is not yet crude fact, as with the Realists; it is fact chosen carefully for its significance, and arranged just so much as it needs in order to seem as well as be significant. "Dans chaque anecdote pouvant servir à porter la lumière dans quelque coin du cœur," says Mérimée, speaking of Stendhal (he might be speaking for himself), "il retenait toujours ce qu'il appelait le trait, c'est à dire le mot ou l'action qui révèle la passion." It was for this word or action in which passion reveals itself that Mérimée was always a seeker: how often and how absolutely he found it, the tales which follow may be left to prove for themselves.
ARTHUR SYMONS.
"THE ABBÉ AUBAIN" was published in Le Constitutionnel, February 24, 1846; "Mateo Falcone" and "The Vision of Charles XI" in the Revue de Paris, May and July, 1829; "How we Stormed the Fort" in the Revue française, September-October, 1829; "Tamango" in the Revue de Paris, October, 1829; "The Game of Backgammon" and "The Etruscan Vase" in the Revue de Paris, June and January, 1830, respectively; "The Venus of Ille" in the Revue des Deux Mondes, May 15, 1837; "Lokis" in the Revue des Deux Mondes, September 15, 1869; "The Blue Chamber," dated Biarritz, September, 1866, in L'Indépendance belge, September 6–7, 1871; "The 'Viccolo' of Madam Lucrezia," dated April 27, 1846, in Dernières Nouvelles, 1873; and "Djoumane" in Le Moniteur Universel, July 9–12, 1873.
A.R.W.
PROSPER MÉRIMÉE
Born at Paris, September 28th, 1803
Died at Cannes, September 23rd, 1870
THE ABBÉ AUBAIN
It were idle to say how the following letters came into our possession. They seem to us curious, moral and instructive. We publish them without any change other than the suppression of certain proper names, and a few passages which have no connection with the incident in the life of the Abbé Aubain.
THE ABBÉ AUBAIN
From Madame de P—— to Madame de G——
NOIRMOUTIERS, … November, 1844.
I promised to write to you, my dear Sophie, and I keep my word; besides, I have nothing better to do these long evenings.
My last letter informed you that I had made the simultaneous discovery that I was thirty and ruined. For the first of these misfortunes, alas! there is no remedy; as for the second, we have resigned ourselves to it badly enough, but, after all, we are resigned. We must pass at least two years, to repair our fortune, in the dreary manor-house, from whence I write this to you. I have been simply heroic. Directly I knew of the state of our finances I proposed to Henry that he should economise in the country, and eight days later we were at Noirmoutiers.
I will not tell you anything of the journey. It was many years since I had found myself alone with my husband for such a length of time. Of course, we were both in a bad temper; but, as I was thoroughly determined to put on a good face, all went off well.
You were acquainted with my good resolutions, and you shall see if I am keeping to them. Behold us, then, installed. By the way, Noirmoutiers, from