A History of the French Novel Volume Ii Part 19

About Carmen herself there has been more--and may justly be a little more--question. Is her _diablura_ slightly exaggerated? Or, to put the complaint in a more accurately critical form, has Merimee attended a little too much to the task of throwing on the canvas a typical Rommany _chi_ or _callee_, and a little too little to that of bodying forth a probable and individual human girl? As an advocate I think I could take a brief on either side of the question without scandalising the, on this point, almost neurotic conscience of the late Mr. Anthony Trollope. But, as a juryman, my verdict on either indictment would be "Not guilty, and _please_ do it again."

But I had much rather decline both functions and all litigious proceedings, and go from the courts of law to the cathedral of literature and thank the Lord thereof for this wonderful triumph of letters. And, in the same way, if any quarrelsome person says, "But only a few pages back you were in parallel ecstasies about _La Morte Amoureuse_," I decline the daggers. Each is supreme in its kind, though the kinds are different. Of each it may be said, "It cannot be better done," but there may be--in fact there is nearly sure to be--something in the individual taste of each reader which will make the appeal of one to his heart, if not to his head, more intimate and welcome. That has nothing to do with their general literary value, which in each case is consummate. And happy are those who can appreciate both.

Consummateness, in the various kinds, is, indeed, the mark of Merimee's stories. The variety is greater than in those of Gautier, because, just as "Theo" had the advantage of Prosper in point of poetry, he had a certain disadvantage in point of range of intellect, or, to prevent mistake, let us say interest--which perhaps is only another _tropos_ (as the Greeks would have said and as the chemists in a very limited sense do say after them) of the same thing. Beauty was Gautier's only idol; Merimee had more of a pantheon.

[Sidenote: _Colomba._]

As to _Colomba_ compared with _Carmen_, there is, I believe, a sort of sectarianism among Prosperites. I hope I am, as always, catholic. I do not know that, in the terms of cla.s.sical scholars.h.i.+p, it is "castigated"

to the same extent as its rival in point of superfluities. Not that I wish anything away from it; but I think a few things might be away without loss--which is not the case with _Carmen_. Yet, on the other hand, the danger of the type seems to me more completely avoided.[223]

At any rate, my admiration for the book is not in any way bribed by that Rossetti portrait of a Corsican lady to which I have referred above. For though she certainly _is_ Colomba, I never saw the face till years--almost decades--after I knew the story.

[Sidenote: Its smaller companions--_Mateo Falcone_, etc.]

But of the smaller tales which usually accompany her, who shall exaggerate the praise? _Mateo Falcone_, that modern Roman father (by the way, there is said to be more Roman blood in Corsica than in any part of the mainland of Italy, and the portrait above mentioned is almost pure Faustina), is another of those things which are _a prendre ou a laisser_. It could not, again, be better done; and if any one will compare it with the somewhat similar anecdote of lynch-law in Balzac's _Les Chouans_, he ought to recognise the fact--good as that also is.

_Les ames du Purgatoire_ is also "first choice." Of what may be called the satellites of the great _Don Juan_ story--satellites with a nebula instead of a planet for their centre--it is quite the greatest. But of this group _La Venus d'Ille_ is my favourite, perhaps for a rather illegitimate reason. That reason is the possibility of comparing it with Mr. Morris's _Ring given to Venus_--a handling of the same subject in poetry instead of in prose, with a happy ending instead of an unhappy one, and pure Romantic in every respect instead of, as _La Venus d'Ille_ is, late cla.s.sical, with a strong Romantic _nisus_.[224]

For, though it might be improper here to argue out the matter, these last words can be fitted to Merimee's _ethos_ from the days of "Clara Gazul" and "Hyacinthe Maglanovich" to those when he wrote _Lokis_ and _La Chambre Bleue_. A deserter from Romanticism he was never; a Romantic free-lance (after being an actual Romantic pioneer) with a strong Cla.s.sical element in him he was always.

[Sidenote: Those of _Carmen_; _a.r.s.ene Guillot_.]

The almost unavoidable temptation of taking _Colomba_ and _Carmen_ together has drawn us away from the companions, as they are usually given, of the Spanish story among Merimee's earlier works. More than two-thirds of the volume, as most people have seen it, consist of translations from the Russian of Poushkin and Gogol, which need no notice here. But _a.r.s.ene Guillot_ and _L'Abbe Aubain_, the two pieces which immediately follow _Carmen_, can by no means be pa.s.sed over. If (as one may fairly suppose, without being quite certain) the selection of these for juxtaposition was authentic and deliberate, it was certainly judicious. They might have been written as a trilogy, not of sequence, but of contrast--a demonstration of power in essentially different forms of subject. _a.r.s.ene Guillot_, like _Carmen_, is tragedy; but it is _tragedie bourgeoise_ or _sentimentale_. There are no daggers or musquetoons, and though (since the heroine throws herself out of a window) there is some blood, she dies of consumption, not of her wounds.

She is only a _grisette_ who has lost her looks, the one lover she ever cared for, and her health; while the other characters of importance (Merimee has taken from the stock-cupboard one of the cynical, rough-mannered, but really good-natured doctors common in French and not unknown in English literature) are the lover or gallant himself, Max de Saligny (quite a good fellow and perfectly willing, though he had tired of a.r.s.ene, to have succoured her had he known her distress), and the Lady Bountiful, Madame de Piennes. How a "triangle" is established n.o.body versed in novels needs to be told, though everybody, however well versed, should be glad to read. a.r.s.ene of course must die; what the others who lived did with their lives is left untold. The thing is quite unexciting, but is done with the author's miraculous skill; nor perhaps is there any piece that better shows his faculty of writing like the "gentleman,"[225] which, according to a famous contrast, he was, on a subject almost equally liable to more or less vulgar Paul-de-k.o.c.kery, to sloppy sentimentalism, and to cheap cynical journalese.

[Sidenote: And _L'Abbe Aubain_.]

As for _L'Abbe Aubain_, it is slight but purely comic, of the very best comedy, telling how a great lady, obliged by pecuniary misfortunes to retire with her husband to a remote country house, takes a fancy to, and imagines she has possibly excited fatal pa.s.sion in, the local priest; attributes to him a sentimental past; but half good-naturedly, half virtuously obtains for him a comfortable town-cure in order to remove him, and perhaps herself, from temptation. This moving tale of self-denial and of averted sorrow, sin, and perhaps tragedy, is told in letters to another lady. Then follows a single epistle from the Abbe himself to his old Professor of Theology, telling, with the utmost brevity and matter-of-factness, how glad he is to make the exchange, what a benevolent nuisance the patroness has been, and how he looks forward to meeting the Professor in his new parsonage, with a plump chicken and a bottle of old bordeaux between them. There is hardly anywhere a better bit of irony of the lighter kind. It is rather like Charles de Bernard, with the higher temper and brighter flash of Merimee's style.

[Sidenote: _La Prise de la Redoute._]

All the stories just noticed, except _Carmen_ itself (which is of 1847), appeared originally in the decade 1830-40, as well as others of less note, and one wonderful little masterpiece, which deserves notice by itself. This is _La Prise de la Redoute_, a very short thing--little more than an anecdote--of one of the "furious five minutes," or hours, not unknown in all great wars, and seldom better known than in that of these recent years, despite the changes of armament and tactics. It is almost sufficient to say of it that no one who has the slightest critical faculty can fail to see its consummateness, and that any one who does not see or will not acknowledge that consummateness may make up his mind to one thing--that he is not, and--but by some marvellous exertion of the grace of G.o.d--never will be, a critic. He may have in him the elements of a capital convict or a faithful father of a family; he may be a poet--poets, though sometimes very good, have sometimes been very bad critics--or a painter, or a philosopher, as distinguished as any of those whose names the Bertram girls learnt; or an elect candlestick-maker, fit to be an elder of any Little Bethel. But of criticism he can have no jot or t.i.ttle, no trace or germ. The question is, for once, not one of anything that can be called merely or mainly "taste." A man who is not a hopelessly bad critic, though he may not have in him the _catholicon_ of critical goodness, may fail to appreciate _La Morte Amoureuse_ because of its dreaminess and supernaturality and all-for-loveness; _Carmen_ because Carmen shocks him; _La Venus d'Ille_ because of its _macabre_ tone; _Les Jeune-France_ because of their _goguenarderie_ or _goguenardise_. But the case of the _Redoute_ is one of those rare instances where the intellect and the aesthetic sense approach closest--almost merge into each other,--as, indeed, they did in Merimee himself. The principles as well as the practice of narrative are here at once reduced to their lowest and exalted to their highest terms. The thing is not merely fermented but distilled; not so much a fact as a formula, with a formula's precision but without its dryness. If we take the familiar trichotomy of body, soul, and spirit and apply it to subject, style, and narrative power in a story, we shall find them all perfectly achieved and perfectly wedded here.[226]

[Sidenote: The _Dernieres Nouvelles_; _Il Viccolo di Madama Lucrezia_.]

About the same time as that at which _Carmen_ was published (indeed a year earlier) Merimee wrote a shorter, but not very short story, _Il Viccolo di Madama Lucrezia_, which for some reason only appeared, at least in book form, long after, with the _Dernieres Nouvelles_ and posthumously. It is, I think, his one attempt in the explained[227]

supernatural--a kind for which I have myself no very great affection.

But it is extremely well done, and if there are some suggestions of impropriety in it, Hymen, to use Paul de k.o.c.k's phrase (it is really pleasant to think of Paul and Prosper--the farthest opposites of French contemporary novel-craft--together), covers up the more recent of them with his mantle.

But some at least of the other contents of the same volume are worthy of greater praise. One, _Le Coup de Pistolet_, is a translation from Poushkin; another, _Federigo_, an agreeable version of an Italian folk-tale--one of the numerous legends in which a 'cute' and not unkindly sinner escapes not only perdition, but Purgatory, and takes Paradise by storm of wit.[228] A third piece, _Les Sorcieres Espagnoles_, is folklorish in a way likewise, but inferior.

Yet another trio remains, and its const.i.tuents, _Lokis_, _La Chambre Bleue_, and _Djoumane_, are among Merimee's greatest triumphs.

_Djoumane_ is not dated; the other two date from the very last years of his life and of the Second Empire; and, unless I mistake, were written directly to amuse that Imperial Majesty who lives yet, and who, as all good men must hope, may live to see the _revanche_, if not of the dynasty, at any rate of the country, which she did so much to adorn.

[Sidenote: _Djoumane._]

Of the three, _Djoumane_--the account of a riding dream during a campaign in Algeria--is the slightest, no doubt, and to a certain extent a "trick" story. But it has the usual Merimean consummateness in its own way; and I can give it one testimonial which, like all testimonials, no doubt depends on the importance of the giver, but which, to that extent, is solid. I have read dozens, scores, almost hundreds of dream-stories. I cannot remember a single one, except this, which "took me in" almost to the very awaking.

There is no trick in either of the others, though in one of them there is the supernatural--_not_ explained. But they are examples--closely and no doubt intentionally juxtaposed--in two different kinds, both of them exceptionally difficult and dangerous: the story of more or less ordinary life, with only a few suggestions of anything else, which resolves itself into horrible tragedy; and the story, again of ordinary life, with a tragic suggestion in the middle, which unknits itself into pure comedy at the end.

[Sidenote: _Lokis._]

_Lokis_ is a story of lycanthropy, or rather _arct_anthropy. A Lithuanian Count's mother has been carried off, soon after her marriage, by a bear, and just rescued with a lucky shot at the monster. She goes, as is not very wonderful, quite mad, does not recover when her child is born, and is under restraint in her own house, as wife and widow, for the term of her life. Her son, however, shows no overt symptoms of anything wrong except fits of melancholy and seclusion, being in other respects a gentleman of most excellent "havings"--handsome, brave, sportsmanlike, familiar with the best European society, and even something of a scholar. He entertains a German minister and professor, whose special forte is Lithuanian, in order that the pundit may study some rare books and MSS. in his library; and his guest, being a great traveller, a good rider, and, though simple in his ways, not at all unlike a man of this world, makes a friend of him. It so happens, too, that they have a common acquaintance--a neighbour, and, as is soon seen, an idol of the Count's, Mademoiselle Julie Ivinska, very pretty, very merry, and, if not very wise, clever enough to take in the scholar, on his own ground, with a vernacular ("jmoude") version of one of Mickiewitz's poems. All goes well in a way, except for occasional apparitions of the poor mad Countess; but there is a rather threatening episode of a ride into a great forest, which is popularly supposed to contain a "sanctuary of the beasts," impenetrable by any hunter, and in which they actually meet a local sorceress, with a basket of poisonous mushrooms and a tame snake in it. Another episode gives us odd comments, and a sort of nightmare afterwards, of the Count, when his guest happens to mention the blood-drinking habits of the South American gauchos, in which the professor himself has been forced to take part.

But these things and other "lights" of the catastrophe are very artistically kept down, and you are never nudged or winked at in the offensive "please note" manner. The guest goes away, but, not much to anybody's surprise, is very soon asked to return and celebrate the wedding of the Count and Mlle. Ivinska, who are both Lutherans. He goes, and finds a great semi-pagan feast of the local peasantry (which does not much please him) and one or two bad omens, including an appearance of the mad old Countess with evil words, which please him still less.

But the feast ends at last and the newly married couple retire, there being, of course, no "going away." Early in the morning the pastor is waked by the sound of a heavy body (a sound which he had noticed before but never interpreted) clambering down a tree just outside his window. A little later, as the bridal pair do not appear, their door is broken open, and the new Countess is found alone, dead, drenched in blood, and her throat, not cut, but _bitten_ through.

The whole story is told by the minister himself to an otherwise unidentified Theodore and Adelaide (who may be anybody, but who adroitly soften the conclusion), and with that consummate management of the difficult part of actor-narrator which has been noted. In every respect but the purely sentimental one it seems to me beyond reproach and almost beyond praise.[229]

[Sidenote: _La Chambre Bleue._]

There could not, as has been said, be a greater contrast than _La Chambre Bleue_ in everything but craftsmans.h.i.+p. Two lovers (being French they have to be unlawful lovers, but the story would be neither injured nor improved, as a story, if the relation were taken quite out of the reach of the Divorce and Admiralty division, as it could be by a very little ingenuity) meet, in slight disguise,[230] at a railway station to spend "a day and a night and a morrow" together at a country hotel--not a great way from Paris, but outside the widest _banlieue_. They meet and start all right; but Fortune begins, almost at once, to play them tricks. They are not, as of course they wish to be, alone in the carriage. A third traveller (one knows the wretch) gets in at the last moment, and when, not to waste too much time, they begin to make love in English, he very properly tells them that he is an Englishman, a.s.suring them, however, that he is probably going to sleep, and in any case will not attend to anything they say. Then he takes a Greek book from his bag, and devotes himself first to it and then to slumber. When their journey comes to an end, so does his, and he goes to the same hotel, but not before he has had an angry interview on the platform with some one who calls him "uncle." However, at the moment this does not matter much.

Still, the _guignon_ is on them; their _chambre bleue_ is between two other rooms, and--as is the common habit of French hotels and the not uncommon one of English--has doors to both, which, though they can be fastened, by no means exclude sound. One of the next rooms is the Englishman's; the other, unfortunately, is a large upper chamber, in which the officers of a departing regiment are entertaining their successors. They are very noisy, very late, and somewhat impertinent when asked not to disturb their neighbours; but they break up at last, and the lovers have, as the poet says, "moonlight [actually] and sleep [possibly] for repayment." But with the morning a worse thing happens.

The lover, waking, sees at the foot of the bed, flowing sluggishly from the crack under the Englishman's door, a dark brownish-red fluid. It is blood, certainly blood! and what on earth is to be done? Apparently the Englishman (they have heard a heavy b.u.mp in the night) has either committed suicide or been murdered, perhaps by the nephew; the matter will be enquired into; in the circ.u.mstances they themselves cannot escape examination, and the escapade will come out (blue spectacles and black veils being alike useless against Commissaries of Police and Judges of Instruction). The only hope is an early Paris train, if they can get their bill, obtain some sort of breakfast, and catch it. But, just as they have determined to do so, the facts next door are discovered. The Englishman, who has ordered two bottles of _porto_, has fallen asleep over the second, knocked it down while still half-full, followed it himself to the floor, and reclined there peacefully, while the fluid from the broken bottle trickled over the boards,[231] under the door, and into the agapemone beyond. Once more (but for one horrible[232] piece of libel), the thing could hardly be better.

[Sidenote: The _Chronique de Charles IX._]

Merimee's largest and most ambitious attempt at pure prose fiction--the _Chronique de Charles IX_--has been rather variously judged. That the present writer once translated the whole of it may, from different points of view, be regarded as a qualification and a disqualification for judging it afresh. For a mere amateur (and there are unfortunately[233] only too many amateur translators) it might be one or the other, according as the executant had been pleased or bored by his occupation. But to a person used to the manner, something of an expert in literary criticism, and brought by the writing of many books to an even keel between _engouement_ and disgust, it certainly should not be a _dis_qualification. I do not think that the _Chronique_, as a romance of the Dumas kind, though written long before Dumas so fortunately deserted the drama for the kind itself, is entirely a success. It has excellent characters, if not in the actual hero, in his two Dalilahs--the camp-follower girl, who is a sort of earlier Carmen, and the great lady--and in his fear-neither-G.o.d-nor-Devil brother; good scenes in the ma.s.sacre and in other pa.s.sages also. But as a whole--as a modernised _roman d'adventures_--it does not exactly _run_: the reader does not devour the story as he should. He may be--I am--delighted with the way in which the teller tells; but the things which he tells are of much less interest. One cannot exactly say with that acute critic (if rather uncritical acceptor of the accomplished facts of life and death and matrimony), Queen Gertrude of Denmark, "More matter with less art,"

for there is plenty of matter as well as amply sufficient and yet not over-lavish art. But one is not made to take sufficient interest in the particular matter supplied.

[Sidenote: The semi-dramatic stories. _La Jacquerie._]

The other considerable and early attempt in historical romance, _La Jacquerie_, is not in pure novel form, but it may fitly introduce some notice of its actual method, in which Merimee frequently, Gautier more than once, and a third eminent man of letters to be noticed presently most of all, distinguished themselves. This was what, in Old French, would have been called the story _par personnages_--the manner in which the whole matter is conveyed, not by _recit_, not by the usual form of mixed narrative and conversation, but by dramatic or semi-dramatic dialogue only, with action and stage direction, but no connecting language of the author to the reader. The early French mysteries and miracles--still more the farces--were not altogether unlike this; we saw that some of the curious intermediate work of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries took it, and that both of Crebillon's most felicitous, if not most edifying exercises are in dialogue form. The admiration of the French Romantics for the "accidented" and "matterful"

English, Spanish, and German drama naturally encouraged experiment in this kind. Gautier has not very much of it, though there is some in _Les Jeune-France_, and his charming ballets might be counted in. But Merimee was particularly addicted thereto. _La Jacquerie_ is injured to some tastes by excessive indulgence in the grime and horror which the subject no doubt invited. We do not all rejoice in the notion of a Good Friday service, "extra-ill.u.s.trated" by a real crucifixion alive of a generous Jacques who has surrendered himself; or in violence offered (it is true, with the object of securing marriage) to a French heiress by an English captain of Free Companions. Even some of those who may not dislike these touches of _haut gout_, may, from the coolest point of view of strict criticism, say that the composition is too _decousu_, and that, as in the _Chronique_, there is little actual interest of story. But the phantasmagoria of gloom and blood and fire is powerfully presented. The earlier _Theatre de Clara Gazul_,[234] one of the boldest and most successful of all literary mystifications, belongs more or less to the same cla.s.s, which Merimee never entirely deserted.

[Sidenote: _Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement_, etc.]

The best of all these is, to my thinking, undoubtedly the _Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement_. It is also, I believe, the only one that ever was tried on the actual stage--it is said without success--though surely this cannot have been the form that it took in _La Perichole_, not the least amusing of those levities of Offenbach's which did so disgust the Pharisees of academic music and so arride the guileless public. _Le Carrosse_ itself is a charming thing--very, very merry and by no means unwise--without a drop of bad blood in it, and, if no better than, very nearly as good as it should be from the moral point of view. _La Famille Carvajal_ has the same fault of gruesomeness as _La Jacquerie_, with less variety, and _Une Femme est un Diable_, a fresh handling of something like the theme of _Le Diable Amoureux_ and _The Monk_, if better than Lewis, is not so good as Cazotte. But _L'Occasion_ is almost great, and I think _Le Ciel et l'Enfer_ absolutely deserves that too much lavished ticket. Indeed Dona Urraca in this, like La Perichole in _Le Carrosse_, seems to me to put Merimee among the greatest masters of feminine character in the nineteenth century, and far above some others who have been held to have reached that perilous position.

At the same time, this hybrid form between _nouvelle_ and _drame_ has some illegitimate advantages. You can, some one has said, "insinuate character," whereas in a regular story you have to delineate it; and though in some modern instances critics have seemed disposed to put a higher price on the insinuation than on the delineation, not merely in this particular form, I cannot quite agree with them. All the same, Merimee's accomplishments in this mixed kind are a great addition to his achievements in the story proper, and, as has been confessed before, I should be slow to deny him the place of the greatest "little master" in fiction all round, though I may like some little masterpieces of others better than any of his.

[Sidenote: Musset: charm of his dramatised stories; his pure narration unsuccessful.]

By an interesting but not at all inexplicable contrast the only writer of prose fiction (except those to whom separate chapters have been allotted and one other who follows him here) to be in any way cla.s.sed with Merimee and Gautier as a man of letters generally--Alfred de Musset--displays the contrast of values in his work of narrative and dramatic form in exactly the opposite way to (at least) Merimee's.

Musset's _Proverbes_, though, I believe, not quite successful at first, have ever since been the delight of all but vulgar stage-goers: they have, from the very first, been the delight of all but vulgar readers for their pure story interest. Even some poems, not given as intended dramas at all, possess the most admirable narrative quality and story-turn.

As for the _Comedies-Proverbes_, it is impossible for the abandoned reader of plays who reads them either as poems or as stories, or as both, to go wrong there, whichever of the delightful bunch he takes up.

To play upon some of their own t.i.tles--you are never so safe in swearing as when you swear that they are charming; when the door of the library that contains them is opened you may think yourself happy, and when it is shut upon you reading them you may know yourself to be happier. But in pure prose narratives this exquisite poet, delightful playwright, and unquestionable though too much wasted genius, never seems quite at home.

For though they sometimes have a poignant appeal, it is almost always the illegitimate or at any rate extrinsic one of revelation of the author's personal feeling; or else that of formulation of the general effects of pa.s.sion, not that of embodiment of its working.

[Sidenote: _Frederic et Bernerette._]

Thus, for instance, there are few more pathetic stories in substance, or in occasional expression of a half-aphoristic kind, than _Frederic et Bernerette_. The grisette heroine has shed all the vulgarity of Paul de k.o.c.k's at his worst, and has in part acquired more poignancy than that of Murger at his best. Her final letter to her lover, just before her second and successful attempt at suicide, is almost consummate. But, somehow or other, it strikes one rather as a marvellous single study--a sort of modernised and transcended _Spectator_ paper--a "Farewell of a Deserted Damsel"--than as part, or even as _denouement_, of a story.

When the author says, "Je ne sais pas lequel est le plus cruel, de perdre tout a coup la femme qu'on aime par son inconstance, ou par sa mort," he says one of the final things finally. But it would be as final and as impressive if it were an isolated _pensee_. The whole story is not well told; Frederic, though not at all a bad fellow, and an only too natural one, is a thing of shreds and patches, not gathered together and grasped as they should be in the hand of the tale-teller; the narrative "backs and fills" instead of sweeping straight onwards.

[Sidenote: _Les Deux Maitresses, Le Fils du t.i.tien_, etc.]

So, again, the first story,[235] _Les Deux Maitresses_, with its inspiring challenge-overture, "Croyez-vous, madame, qu'il soit possible d'etre amoureux de deux personnes a la fois?" is in parts interesting.