entirely atone for the anachronism of a grossness more natural in the sixteenth than in the nineteenth century. V Was it possible to be romantic without being lyrical? Was it possible to produce purely objective work, reserving one's own personality, and glancing at one's audience only with an occasional look of superior irony? Such was the task essayed by PROSPER MERIMEE (1803-70). With some points of resemblance in character to Beyle, whose ideas were influential on his mind, Merimee possessed the plastic imagination and the craftsman's skill, in which Beyle was deficient. "He is a gentleman," said Cousin, and the words might serve for Merimee's epitaph; a gentleman not of nature's making, or God Almighty's kind, but constructed in faultless bearing according to the rules. Such a gentleman must betray no sensibility, must express no sentiment, must indulge no enthusiasm, must attach himself to no faith, must be superior to all human infirmities, except the infirmity of a pose which is impressive only by its correctness; he may be cynical, if the cynicism is wholly free from emphasis; he may be ironical, if the irony is sufficiently disguised; he may mystify his fellows, if he keeps the pleasure of mystification for his private amusement. Should he happen to be an artist, he must appear to be only a dilettante. He must never incur ridicule, and yet his whole attitude may be ridiculous. Such a gentleman was Prosper Merimee. He had the gift of imagination, psychological insight, the artist's shaping hand. His early romantic plays were put forth as those of Clara Gazul, a Spanish _comedienne_. His Illyrian poems, _La Guzla_, were the work of an imaginary Hyacinthe Maglanovich, and Merimee could smile gently at the credulity of a learned public. He took up the short story where Xavier de Maistre, who had known how to be both pathetic and amiably humorous, and Charles Nodier, who had given play to a graceful fantasy, left it. He purged it of sentiment, he reduced fantasy to the law of the imagination, and produced such works as _Carmen_ and _Colomba_, each one a little masterpiece of psychological truth, of temperate local colour, of faultless narrative, of pure objective art. The public must not suppose that he cares for his characters or what befell them; he is an archaeologist, a savant, and only by accident a teller of tales. Merimee had more sensibility than he would confess; it shows itself for moments in the posthumous _Lettres a une Inconnue_; but he has always a bearing-rein of ironical pessimism to hold his sensibility in check. The egoism of the romantic school appears in Merimee inverted; it is the egoism not of effusion but of disdainful reserve.[1] [Footnote 1: It is one of Merimee's merits that he awakened in France an interest in Russian literature.] CHAPTER V HISTORY--LITERARY CRITICISM I