The conversational story-telling depends for its success, not on the wit or charm of the talker, but on the plots of his stories. No more exigent test of the intrinsic power of a tale can be applied than this, of telling it badly in conversation. A good story will sometimes gain by the naked recital of its facts; a bad one is immediately betrayed. Bad stories, in this sense, are those that resemble the women of whom Lyly wrote:--'Take from them their periwigges, their paintings, their Jewells, their rowles, their boulstrings, and thou shalt soone perceive that a woman is the least part of hir selfe.' How many times, in repeating to a friend the story of a book, you have become suddenly aware it was an empty, worthless thing that, in clothes more gorgeous than it had a right to wear, had made you its dupe for a moment. Mérimée was compelled by his method to tell good stories or none. His material, to be sufficiently strong to stand without support, to be built with rigid economy, and to make its effects out of its construction, to be told as if with a desire of making no impression, and to make an impression all the stronger for such telling, could not be of a light or delicate nature. His events had to be striking, visible, conclusive. He had to choose stories in which something happened. There is death in almost every one of his tales. Hence comes the amazing contrast between his work and that of the Romantics. The large gesture, the simple violent passions are his as well as theirs, because he needed them, but, while they matched their subjects in their temperaments, and wrote of hot blood with pulsing veins, everything in Mérimée's stories is vivid and passionate except the author. The atmosphere of his tales is not warm or moist, but extraordinarily rarified. In that clear air his colours seem almost white. If they were not so brilliant we should not perceive them at all. Even his women are chosen for the attitude. The women a man loves are usually reflected in his work. But Mérimée's women are the women of Romance, dying for love or for hate, ready at any moment to throw their emotions into dramatic action, while the women he loved were capricious, whimsical, tender seldom, _outrées_ never. The writer needed picturesque women as clear as facts. The man loved women who never betrayed themselves, but were sufficiently elusive to give him an Epicurean pleasure in pursuing them. [An art of construction.]