No traces of anything similar are to be found in Mérimée's writings; no reflections or divagations--strictly accurate, bold representation of his fact, and nothing more. When he has chosen his subject, which is most frequently some survival of ancient savagery that has attracted his attention as an old coin among modern ones attracts the eye of the connoisseur, or an old building in a modern town the eye of the traveller, his whole aim is to make the curious phenomenon stand out in as strong relief as possible from the insipid dead-level of his own day; he removes everything which might prevent the strange survival of the past from producing its full effect; but such a proceeding as tracing its connection with the general condition of the society or country of which it bears the impress, never occurs to him. To see things in their whole bearing is not his affair: the bird's-eye view he leaves to others. He seeks and finds a curious phenomenon in the world of reality, delineates it, and in the process of reproduction imparts to it some of his own life; but he never regards it as anything but the curious phenomenon. And he is as strictly matter-of-fact in interpretation as in delineation. Note, for example, how he protests (in his _Portraits historiques et littéraires_) against any symbolic interpretation of _Don Quixote_, in which work he refuses to see anything but a masterly parody of the romances of chivalry. "Let us leave to solemn German professors," he exclaims, "the honour of the discovery that the Knight of La Mancha symbolises poetry and his squire prose. The interpreter will always discover in the works of a man of genius a thousand poetical intentions of which their author was entirely ignorant." Contrast with this kind of criticism the following fine passage from Sainte-Beuve. "This book, originally a purely topical work, has become part of the literature of the world. It has conquered the imagination of humanity. Every reader has worked his will with it, has shaped it to his taste.... Cervantes did not think of this, but we do. Each one of us is a Don Quixote to-day, a Sancho Panza to-morrow. In every one of us there is more or less of this discordant union of a high-flying ideal with the plain common-sense which keeps close to the ground. With many it is actually only a question of age; a man falls asleep Don Quixote and awakes Sancho Panza." Beyle would have endorsed these sentiments; Mérimée was kept from doing so by his antipathy to generalisation.