In order to obtain an adequate impression of his literary matter-of-factness, let us for a moment compare his tales, not with Beyle's, but with George Sand's first novels, which were written about the same time. What George Sand offers us in hers is, principally, such a masterly revelation of the inner life of a young woman, with its modesty and its enthusiasm, its impulse to self-devotion and its susceptibility to passion, as no woman had ever given to the world before; but in the deepest recesses of her soul there is a purpose; she has a wrong to avenge, wrath to satisfy; she does not see the sufferings of the female sex from the standpoint of an outsider; she does not try to conceal that her heart has bled. Mérimée, on the other hand, has no cause, no theory, no political or social bias whatever. He has no enthusiasms and believes in nothing, neither in a philosophic system, nor in a school of art, nor in a religious truth; scarcely even in the general progress of humanity. The sceptical man-of-the-world, he hardens his heart against all reformers, missionaries, improvers of the world, and saviours of humanity; he does not answer the question whether or not he agrees with them; he turns a deaf ear to it. George Sand shows what marriage is in France, and asks her public with a quivering voice: "What do you say to this? Is it to be endured?" Mérimée writes _La double Méprise_ and ends his tale without moving a muscle of his face. As a rest from overpowering emotion George Sand goes back to primitive human nature, and with simple, beautiful touches delineates (as in Mauprat) the power and the happiness of faithful love, or produces (as in the peasant stories and _Jean de la Roche_) simple, touching, ideal representations of the innate nobility of the human soul. Mérimée does not believe in the ideal, and has no talent for the idyll. There is a sombre, dusky tone over everything he paints; the impulse of the soul towards a purity which it loves, or a heroism which it admires, is foreign to his art. In her inmost heart George Sand is the lyric poet. Whether she makes the passion of love the centre of her book, concedes it every right and gives it her whole sympathy even when it inspires an unworthy character (as in that remarkable and profoundly suggestive tale, _Valvèdre_), or whether she is carried away by her admiration for the courage and strength of character of the best of her own sex, she always shares the emotions and passions of her characters, rejoices, weeps, sighs, and smiles with them. Mérimée, on the contrary, resembles Beyle in giving an impersonal, dramatic expression to his ideas and feelings, and surpasses him in the artistic skill with which he does it. He has been at great trouble to shut up his feelings in his own breast, has imposed silence upon them, the absolute silence of the prison cell, and never, never once, does he give expression to them in his own name. He gives voice to them only through fully