In the second place, the fear in question made Mérimée so severely critical of himself as an author that he became unproductive. Beyle's motto was: "No day without its line." Mérimée never wrote much, and at last stopped altogether. His demands of himself in the matter of plasticity and technical perfection were so excessive that he preferred withdrawing from the contest with his own ideal to risking defeat. It seemed to him that it was better to rest contented with what he had done than to stake his reputation as an artist on any new work. And it made it the easier for him to refrain, that he was by nature of a reserved, retiring disposition, and not impelled by any uncontrollable impulse to constant production. It was in vain that Beyle reproached him for "laziness." Amongst the causes of that laziness there was one which Beyle did not understand, and which constituted the main difference between the two men. Beyle was a psychologist and a poet, but not an artist; Mérimée was an artist to his finger-tips. It is as the artist and as the artist alone that he is great; and his superiority to Beyle lies in his artistic skill. It was he who gave imperishable artistic form to that wealth of intellectual material which Beyle brought to light. And the laziness was anything but absolute idleness. It found expression in essays, descriptions of historical monuments, translations from the Russian, and modest but careful historical research and historical writings. Mérimée was a philologist and an archaeologist, a scholar and a scientist. His art may be likened to an oasis lying in the midst of his arid technical studies; it borders on science on every side, and the passage from it to historical writing is an easy one; for there comes a moment when the love of fact and the passion for accuracy and precision can no longer find satisfaction in merely imaginary portraiture. In this particular the history of Mérimée's personal career as an author resembles the history of the Romantic School; he reflects a great movement on a small scale. For in France as well as in Germany, scientific criticism and historical research followed in the path which the literary criticism of the Romanticists had opened up for imaginative literature. When the poets had done with the foreign and medieval material, the scientists began to deal with it in the spirit which poetry had evoked.