Towards such companionship that likeness to himself in her might have been helpful, but was not enough of a complement to his own nature to be anything but an obstruction in love; and it is to that, little by little, that his humour turns. He--the Megalopsychus, as Aristotle defines him--acquires all the lover's humble habits: himself displays all the tricks of love, its casuistries, its exigency, its superstitions, aye! even its vulgarities; involves with the significance of his own genius the mere hazards and inconsequence of a perhaps average nature; but too late in the day--the years. After the attractions and repulsions of half a lifetime, they are but friends, and might forget to be that, but for his death, clearly presaged in his last weak, touching letter, just two hours before. There, too, had been the blind and naked force of nature and circumstance, surprising him in the uncontrollable movements of his own so carefully guarded heart. The intimacy, the effusion, the so freely exposed personality of those letters does but emphasise the fact that impersonality was, in literary art, Merimee's central aim. Personality versus impersonality in art:--how much or how little of one's self one may put into one's work: whether anything at all of it: whether one can put there anything else:--is clearly a far-reaching and complex question. Serviceable as [36] the basis of a precautionary maxim towards the conduct of our work, self-effacement, or impersonality, in literary or artistic creation, is, perhaps, after all, as little possible as a strict realism. "It has always been my rule to put nothing of myself into my works," says another great master of French prose, Gustave Flaubert; but, luckily as we may think, he often failed in thus effacing himself, as he too was aware. "It has always been my rule to put nothing of myself into my works" (to be disinterested in his literary creations, so to speak), "yet I have put much of myself into them": and where he failed Merimee succeeded. There they stand--Carmen, Colomba, the "False" Demetrius--as detached from him as from each other, with no more filial likeness to their maker than if they were the work of another person. And to his method of conception, Merimee's much-praised literary style, his method of expression, is strictly conformable--impersonal in its beauty, the perfection of nobody's style--thus vindicating anew by its very impersonality that much worn, but not untrue saying, that the style is the man:--a man, impassible, unfamiliar, impeccable, veiling a deep sense of what is forcible, nay, terrible, in things, under the sort of personal pride that makes a man a nice observer of all that is most conventional. Essentially unlike other people, he is always fastidiously in the fashion--an expert in all the little, half- [37] contemptuous elegances of which it is capable. Merimee's superb self-effacement, his impersonality, is