Prosper Mérimée, in Pater’s view, is the summary and type of these tendencies. The world is utterly hollow to him; his cynicism is complete and all-embracing. He is indifferent to ideas, to politics, to art; but there still remains the vast and inconsequent spectacle of human life to study, to amuse oneself with, to depict with a contemptuous grace. History, artistically selected and displayed, is perhaps the best distraction of all. History reveals, no doubt, little but desperate and passionate illusions, but even so there is a narcotic interest about the spectacle. Into this quarry of ancient materials Mérimée flings himself with the zest and appetite of an energetic mind. And so, too, there were similar possibilities of romance in the modern world. Corsica, where the scene of _Colomba_ is laid, was a place still full of primal, simple, passionate emotions—exaggerated, no doubt, and unreasonable, but still unquestionably there. Even that morbid personal pride with its passion for revenge, its view of life as a sacrifice to honour, offers a stimulus to the imagination, though the terror of it is free from all interfusion of pity. Pater skilfully indicates the perfect art of Mérimée, the minute proportion, the horror of all loose and otiose statement, issuing in a style of which every part is closely tied with every other part, and the end synchronises sharply with the conclusion of the story; and further, he characterises the human charm of the _Lettres à une Inconnue_, where the author seems surprised and baffled by the unsuspected violence of his own emotion; the fine intellectual companionship of which he is in search betraying him suddenly, like a crust of ashes over a smouldering fire. He concludes with an interesting passage which shows that _impersonality_ was the aim of Mérimée’s art, so that his books stand “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.” The same is true of his style—“the perfection of nobody’s style,” as Pater cleverly calls it—“fastidiously in the fashion—an expert in all the little, half-contemptuous elegances of which it is capable ... a nice observer of all that is most conventional.” And thus we see that the absence of soul, of subjectivity, of peculiarities, is at once the weakness and the strength of Mérimée’s work. It is all pure mind, and produces a singular harshness of ideal, so that “there are masters of French prose whose art has begun where the art of Mérimée leaves off.”