character, exhibiting him as a man who, with very
genuine and hearty affections, veiled them under an outward cloak of
cynicism, for fear of being betrayed into vulgarity and extravagance. He
died in 1870, at the beginning of the troubles of France, by which he
was deeply afflicted. The entire amount of Merimee's work is, as has
been said, not large, and during the last twenty years of his life it is
almost insignificant. But such as it is, it has an enduring and
monumental value, which belongs to the work of few of his
contemporaries. He began by a curious practice, which united the
romantic fancy for strange countries and strong local colour with his
personal longing for privacy and the absence of literary _eclat. Le
Theatre de Clara Gazul_--plays, nominally by a Spanish actress--was
produced when he was but one-and-twenty; two years later, with an
audacious anagram on the title of his previous work, he published, under
the title of _La Guzla_, some nominal translation of Dalmatian prose and
verse, in which he utilised with extraordinary cleverness the existing
books on Slav poetry. _La Famille de Carvajal_ was a further
_supercherie_ in the same style. In the very height and climax of the
Romantic movement Merimee produced two works, attesting at once his
marvellous supremacy of style, his strange critical appreciation of the
current forces in literature, his penetrating insight into history, and
the satiric background of all his thoughts and studies. These were _La
Jacquerie_, and a _Chronique du Regne de Charles IX_. These books, with
Balzac's _Contes Drolatiques_ (which they long preceded), are the most
happy creative criticisms extant of the middle ages and the Renaissance
in France. They are not fair or complete: on the contrary, they are
definitely and unfairly hostile. But the mastery at once of human nature
and of literary form which they display, the faculty of vivid
resurrection indicated by them, the range, the insight, the power of
expression, are extraordinary. During the rest of his life Merimee, with
some excursions into history (ancient and modern), archaeology, and
criticism, confined himself for the most part to the production, at long
intervals, of short tales or novels of very limited length. They are all
masterpieces of literature, and, like most masterpieces of literature,
they indicate, in a comparatively incidental and by-the-way fashion,
paths which duller men have followed up to the natural re