ee 1894.

PROSPER MERIMEE*

FOR one born in eighteen hundred and three much was recently become
incredible that had at least warmed the imagination even of the
sceptical eighteenth century. Napoleon, sealing the tomb of the
Revolution, had foreclosed many a problem, extinguished many a hope, in
the sphere of practice. And the mental parallel was drawn by Heine.
In the mental world too a great outlook had lately been cut off. After
Kant's criticism of the mind, its pretensions to pass beyond the limits
of individual experience seemed as dead as those of old French royalty.
And Kant did but furnish its innermost theoretic force to a more
general criticism, which had withdrawn from every department of action,
underlying principles once thought eternal. A time of disillusion
followed. The typical personality of the day was Obermann, the very
genius of ennui, a Frenchman disabused even of patriotism, who has
hardly strength enough to die.

[12] More energetic souls, however, would recover themselves, and find
some way of making the best of a changed world. Art: the passions,
above all, the ecstasy and sorrow of love: a purely empirical knowledge
of nature and man: these still remained, at least for pastime, in a
world of which it was no longer proposed to calculate the remoter
issues:--art, passion, science, however, in a somewhat novel attitude
towards the practical interests of life. The desillusionne, who had
found in Kant's negations the last word concerning an unseen world, and
is living, on the morrow of the Revolution, under a monarchy made out
of hand, might seem cut off from certain ancient natural hopes, and
will demand, from what is to interest him at all, something in the way
of artificial stimulus. He has lost that sense of large proportion in
things, that all-embracing prospect of life as a whole (from end to end
of time and space, it had seemed), the utmost expanse of which was
afforded from a cathedral tower of the Middle Age: by the church of the
thirteenth century, that is to say, with its consequent aptitude for
the co-ordination of human effort. Deprived of that exhilarating yet
pacific outlook, imprisoned now in the narrow cell of its own
subjective experience, the action of a powerful nature will be intense,
but exclusive and peculiar. It will come to art, or science, to the
experience of life itself, not as to portions of human nature's daily
food, but as to [13] something that must be