as a mask, the conventional attire of the modern
world--carrying it with an infinite, contemptuous grace, as if that,
too, were an all-sufficient end in itself. With a natural gift for
words, for expression, it will be his literary function to draw back
the veil of time from the true greatness of old Roman character; the
veil of modern habit from the primitive energy of the creatures of his
fancy, as the Lettres a une Inconnue discovered to general gaze, after
his death, a certain depth of [15] passionate force which had surprised
him in himself. And how forcible will be their outlines in an otherwise
insignificant world! Fundamental belief gone, in almost all of us, at
least some relics of it remain--queries, echoes, reactions,
after-thoughts; and they help to make an atmosphere, a mental
atmosphere, hazy perhaps, yet with many secrets of soothing light and
shade, associating more definite objects to each other by a perspective
pleasant to the inward eye against a hopefully receding background of
remoter and ever remoter possibilities. Not so with Merimee! For him
the fundamental criticism has nothing more than it can do; and there
are no half-lights. The last traces of hypothesis, of supposition, are
evaporated. Sylla, the false Demetrius, Carmen, Colomba, that
impassioned self within himself, have no atmosphere. Painfully
distinct in outline, inevitable to sight, unrelieved, there they stand,
like solitary mountain forms on some hard, perfectly transparent day.
What Merimee gets around his singularly sculpturesque creations is
neither more nor less than empty space.

So disparate are his writings that at first sight you might fancy them
only the random efforts of a man of pleasure or affairs, who, turning
to this or that for the relief of a vacant hour, discovers to his
surprise a workable literary gift, of whose scope, however, he is not
precisely aware. His sixteen volumes nevertheless range themselves in
three compact groups. There are his letters [16] --those Lettres a une
Inconnue, and his letters to the librarian Panizzi, revealing him in
somewhat close contact with political intrigue. But in this age of
novelists, it is as a writer of novels, and of fiction in the form of
highly descriptive drama, that he will count for most:--Colomba, for
instance, by its intellectual depth of motive, its firmly conceived
structure, by the faultlessness of its execution, vindicating the
function of the novel as no t