military features, its
faded mural paintings, are no merely picturesque matter for the pencil
he could use so well, but the lively record of a human society. With
what appetite! with all the animation of George Sand's Mauprat, he
tells the story of romantic violence having its way there, defiant of
law, so late as the year 1611; of the family of robber nobles perched,
as abbots in commendam, in those sacred places. That grey, pensive old
church in the little valley of Poitou, was for a time like Santa Maria
del Fiore to [20] Michelangelo, the mistress of his affections--of a
practical affection; for the result of his elaborate report was the
Government grant which saved the place from ruin. In architecture,
certainly, he had what for that day was nothing less than intuition--an
intuitive sense, above all, of its logic, of the necessity which draws
into one all minor changes, as elements in a reasonable development.
And his care for it, his curiosity about it, were symptomatic of his
own genius. Structure, proportion, design, a sort of architectural
coherency: that was the aim of his method in the art of literature, in
that form of it, especially, which he will live by, in fiction.

As historian and archaeologist, as a man of erudition turned artist, he
is well seen in the Chronique du Regne de Charles IX., by which we pass
naturally from Merimee's critical or scientific work to the products of
his imagination. What economy in the use of a large antiquarian
knowledge! what an instinct amid a hundred details, for the detail that
carries physiognomy in it, that really tells! And again what outline,
what absolute clarity of outline! For the historian of that puzzling
age which centres in the "Eve of Saint Bartholomew," outward events
themselves seem obscured by the vagueness of motive of the actors in
them. But Merimee, disposing of them as an artist, not in love with
half-lights, compels events and actors alike to the clearness he [21]
desired; takes his side without hesitation; and makes his hero a
Huguenot of pure blood, allowing its charm, in that charming youth,
even to Huguenot piety. And as for the incidents--however freely it
may be undermined by historic doubt, all reaches a perfectly firm
surface, at least for the eye of the reader. The Chronicle of Charles
the Ninth is like a series of masterly drawings in illustration of a
period--the period in which two other masters of French fiction have
found thei