pressed laughter one
day, as they overhear Colomba's violent utterances at a funeral feast,
for she is a renowned improvisatrice. "Your father is an old man," he
finds himself saying, "I could crush with my hands. 'Tis for you I am
destined, for you and your brother!" And if it is by course of nature
that the old man dies not long after the murder of these sons
(self-provoked after all), dies a fugitive at Pisa, as it happens, by
an odd accident, in the presence of Colomba, no violent death by Orso's
own hand could have been more to her mind. In that last hard page of
Merimee's story, mere dramatic propriety itself for a moment seems to
plead for the forgiveness, which from Joseph and his brethren to the
present day, as we know, has been as winning in story as in actual
life. Such dramatic propriety, however, was by no means [27] in
Merimee's way. "What I must have is the hand that fired the shot," she
had sung, "the eye that guided it; aye! and the mind moreover--the
mind, which had conceived the deed!" And now, it is in idiotic terror,
a fugitive from Orso's vengeance, that the last of the Barricini is
dying.

Exaggerated art! you think. But it was precisely such exaggerated art,
intense, unrelieved, an art of fierce colours, that is needed by those
who are seeking in art, as I said of Merimee, a kind of artificial
stimulus. And if his style is still impeccably correct, cold-blooded,
impersonal, as impersonal as that of Scott himself, it does but conduce
the better to his one exclusive aim. It is like the polish of the
stiletto Colomba carried always under her mantle, or the beauty of the
fire-arms, that beauty coming of nice adaptation to purpose, which she
understood so well--a task characteristic also of Merimee himself, a
sort of fanatic joy in the perfect pistol-shot, at its height in the
singular story he has translated from the Russian of Pouchkine. Those
raw colours he preferred; Spanish, Oriental, African, perhaps, irritant
certainly to cisalpine eyes, he undoubtedly attained the colouring you
associate with sun-stroke, only possible under a sun in which dead
things rot quickly.

Pity and terror, we know, go to the making of the essential tragic
sense. In Merimee, certainly, we have all its terror, but without the
[28] pity. Saint-Clair, the consent of his mistress barely attained at
last, rushes madly on self-destruction, that he may die with the taste
of his great love fresh on his lips. All