e Lucrezia he
seems to wish to expose his own method cynically; to explain his
art--how he takes you in--as a clever, confident conjuror might do. So
properly were the readers of La Guzla taken in that he followed up his
success in that line by the Theatre of Clara Gazul, purporting to be
from a rare Spanish original, the work [30] of a nun, who, under tame,
conventual reading, had felt the touch of mundane, of physical
passions; had become a dramatic poet, and herself a powerful actress.
It may dawn on you in reading her that Merimee was a kind of Webster,
but with the superficial mildness of our nineteenth century. At the
bottom of the true drama there is ever, logically at least, the ballad:
the ballad dealing in a kind of short-hand (or, say! in grand, simple,
universal outlines) with those passions, crimes, mistakes, which have a
kind of fatality in them, a kind of necessity to come to the surface of
the human mind, if not to the surface of our experience, as in the case
of some frankly supernatural incidents which Merimee re-handled.
Whether human love or hatred has had most to do in shaping the
universal fancy that the dead come back, I cannot say. Certainly that
old ballad literature has instances in plenty, in which the voice, the
hand, the brief visit from the grave, is a natural response to the cry
of the human creature. That ghosts should return, as they do so often
in Merimee's fiction, is but a sort of natural justice. Only, in
Merimee's prose ballads, in those admirable, short, ballad-like
stories, where every word tells, of which he was a master, almost the
inventor, they are a kind of half-material ghosts--a vampire tribe--and
never come to do people good; congruously with the mental constitution
of the writer, which, alike in fact and fiction, [31] could hardly have
horror enough--theme after theme. Merimee himself emphasises this
almost constant motive of his fiction when he adds to one of his
volumes of short stories some letters on a matter of fact--a Spanish
bull-fight, in which those old Romans, he regretted, might seem,
decadently, to have survived. It is as if you saw it. In truth,
Merimee was the unconscious parent of much we may think of dubious
significance in later French literature. It is as if there were
nothing to tell of in this world but various forms of hatred, and a
love that is like lunacy; and the only other world, a world of
maliciously active, hideous, dead bodies.

Meri