of
carnal love, discovers itself; and for her first thoughts Merimee is
always pleading, but always complaining that he gets only her second
thoughts; the thoughts, that is, of a reserved, self-limiting nature,
well under the yoke of convention, like his own. Strange conjunction!
At the beginning of the correspondence he seems to have been [35]
seeking only a fine intellectual companionship; the lady, perhaps,
looking for something warmer. Towards such companionship that likeness
to himself in her might have been helpful, but was not enough of a
complement to his own nature to be anything but an obstruction in love;
and it is to that, little by little, that his humour turns. He--the
Megalopsychus, as Aristotle defines him--acquires all the lover's
humble habits: himself displays all the tricks of love, its
casuistries, its exigency, its superstitions, aye! even its
vulgarities; involves with the significance of his own genius the mere
hazards and inconsequence of a perhaps average nature; but too late in
the day--the years. After the attractions and repulsions of half a
lifetime, they are but friends, and might forget to be that, but for
his death, clearly presaged in his last weak, touching letter, just two
hours before. There, too, had been the blind and naked force of nature
and circumstance, surprising him in the uncontrollable movements of his
own so carefully guarded heart.

The intimacy, the effusion, the so freely exposed personality of those
letters does but emphasise the fact that impersonality was, in literary
art, Merimee's central aim. Personality versus impersonality in
art:--how much or how little of one's self one may put into one's work:
whether anything at all of it: whether one can put there anything
else:--is clearly a far-reaching and complex question. Serviceable as
[36] the basis of a precautionary maxim towards the conduct of our
work, self-effacement, or impersonality, in literary or artistic
creation, is, perhaps, after all, as little possible as a strict
realism. "It has always been my rule to put nothing of myself into my
works," says another great master of French prose, Gustave Flaubert;
but, luckily as we may think, he often failed in thus effacing himself,
as he too was aware. "It has always been my rule to put nothing of
myself into my works" (to be disinterested in his literary creations,
so to speak), "yet I have put much of myself into them": and where he
failed Merimee succ