”
For nothing further would astonish her, as he rightly under-
stood her; but he said, “You're prepared for the rites?
For nothing further would astonish her, as he rightly under-
stood her; but he said, “You're prepared for the rites?
Warner - World's Best Literature - v17 - Mai to Mom
” he said; and dropping his lips to the soft
fair hand, kissed it, and hung his head, swinging away from her,
ready for death.
Strange, that now she was released she should linger by him.
Strange, that his audacity, instead of the executioner, brought
blushes and timid tenderness to his side, and the sweet words,
“You are not angry with me? "
“With you, O Beloved! ” cried his soul. "And you forgive
me, fair charity! ”
She repeated her words in deeper sweetness to his bewildered
look; and he, inexperienced, possessed by her, almost lifeless with
the divine new emotions she had realized in him, could only sigh
and gaze at her wonderingly.
“I think it was rude of me to go without thanking you
again,” she said, and again proffered her hand.
The sweet heaven-bird shivered out his song above him. The
gracious glory of heaven fell upon his soul. He touched her
hand, not moving his eyes from her nor speaking; and she, with
a soft word of farewell, passed across the stile, and up the path-
way through the dewy shades of the copse, and out of the arch
of the light, away from his eyes.
And away with her went the wild enchantment. He looked
on barren air.
But it was no more the world of yesterday.
The marvelous splendors had sown seeds in him, ready to spring
up and bloom at her gaze; and in his bosom now the vivid con-
juration of her tones, her face, her shape, makes them leap and
illumine him like fitful summer lightnings - ghosts of the van-
ished sun.
There was nothing to tell him that he had been making love
and declaring it with extraordinary rapidity; nor did he know it.
Soft flushed cheeks! sweet mouth! strange sweet brows! eyes of
softest fire! - how could his ripe eyes behold you, and not plead
## p. 9930 (#338) ###########################################
9930
GEORGE MEREDITH
to keep you? Nay, how could he let you go? And he seriously
asked himself that question.
To-morrow this place will have a memory,- the river and the
meadow, and the white falling weir: his heart will build a tem-
ple here; and the skylark will be its high priest, and the old
blackbird its glossy-gowned chorister, and there will be a sacred
repast of dewberries. To-day the grass is grass; his heart is
chased by phantoms and finds rest nowhere. Only when the
most tender freshness of his flower comes across him does he
taste a moment's calm; and no sooner does it come than it gives
place to keen pangs of fear that she may not be his forever.
Ere long he learns that her name is Lucy. Ere long he
meets Ralph, and discovers that in a day he has distanced him
by a sphere.
RICHARD'S ORDEAL IS OVER
From «The Ordeal of Richard Feverel:
W"
HERE are the dreams of the hero when he learns he has a
child ? Nature is taking him to her bosom. She will
speak presently. Every domesticated boor in these hills
can boast the same; yet marvels the hero at none of his visioned
prodigies as he does when he comes to hear of this most com-
mon performance. A father? Richard fixed his eyes as if he
were trying to make out the lineaments of his child.
Telling Austin he would be back in a few minutes, he sallied
into the air, and walked on and on. “A father! ” he kept repeat-
ing to himself: "a child! ” And though he knew it not, he was
striking the keynotes of Nature. But he did know of a singular
harmony that suddenly burst over his whole being.
The moon was surpassingly bright; the summer air heavy
and still. He left the high-road and pierced into the forest. His
walk was rapid: the leaves on the trees brushed his cheeks;
the dead leaves heaped in the dells noised to his feet Some-
thing of a religious joy — a strange sacred pleasure — was in
him. By degrees it wore; he remembered himself; and now he
was possessed by a proportionate anguish. A father! he dared
never see his child. And he had no longer his phantasies to fall
upon, He was utterly bare to his sin. In his troubled mind it
seemed to him that Clare looked down on him Clare, who saw
## p. 9931 (#339) ###########################################
GEORGE MEREDITH
9931
him as he was- and that to her eyes it would be infamy for
him to go and print his kiss upon his child. Then came stern
efforts to command his misery and make the nerves of his face
iron.
By the log of an ancient tree, half buried in dead leaves of
past summers, beside a brook, he halted as one who had reached
his journey's end. There he discovered he had a companion in
Lady Judith's little dog. He gave the friendly animal a pat of
recognition, and both were silent in the forest silence.
It was impossible for Richard to return; his heart was sur-
charged. He must advance; and on he footed, the little dog fol-
lowing:
An oppressive slumber hung about the forest branches. In the
dells and on the heights was the same dead heat. Here where
the brook tinkled, it was no cool-lipped sound, but metallic, and
without the spirit of water. Yonder, in a space of moonlight
on lush grass, the beams were as white fire to sight and feeling.
No haze spread around. The valleys were clear, defined to the
shadows of their verges; the distances sharply distinct, and with
the colors of day but slightly softened. Richard beheld a roe
moving across a slope of sward far out of rifle mark. The breath-
less silence was significant, yet the moon shone in a broad blue
heaven. Tongue out of mouth trotted the little dog after him;
couched panting when he stopped an instant; rose weariedly
when he started afresh. Now and then a large white night-moth
flitted through the dusk of the forest.
On a barren corner of the wooded highland, looking inland,
stood gray topless ruins set in nettles and rank grass blades.
Richard mechanically sat down on the crumbling flints to rest,
and listened to the panting of the dog. Sprinkled at his feet
were emerald lights; hundreds of glow-worms studded the dark
dry ground.
He sat and eyed them, thinking not at all. His energies
were expended in action. He sat as a part of the ruins, and the
moon turned his shadow westward from the south. Overhead,
as she declined, long ripples of silver cloud were imperceptibly
stealing toward her. They were the van of a tempest. He did
not observe them, or the leaves beginning to chatter. When he
again pursued his course with his face to the Rhine, a huge
mountain appeared to rise sheer over him, and he had it in his
mind to scale it. He got no nearer to the base of it for all his
## p. 9932 (#340) ###########################################
9932
GEORGE MEREDITH
vigorous outstepping The ground began to dip; he lost sight of
the sky
Then heavy thunder drops struck his cheek, the leaves
were singing, the earth breathed, it was black before him and
behind. All at once the thunder spoke. The mountain he had
marked was bursting over him.
Up started the whole forest in violet fire. He saw the coun-
try at the foot of the hills, to the bounding Rhine, gleam, quiver,
extinguished. Then there were pauses: and the lightning seemed
as the eye of heaven, and the thunder as the tongue of heaven,
each alternately addressing him; filling him with awful rapture.
Alone there — sole human creature among the grandeurs and
mysteries of storm — he felt the representative of his kind; and
his spirit rose and marched and exulted, - let it be glory, let it
be ruin! Lower down the lightened abysses of air rolled the
wrathful crash; then white thrusts of light were darted from the
sky, and great curving ferns, seen steadfast in pallor a second,
were supernaturally agitated, and vanished. Then a shrill song
a
roused in the leaves and the herbage. Prolonged and louder it
sounded, as deeper and heavier the deluge pressed. A mighty
force of water satisfied the desire of the earth. Even in this,
drenched as he was by the first outpouring, Richard had a sav-
age pleasure. Keeping in motion, he was scarcely conscious of
the wet, and the grateful breath of the weeds was refreshing.
Suddenly he stopped short, lifting a curious nostril. He fancied
he smelt meadow-sweet. He had never seen the flower in Rhine.
land — never thought of it; and it would hardly be met with in
a forest.
He was
sure he smelt it fresh in dews. His little
companion wagged a miserable wet tail some way in advance.
He went on slowly, thinking indistinctly. After two or three
steps he stooped and stretched out his hand to feel for the
flower,— having, he knew not why, a strong wish to verify its
growth there. Groping about, his hand encountered something
warm that started at his touch; and he, with the instinct we
have, seized it and lifted it to look at it. The creature was very
small, evidently quite young. Richard's eyes, now accustomed
to the darkness, were able to discern it for what it was,-a tiny
leveret; and he supposed that the dog had probably frightened
its dam just before he found it. He put the little thing on one
hand in his breast, and stepped out rapidly as before.
The rain was now steady; from every tree a fountain poured.
So cool and easy had his mind become that he was speculating
## p. 9933 (#341) ###########################################
GEORGE MEREDITH
9933
on what kind of shelter the birds could find, and how the butter-
flies and moths saved their colored wings from washing Folded
close they might hang under a leaf, he thought. Lovingly he
looked into the dripping darkness of the coverts on each side, as
one of their children. Then he was musing on a strange sensa-
tion he experienced. It ran up one arm with an indescribable
thrill, but communicated nothing to his heart. It was purely
physical, ceased for a time, and recommenced, till he had it all
through his blood, wonderfully thrilling. He grew aware that
the little thing he carried in his breast was licking his hand
there. The small rough tongue going over and over the palm of
his hand produced this strange sensation he felt. Now that he
knew the cause, the marvel ended; but now that he knew the
cause, his heart was touched and made more of it.
The gentle
scraping continued without intermission as on he walked. What
did it say to him ? Human tongue could not have said so much
just then.
A pale gray light on the skirts of the flying tempest dis-
played the dawn. Richard was walking hurriedly. The green
drenched weeds lay all about in his path, bent thick, and the
forest drooped glimmeringly. Impelled as a man who feels a a
revelation mounting obscurely to his brain, Richard was passing
one of those little forest chapels, hung with votive wreaths, where
the peasant halts to kneel and pray. Cold, still, in the twilight
it stood, rain-drops pattering round it. He looked within, and
,
saw the Virgin holding her Child. He moved by. But not
many steps had he gone ere his strength went out of him, and
he shuddered. What was it ? He asked not. He was in other
hands. Vivid as lightning the Spirit of Life illumined him. He
felt in his heart the cry of his child, his darling's touch. With
shut eyes he saw them both. They drew him from the depths;
they led him a blind and tottering man. And as they led him,
he had a sense of purification so sweet he shuddered again and
again.
When he looked out from his trance on the breathing world,
the small birds hopped and chirped: warm fresh sunlight was
over all the hills. He was on the edge of the forest, entering a
plain clothed with ripe corn under a spacious morning sky.
## p. 9934 (#342) ###########################################
GEORGE MEREDITH
9934
AMINTA TAKES A MORNING SEA-SWIM: A MARINE DUET
From Lord Ormont and his Aminta. Copyright 1894, by Charles Scribner's
Sons
on a sea
A.
GLORIOUS morning of flushed open sky and sun
chased all small thoughts out of it. The breeze was from
the west; and the Susan, lightly laden, took the heave of
smooth rollers with a flowing current-curtsy in the motion of her
speed. Foresail and aft were at their gentle strain; her shadow
rippled fragmentarily along to the silver rivulet and boat of her
wake. Straight she flew to the ball of fire now at spring above
the waters, and raining red gold on the line of her bows. By
comparison she was an ugly yawl, and as the creature of wind
and wave beautiful.
They passed an English defensive fort, and spared its walls,
in obedience to Matthew Shale's good counsel that they should
forbear from sneezing. Little Collett pointed to the roof of his
mother's house twenty paces rearward of a belt of tamarisks,
green amid the hollowed yellows of shore banks yet in shade,
crumbling to the sands. Weyburn was attracted by a diminutive
white tent of sentry-box shape; evidently a bather's, quite as evi.
dently a fair bather's. He would have to walk on some way for
his dip. He remarked to little Collett that ladies going into the
water half-dressed never have more than half a bath.
His arms
and legs flung out contempt of that style of bathing, exactly in
old Matey's well-remembered way.
Half a mile off shore, the Susan was put about to flap her
sails, and her boat rocked with the passengers. Turning from a
final cheer to friendly Matthew, Weyburn at the rudder espied
one of those unenfranchised ladies in marine uniform issuing
through the tent-slit. She stepped firmly, as into her element.
A plain look at her, and a curious look, and an intent look, fixed
her fast, and ran the shock on his heart before he knew of a
guess. She waded, she dipped; a head across the breast of the
waters was observed: this one of them could swim. She was
making for sea, a stone's throw off the direction of the boat.
Before his wits had grasped the certainty possessing them,
fiery envy and desire to be alongside her set his fingers fretting
at buttons. A grand smooth swell of the waters lifted her, and
her head rose to see her world. She sank down the valley,
where another wave was mounding for its onward roll: a gentle
## p. 9935 (#343) ###########################################
GEORGE MEREDITH
9935
scene of the Bárt éteóvra of Weyburn's favorite Sophoclean chorus.
Now she was given to him — it was she. How could it ever have
been any other! He handed his watch to little Collett, and gave
him the ropes, pitched coat and waistcoat on his knees, stood
free of boots and socks, and singing out truly enough the words
of a popular cry, “White ducks want washing,” went over and in.
>
Aminta soon had to know she was chased. She had seen the
dive from the boat, and received an illumination. With a chuckle
of delighted surprise, like a blackbird startled, she pushed sea-
ward for joy of the effort, thinking she could exult in imagina-
tion of an escape up to the moment of capture, yielding then
only to his greater will; and she meant to try it.
The swim was a holiday; all was new - nothing came to her
as the same old thing since she took her plunge; she had a sea-
mind — had left her earth-mind ashore. The swim, and Matey
Weyburn pursuing her, passed up out of happiness, through the
spheres of delirium, into the region where our life is as we
would have it be: a home holding the quiet of the heavens, if
but midway thither, and a home of delicious animation of the
whole frame, equal to wings.
He drew on her; but he was distant, and she waved an arm.
The shout of her glee sprang from her: "Matey! ” He waved:
she heard his voice. Was it her name? He was not so drunken
of the sea as she: he had not leapt out of bondage into buoyant
waters, into a youth without a blot, without an aim, satisfied in
tasting; the dream of the long felicity.
A thought brushed by her: How if he were absent ?
It relaxed her stroke of arms and legs. He had doubled the
salt sea's rapture, and he had shackled its gift of freedom. She
turned to float, gathering her knees for the funny sullen kick,
until she heard him near. At once her stroke was renewed vig-
orously; she had the foot of her pursuer, and she called, "Adieu,
Matey Weyburn!
Her bravado deserved a swifter humiliation than he was able
to bring down on her; she swam bravely: and she was divine to
see as well as overtake.
Darting to the close parallel, he said, “What sea-nymph sang
me my name ? »
She smote a pang of her ecstasy into him: "Ask mine! »
“ Browny! ”
(
## p. 9936 (#344) ###########################################
9936
GEORGE MEREDITH
>
They swam; neither of them panted; their heads were water-
flowers that spoke at ease.
“We've run rom school; we won't go back. ”
«We've a kingdom. ”
“Here's a big wave going to be a wall. ”
“Off he rolls. ”
“He's like the High Brent broad meadow under Elling
Wood. ”
“Don't let Miss Vincent hear you. ”
« They're not waves: they're sighs of the deep. ”
"A poet I swim with! He fell into the deep in his first of
May-morning ducks. We used to expect him. ”
“I never expected to owe them so much. "
Pride of the swimmer and the energy of her joy embraced
Aminta, that she might nerve all her powers to gain the half.
minute for speaking at her ease.
“Who'd have thought of a morning like this? You were
looked for last night. ”
“A lucky accident to our coach. I made friends with the
skipper of the yawl. ”
“I saw the boat. Who could have dreamed — ? Anything
may happen now.
”
For nothing further would astonish her, as he rightly under-
stood her; but he said, “You're prepared for the rites? Old
Triton is ready. ”
“Float, and tell me. ”
They spun about to lie on their backs. Her right hand, at
piano-work of the octave-shake, was touched and taken, and she
did not pull it away. Her eyelids fell.
«Old Triton waits. ”
“Why? ”
“We're going to him. ”
« Yes ? »
Customs of the sea. ”
« Tell me. ”
"He joins hands. We say, “Browny - Matey,' and it's done. ”
She splashed, crying "Swim," and after two strokes, You
want to beat me, Matey Weyburn. "
«How ? »
«Not fair! "
“Say what. ”
»
(
»
-
## p. 9937 (#345) ###########################################
GEORGE MEREDITH
9937
»
“Take my breath. But, yes! we'll be happy in our own way.
We're sea-birds. We've said adieu to land. Not to one another.
We shall be friends?
"Always. ”
« This is going to last ? ”
«Ever so long. ”
They had a spell of steady swimming, companionship to inspirit
it. Browny was allowed place a little foremost, and she guessed
not wherefore, in her flattered emulation.
“I'm bound for France. ”
«Slue a point to the right: southeast by south. We shall hit
Dunquerque. ”
“I don't mean to be picked up by boats. ”
“We'll decline. ”
“You see I can swim. ”
I was sure of it. »
They stopped their talk — for the pleasure of the body to be
savored in the mind, they thought; and so took Nature's counsel
to rest their voices awhile.
Considering that she had not been used of late to long immer-
sions, and had not broken her fast, and had talked much for a
sea-nymph, Weyburn spied behind him on a shore seeming flat
down, far removed.
“France next time,” he said: “we'll face to the rear. ”
«Now? » said she, big with blissful conceit of her powers, and
incredulous of such a command from him.
“You may be feeling tired presently. "
The musical sincerity of her “Oh no, not I! ” sped through
his limbs: he had a willingness to go onward still some way.
But his words fastened the heavy land on her spirit, knocked
at the habit of obedience. Her stroke of the arms paused. She
inclined to his example, and he set it shoreward.
They swam silently, high, low, creatures of the smooth green
roller.
He heard the water-song of her swimming. She, though
breathing equably at the nostrils, lay deep. The water shocked
at her chin, and curled round the under lip. He had a faint
anxiety; and not so sensible of a weight in the sight of land as
she was, he chattered by snatches, rallied her, encouraged her
to continue sportive for this once, letting her feel it was but a
once and had its respected limit with him. So it was not out of
the world.
XVII-622
## p. 9938 (#346) ###########################################
9938
GEORGE MEREDITH
Ah, friend Matey! And that was right and good on land; but
rightness and goodness flung earth's shadow across her brilliancy
here, and any stress on “this once ” withdrew her liberty to revel
in it, putting an end to a perfect holiday; and silence, too, might
hint at fatigue. She began to think her muteness lost her the
bloom of the enchantment, robbing her of her heavenly frolic
lead, since friend Matey resolved to be as eminently good in salt
water as on land. Was he unaware that they were boy and girl
again ? — she washed pure of the intervening years, new born, by
blessing of the sea; worthy of him here! — that is, a swimmer
worthy of him, his comrade in salt water.
« You're satisfied I swim well ? ” she said.
“It would go hard with me if we raced a long race. ”
"I really was out for France. ”
“I was ordered to keep you for England. ”
She gave him Browny's eyes.
« We've turned our backs on Triton. ”
“The ceremony was performed. ”
«When? ”
«The minute I spoke of it and you splashed. ”
“Matey! Matey Weyburn! »
“Browny Farrell! >>
"O Matey! she's gone! ”
She's here. "
« Try to beguile me, then, that our holiday's not over. You
won't forget this hour ? ”
“No time of mine on earth will live so brightly for me. ”
“I have never had one like it. I could go under and be
happy; go to old Triton and wait for you; teach him to speak
your proper Christian name. He hasn't heard it yet — heard
Matey'— never yet has been taught Matthew. ) »
"Aminta ! »
"O my friend! my dear! ” she cried, in the voice of the
wounded, like a welling of her blood, “my strength will leave
me. I may play — not you: you play with a weak vessel. Swim,
and be quiet. How far do you count it ? »
"Under a quarter of a mile. ”
"Don't imagine me tired. ”
"If you are, hold on to me. ”
Matey, I'm for a dive. ”
He went after the ball of silver and bubbles, and they came
up together. There is no history of events below the surface,
(
)
## p. 9939 (#347) ###########################################
GEORGE MEREDITH
9939
She shook off her briny blindness, and settled to the full
sweep of the arms, quite silent now. Some emotion, or exhaus-
tion from the strain of the swimmer's breath in speech, stopped
her playfulness. The pleasure she still knew was a recollection
of the outward swim, when she had been privileged to cast
away sex with the push from earth, as few men will believe
that women, beautiful women, ever wish to do; and often and
ardently during the run ahead they yearn for Nature to grant
them their one short holiday truce.
But Aminta forgave him for bringing earth so close to her
when there was yet a space of salt water between her and shore;
and she smiled at times, that he might not think she was look-
ing grave.
They touched the sand at the first draw of the ebb; and this
being earth, Matey addressed himself to the guardian and ab-
solving genii of matter-of-fact by saying, “Did you inquire about
the tides ? »
Her head shook, stunned with what had passed. She waded
to shore, after motioning for him to swim on.
Men, in the comparison beside their fair fellows, are so little
sensationally complex, that his one feeling now as to what had
passed, was relief at the idea of his presence having been a war-
rantable protectorship. Aminta's return from sea-nymph to the
state of woman crossed annihilation on the way back to senti-
ence, and picked-up meaningless pebbles and shells of life, be-
tween the sea's verge and her tent's shelter: hardly her own life
her understanding yet, except for the hammer Memory became
to strike her insensible, at here and there a recollected word or
nakedness of her soul. What had she done, what revealed, to
shiver at for the remainder of her days!
He swam along the shore to where the boat was paddled,
spying at her bare feet on the sand, her woman's form. He
waved, and the figure in the striped tunic and trousers waved
her response, apparently the same person he had quitted.
Dry and clad, and decently formal under the transformation,
they met at Mrs. Collett's breakfast table; and in each hung the
doubt whether land was the dream, or sea.
## p. 9940 (#348) ###########################################
9940
GEORGE MEREDITH
FROM MODERY LOVE)
A
LL other joys of life he strove to warm,
And magnify, and catch them to his lip;
But they had suffered shipwreck with the ship.
And gazed upon him sallow from the storm.
Or if Delusion came, 'twas but to show
The coming minute mock the one that went.
Cold as a mountain in its star-pitched tent
Stood high philosophy, less friend than foe;
Whom self-caged passion, from its prison-bars,
Is always watching with a wondering hate.
Not till the fire is dying in the grate
Look we for any kinship with the stars.
Oh, Wisdom never comes when it is gold,
And the great price we pay for it full worth;
We have it only when we are half earth:
Little avails that coinage to the old!
EVENING
W"
E SAW the swallows gathering in the sky,
And in the osier-isle we heard their noise.
We had not to look back on summer joys,
Or forward to a summer of bright dye;
But in the largeness of the evening earth
Our spirits grew as we went side by side.
The hour became her husband and my bride.
Love that had robbed us so, thus blessed our dearth!
The pilgrims of the year waxed very loud
In multitudinous chatterings as the flood
Full brown came from the West, and like pale blood
Expanded to the upper crimson cloud.
Love, that had robbed us of immortal things,
This little moment mercifully gave,
Where I have seen across the twilight wave
The swan sail with her young beneath her wings.
## p. 9941 (#349) ###########################################
9941
PROSPER MÉRIMÉE
(1803-1870)
BY GRACE KING
Kne of the magisterial critics of Mérimée's day, passing judg-
ment upon his writings, dismisses personal details about the
author with the remark: "As for the biography of Prosper
Mérimée, it is like the history of a happy people,- it does not exist.
One knows only that he was educated in a college of Paris, that he
has studied law, that he has been received as a lawyer, that he has
never pleaded; and the papers have taken
pains to inform us that he is to-day secre-
tary to M. le Comte d'Argout. Those who
know him familiarly see in him nothing
more than a man of very simple manners,
with a solid education, reading Italian and
modern Greek with ease, and speaking Eng-
lish and Spanish with remarkable purity. ”
This was written in 1832, when Mérimée
in his thirtieth year had attained celebrity
not only in the literary world of Paris, but
in the world of literary Europe, as the
author of the Theatre de Clara Gazul);
"La Guzla'; 'La Chronique de Charles IX. '; PROSPER MÉRIMÉE
(Mateo Falcone); Tamango'; 'La Partie
de Tric-Trac'; 'Le Vase Etrusque); La Double Méprise); “La Vision
de Charles XI. ': most of which Taine pronounced masterpieces of
fiction, destined to immortality as classics.
No tribute could have been better devised to please Mérimée, and
praise his writings, than this one to the impersonality of his art, and
the dispensation of it from any obligation to its author. “We should
write and speak,” he held, so that no one would notice, at least
immediately, that we were writing or speaking differently from any
one else. ” But as that most impersonal of modern critics, Walter
Pater, keenly observes: “Mérimée's superb self-effacement, his imper-
sonality, is itself but an effective personal trait, and transferred to
art, becomes a markedly peculiar quality of literary beauty. ” And
he pronounces in a sentence the judgment of Mérimée's literary pos-
terity upon him: "For in truth this creature who had no
care for
half-lights, and like his creations, had no atmosphere about him,
## p. 9942 (#350) ###########################################
9942
PROSPER MÉRIMÉE
-
an
-
gifted as he was with pure mind, with the quality which secures
flawless literary structures, — had on the other hand nothing of what
we call soul in literature. ”
And the brilliant young secretary and successful author, whose
happiness furnishes presumptive evidence against a biography, was no
more relieved from the fact of it than the hypothetical happy people
of their history. With that unfaltering rectification of contempo-
raneous values which time and the gravitation to truth bring about,
Mérimée's position in regard to his works is quite the reverse of
what he contemplated and aimed for. Of the published volumes of
his writings, the many containing his artistic works could be better
spared than the few containing his letters. And of his letters, that
volume will longest carry his name into the future which contains
his most intimate, most confidential, least meditated, in short most
genuinely personal and most artistically perfect revelations,— his
Lettres à une Inconnue) (Letters to an Unknown Woman).
Prosper Mérimée was born in Paris in 1803, of parentage that
made his vocation, it would seem, mandatory. His father was
artist of note, a pupil of David's, and long secretary of the École des
Beaux-Arts. His mother was also, and in a double measure, an artist.
Her talent was for portraits of children, whose quiet sittings she
secured by her other talent of relating stories,- a gift inherited from
her grandmother, Madame de Beaumont, a charming writer of child-
ren's stories, and the author of the famous and entrancing Beauty
and the Beast. ' At twenty, having finished his collegiate studies,
Mérimée, in obedience to the will of his parents, began to fit himself
for the legal profession. Following his own tastes, however, he had
already sought and gained admission into the salons of the men of
letters, and was already under his first and only literary influence,-
that of Henri Beyle, the progenitor of modern French realism. It
was in one of these salons that he, not yet twenty-one, read his first
composition, a drama, Cromwell); an effort inspired by Shakespeare
and composed according to the doctrines of Beyle. It was never
published. Shortly afterwards, in the same place and to the same
audience, he read aloud his second attempt, The Spaniards in Den-
mark); and Heaven and Hell, a little dramatic scene which met
with spontaneous applause, and was praised as extremely witty and
still more undevout. Successive readings followed in successive even-
ings, under the encouragement of applause; and the collection, by a
last stroke of audacious wit, in which author and audience collab-
orated, was published as the “Théâtre de Clara Gazul' (an imaginary
Spanish actress), with the portrait of Mérimée, in low-necked dress
and mantilla, for frontispiece.
The strong individuality of Mérimée's art is as easily discernible
to-day, under the thin disguise of his pseudonym, as his features
1
## p. 9943 (#351) ###########################################
PROSPER MÉRIMÉE
9943
under his travesty: his clear, cold, impartial realism, unflinching wit,
and a trait attributed also to his mother— his invincible irreligion.
The success of the mystification was immediate and effective. His
next adventure was of the same kind: the publication of 'La Guzla,'
a collection of prose ballads, pseudo-translations from the Dalmatian
folk-songs, with prefatory notices, appendices, and biographical sketch
of the author, the bard Magdanovitch, accompanied by a dissertation
on vampires and the evil eye. The intrinsic beauty of the ballads,
the barbaric strength of the imagination, in the musical rhythm of
French prose, contributed to render the mystification one of the most
perfect in literary history. Goethe wrote an article upon it, Push-
kin made translations from it, and German scholars rejoiced in print
to find in it some long-lost Illyrian metrical measure. This success
disgusted Mérimée with “local color,” — the shibboleth of the young
French Romantic school,— seeing, as he said, how easy it was to fab-
ricate it.
The Famille Carvajal, a continuation of the Spanish vein,- a
weird, grewsome, and pitiless tale,— and “Le Jacquerie,' a dramatic
historical recital in the Shakespearean vein, followed. His next
venture was in historical fiction : (The Chronicle of Charles IX. ,' an
evident inspiration from Walter Scott. From an English point of
view, it is the masterpiece of French fiction in historical domain; and
one, with a few reservations, not unworthy the hand of “Waverley »
himself.
In 1830 came the visit to Spain, related in his published letters,
and the forming of the friendship with the Countess of Montijo which
led to a correspondence, of which the fragments published are war-
rant that it will prove in the future an invaluable guide to the social,
literary, and political history of Paris during the yet controverted
period of the Empire. Always sensitive to feminine influence, if not
to local color, it is to the Countess of Montijo that Mérimée owes the
Spanish inspiration, as it may well be called, which bore fruit in his
incomparable relation of Carmen. ' And while a guest of his friend,
listening to her charming tales of the Alhambra and the Generalife,
Mérimée formed his historical friendship with the Empress Eugénie,
then a little girl playing around her mother's knee.
Appointed inspector-general of the historical monuments of France,
Mérimée threw his archæological erudition into diligent performance
of official duties. His reports, written with minute and even pedan-
tic conscientiousness, bear out Faguet's assertion that — archæologist,
traveler, art critic, historian, and philologist, man of the world and
senator, and competent and sure
as each
he would and should
have belonged to four academies; it was only his discretion that re-
stricted him to two,— the Académie Française and Académie des
Inscriptions. As a compatriot states, it was the inspector-general that
u
## p. 9944 (#352) ###########################################
9944
PROSPER MÉRIMÉE
related to him two of his most perfect stories, the Venus d'Ille?
and 'Colomba,' while it was the philologist who found the episode of
Carmen. '
It was at this point of his life, at the meridian of age and success,
that he received his first letter from the Inconnue, a graceful tribute
from the graceful pen of a woman, who yielded to an impulse to
express her admiration, yet guarded her identity beyond possibility
of discovery. The correspondence ensued that a posthumous publi-
cation under the editorship of H. Taine has revealed to the public.
In it, for one who knows how to read the letters, as Taine says,
Mérimée shows himself gracious, tender, delicate, truly in love, and a
poet. After nine years of expostulation and entreaty he obtained an
interview; and his mysterious friend proved to be a Mademoiselle
Jenny Dacquin, the daughter of a notary of Boulogne. The friend-
ship that ensued waxed into love through the thirty succeeding years,
and waned again into a friendship that ended only with Mérimée's
life; his last letter to the Inconnue, a few lines, was written two
hours before he died.
Mérimée's (Studies in the History of Rome,' his "Social War,' and
Catiline,' were to have been followed and closed by a study of
Cæsar. Circumstances, however, adjourned the task, which was after-
wards ceded to an illustrious competitor, or collaborator,-- Napoleon
III. In 1844 he was elected to the French Academy. On the follow-
ing day he published Arsène Guillot. ) Had the publication preceded
the election, the result might have been different; for repentant
Academicians pronounced immoral the tale which Anglo-Saxon critics
have generally selected as the most simple, most pathetic, and only
human one the author ever wrote.
In 1852, the little girl whose growth and development Mérimée
had watched with tenderest interest became Empress of the French.
He was appointed life senator in the reconstructed government; and
became one of the most familiar members of the new and brilliant
court at the Tuileries, and always a conspicuous one. His pleased,
tender, sad, gay, and always frank and critical commentary of the
court and its circles, forms the interest of his weekly bulletins to
the Countess of Montijo. His conversational charm, his wit, and his
ever ready response to demands upon his artistic and historical lore,
in questions of etiquette, costumes, and precedent; his versatility as
dramatist and actor, and his genius for friendship with women,-
made him not only a favorite, but a spoiled favorite, in the royal cir-
cle. His coldness, reserve, cynicism, frank speech, and independent
political opinions saved him from even a suspicion of being a courtier.
He nevertheless lost none of his diligence in literature.
period of his edition of Henri Beyle and of Brantôme, of numerous
miscellaneous articles in reviews, and of those excursions into Russian
It was the
## p. 9945 (#353) ###########################################
PROSPER MÉRIMÉE
9945
literature — critical dissertations upon Gogol, Pushkin, and Tourgué-
nieff — which may be considered the pioneer of that advance into
Russian literature which has resulted in throwing it open to, and
making it one with, the literature of Europe.
To this period also belongs his friendship with Panizzi, the ad-
ministrator of the British Museum; and the voluminous correspond-
ence in which he reveals himself in all the fineness and breadth of
his culture,- as Taine puts it, the possessor of six languages with
their literature and history, man of the world and politician, as well
as philosopher, artist, and historian.
So shrewd an observer of men and politics could not be unpre-
pared for the catastrophe of 1870. He had never been free from
vague apprehensions, and the acute presentiment overshadows the
gayety in his letters. In addition he was growing old, and infirm
health drove him during the winter months into annual exile at
Cannes. It was there that, in a crisis of his malady, the journals, in
anticipation of the end, published his death, and M. Guizot in conse-
quence made official announcement of it at the Academy. Mérimée
lived, however, to return to Paris, and suffer through to the end of
the tragedy. He dragged himself to the Tuileries, had a last inter-
view with his mistress, sat for the last time in his seat in the Senate,
and voted for adjournment to a morrow which never came. Four
days afterwards he departed for Cannes, where a fortnight later he
died. He was buried in the Protestant cemetery.
“A gallant man and a gentleman,” says Faguet, «he has had the reward
he would have wished. He has been discreetly and intimately enjoyed by
delicate tastes.
fair hand, kissed it, and hung his head, swinging away from her,
ready for death.
Strange, that now she was released she should linger by him.
Strange, that his audacity, instead of the executioner, brought
blushes and timid tenderness to his side, and the sweet words,
“You are not angry with me? "
“With you, O Beloved! ” cried his soul. "And you forgive
me, fair charity! ”
She repeated her words in deeper sweetness to his bewildered
look; and he, inexperienced, possessed by her, almost lifeless with
the divine new emotions she had realized in him, could only sigh
and gaze at her wonderingly.
“I think it was rude of me to go without thanking you
again,” she said, and again proffered her hand.
The sweet heaven-bird shivered out his song above him. The
gracious glory of heaven fell upon his soul. He touched her
hand, not moving his eyes from her nor speaking; and she, with
a soft word of farewell, passed across the stile, and up the path-
way through the dewy shades of the copse, and out of the arch
of the light, away from his eyes.
And away with her went the wild enchantment. He looked
on barren air.
But it was no more the world of yesterday.
The marvelous splendors had sown seeds in him, ready to spring
up and bloom at her gaze; and in his bosom now the vivid con-
juration of her tones, her face, her shape, makes them leap and
illumine him like fitful summer lightnings - ghosts of the van-
ished sun.
There was nothing to tell him that he had been making love
and declaring it with extraordinary rapidity; nor did he know it.
Soft flushed cheeks! sweet mouth! strange sweet brows! eyes of
softest fire! - how could his ripe eyes behold you, and not plead
## p. 9930 (#338) ###########################################
9930
GEORGE MEREDITH
to keep you? Nay, how could he let you go? And he seriously
asked himself that question.
To-morrow this place will have a memory,- the river and the
meadow, and the white falling weir: his heart will build a tem-
ple here; and the skylark will be its high priest, and the old
blackbird its glossy-gowned chorister, and there will be a sacred
repast of dewberries. To-day the grass is grass; his heart is
chased by phantoms and finds rest nowhere. Only when the
most tender freshness of his flower comes across him does he
taste a moment's calm; and no sooner does it come than it gives
place to keen pangs of fear that she may not be his forever.
Ere long he learns that her name is Lucy. Ere long he
meets Ralph, and discovers that in a day he has distanced him
by a sphere.
RICHARD'S ORDEAL IS OVER
From «The Ordeal of Richard Feverel:
W"
HERE are the dreams of the hero when he learns he has a
child ? Nature is taking him to her bosom. She will
speak presently. Every domesticated boor in these hills
can boast the same; yet marvels the hero at none of his visioned
prodigies as he does when he comes to hear of this most com-
mon performance. A father? Richard fixed his eyes as if he
were trying to make out the lineaments of his child.
Telling Austin he would be back in a few minutes, he sallied
into the air, and walked on and on. “A father! ” he kept repeat-
ing to himself: "a child! ” And though he knew it not, he was
striking the keynotes of Nature. But he did know of a singular
harmony that suddenly burst over his whole being.
The moon was surpassingly bright; the summer air heavy
and still. He left the high-road and pierced into the forest. His
walk was rapid: the leaves on the trees brushed his cheeks;
the dead leaves heaped in the dells noised to his feet Some-
thing of a religious joy — a strange sacred pleasure — was in
him. By degrees it wore; he remembered himself; and now he
was possessed by a proportionate anguish. A father! he dared
never see his child. And he had no longer his phantasies to fall
upon, He was utterly bare to his sin. In his troubled mind it
seemed to him that Clare looked down on him Clare, who saw
## p. 9931 (#339) ###########################################
GEORGE MEREDITH
9931
him as he was- and that to her eyes it would be infamy for
him to go and print his kiss upon his child. Then came stern
efforts to command his misery and make the nerves of his face
iron.
By the log of an ancient tree, half buried in dead leaves of
past summers, beside a brook, he halted as one who had reached
his journey's end. There he discovered he had a companion in
Lady Judith's little dog. He gave the friendly animal a pat of
recognition, and both were silent in the forest silence.
It was impossible for Richard to return; his heart was sur-
charged. He must advance; and on he footed, the little dog fol-
lowing:
An oppressive slumber hung about the forest branches. In the
dells and on the heights was the same dead heat. Here where
the brook tinkled, it was no cool-lipped sound, but metallic, and
without the spirit of water. Yonder, in a space of moonlight
on lush grass, the beams were as white fire to sight and feeling.
No haze spread around. The valleys were clear, defined to the
shadows of their verges; the distances sharply distinct, and with
the colors of day but slightly softened. Richard beheld a roe
moving across a slope of sward far out of rifle mark. The breath-
less silence was significant, yet the moon shone in a broad blue
heaven. Tongue out of mouth trotted the little dog after him;
couched panting when he stopped an instant; rose weariedly
when he started afresh. Now and then a large white night-moth
flitted through the dusk of the forest.
On a barren corner of the wooded highland, looking inland,
stood gray topless ruins set in nettles and rank grass blades.
Richard mechanically sat down on the crumbling flints to rest,
and listened to the panting of the dog. Sprinkled at his feet
were emerald lights; hundreds of glow-worms studded the dark
dry ground.
He sat and eyed them, thinking not at all. His energies
were expended in action. He sat as a part of the ruins, and the
moon turned his shadow westward from the south. Overhead,
as she declined, long ripples of silver cloud were imperceptibly
stealing toward her. They were the van of a tempest. He did
not observe them, or the leaves beginning to chatter. When he
again pursued his course with his face to the Rhine, a huge
mountain appeared to rise sheer over him, and he had it in his
mind to scale it. He got no nearer to the base of it for all his
## p. 9932 (#340) ###########################################
9932
GEORGE MEREDITH
vigorous outstepping The ground began to dip; he lost sight of
the sky
Then heavy thunder drops struck his cheek, the leaves
were singing, the earth breathed, it was black before him and
behind. All at once the thunder spoke. The mountain he had
marked was bursting over him.
Up started the whole forest in violet fire. He saw the coun-
try at the foot of the hills, to the bounding Rhine, gleam, quiver,
extinguished. Then there were pauses: and the lightning seemed
as the eye of heaven, and the thunder as the tongue of heaven,
each alternately addressing him; filling him with awful rapture.
Alone there — sole human creature among the grandeurs and
mysteries of storm — he felt the representative of his kind; and
his spirit rose and marched and exulted, - let it be glory, let it
be ruin! Lower down the lightened abysses of air rolled the
wrathful crash; then white thrusts of light were darted from the
sky, and great curving ferns, seen steadfast in pallor a second,
were supernaturally agitated, and vanished. Then a shrill song
a
roused in the leaves and the herbage. Prolonged and louder it
sounded, as deeper and heavier the deluge pressed. A mighty
force of water satisfied the desire of the earth. Even in this,
drenched as he was by the first outpouring, Richard had a sav-
age pleasure. Keeping in motion, he was scarcely conscious of
the wet, and the grateful breath of the weeds was refreshing.
Suddenly he stopped short, lifting a curious nostril. He fancied
he smelt meadow-sweet. He had never seen the flower in Rhine.
land — never thought of it; and it would hardly be met with in
a forest.
He was
sure he smelt it fresh in dews. His little
companion wagged a miserable wet tail some way in advance.
He went on slowly, thinking indistinctly. After two or three
steps he stooped and stretched out his hand to feel for the
flower,— having, he knew not why, a strong wish to verify its
growth there. Groping about, his hand encountered something
warm that started at his touch; and he, with the instinct we
have, seized it and lifted it to look at it. The creature was very
small, evidently quite young. Richard's eyes, now accustomed
to the darkness, were able to discern it for what it was,-a tiny
leveret; and he supposed that the dog had probably frightened
its dam just before he found it. He put the little thing on one
hand in his breast, and stepped out rapidly as before.
The rain was now steady; from every tree a fountain poured.
So cool and easy had his mind become that he was speculating
## p. 9933 (#341) ###########################################
GEORGE MEREDITH
9933
on what kind of shelter the birds could find, and how the butter-
flies and moths saved their colored wings from washing Folded
close they might hang under a leaf, he thought. Lovingly he
looked into the dripping darkness of the coverts on each side, as
one of their children. Then he was musing on a strange sensa-
tion he experienced. It ran up one arm with an indescribable
thrill, but communicated nothing to his heart. It was purely
physical, ceased for a time, and recommenced, till he had it all
through his blood, wonderfully thrilling. He grew aware that
the little thing he carried in his breast was licking his hand
there. The small rough tongue going over and over the palm of
his hand produced this strange sensation he felt. Now that he
knew the cause, the marvel ended; but now that he knew the
cause, his heart was touched and made more of it.
The gentle
scraping continued without intermission as on he walked. What
did it say to him ? Human tongue could not have said so much
just then.
A pale gray light on the skirts of the flying tempest dis-
played the dawn. Richard was walking hurriedly. The green
drenched weeds lay all about in his path, bent thick, and the
forest drooped glimmeringly. Impelled as a man who feels a a
revelation mounting obscurely to his brain, Richard was passing
one of those little forest chapels, hung with votive wreaths, where
the peasant halts to kneel and pray. Cold, still, in the twilight
it stood, rain-drops pattering round it. He looked within, and
,
saw the Virgin holding her Child. He moved by. But not
many steps had he gone ere his strength went out of him, and
he shuddered. What was it ? He asked not. He was in other
hands. Vivid as lightning the Spirit of Life illumined him. He
felt in his heart the cry of his child, his darling's touch. With
shut eyes he saw them both. They drew him from the depths;
they led him a blind and tottering man. And as they led him,
he had a sense of purification so sweet he shuddered again and
again.
When he looked out from his trance on the breathing world,
the small birds hopped and chirped: warm fresh sunlight was
over all the hills. He was on the edge of the forest, entering a
plain clothed with ripe corn under a spacious morning sky.
## p. 9934 (#342) ###########################################
GEORGE MEREDITH
9934
AMINTA TAKES A MORNING SEA-SWIM: A MARINE DUET
From Lord Ormont and his Aminta. Copyright 1894, by Charles Scribner's
Sons
on a sea
A.
GLORIOUS morning of flushed open sky and sun
chased all small thoughts out of it. The breeze was from
the west; and the Susan, lightly laden, took the heave of
smooth rollers with a flowing current-curtsy in the motion of her
speed. Foresail and aft were at their gentle strain; her shadow
rippled fragmentarily along to the silver rivulet and boat of her
wake. Straight she flew to the ball of fire now at spring above
the waters, and raining red gold on the line of her bows. By
comparison she was an ugly yawl, and as the creature of wind
and wave beautiful.
They passed an English defensive fort, and spared its walls,
in obedience to Matthew Shale's good counsel that they should
forbear from sneezing. Little Collett pointed to the roof of his
mother's house twenty paces rearward of a belt of tamarisks,
green amid the hollowed yellows of shore banks yet in shade,
crumbling to the sands. Weyburn was attracted by a diminutive
white tent of sentry-box shape; evidently a bather's, quite as evi.
dently a fair bather's. He would have to walk on some way for
his dip. He remarked to little Collett that ladies going into the
water half-dressed never have more than half a bath.
His arms
and legs flung out contempt of that style of bathing, exactly in
old Matey's well-remembered way.
Half a mile off shore, the Susan was put about to flap her
sails, and her boat rocked with the passengers. Turning from a
final cheer to friendly Matthew, Weyburn at the rudder espied
one of those unenfranchised ladies in marine uniform issuing
through the tent-slit. She stepped firmly, as into her element.
A plain look at her, and a curious look, and an intent look, fixed
her fast, and ran the shock on his heart before he knew of a
guess. She waded, she dipped; a head across the breast of the
waters was observed: this one of them could swim. She was
making for sea, a stone's throw off the direction of the boat.
Before his wits had grasped the certainty possessing them,
fiery envy and desire to be alongside her set his fingers fretting
at buttons. A grand smooth swell of the waters lifted her, and
her head rose to see her world. She sank down the valley,
where another wave was mounding for its onward roll: a gentle
## p. 9935 (#343) ###########################################
GEORGE MEREDITH
9935
scene of the Bárt éteóvra of Weyburn's favorite Sophoclean chorus.
Now she was given to him — it was she. How could it ever have
been any other! He handed his watch to little Collett, and gave
him the ropes, pitched coat and waistcoat on his knees, stood
free of boots and socks, and singing out truly enough the words
of a popular cry, “White ducks want washing,” went over and in.
>
Aminta soon had to know she was chased. She had seen the
dive from the boat, and received an illumination. With a chuckle
of delighted surprise, like a blackbird startled, she pushed sea-
ward for joy of the effort, thinking she could exult in imagina-
tion of an escape up to the moment of capture, yielding then
only to his greater will; and she meant to try it.
The swim was a holiday; all was new - nothing came to her
as the same old thing since she took her plunge; she had a sea-
mind — had left her earth-mind ashore. The swim, and Matey
Weyburn pursuing her, passed up out of happiness, through the
spheres of delirium, into the region where our life is as we
would have it be: a home holding the quiet of the heavens, if
but midway thither, and a home of delicious animation of the
whole frame, equal to wings.
He drew on her; but he was distant, and she waved an arm.
The shout of her glee sprang from her: "Matey! ” He waved:
she heard his voice. Was it her name? He was not so drunken
of the sea as she: he had not leapt out of bondage into buoyant
waters, into a youth without a blot, without an aim, satisfied in
tasting; the dream of the long felicity.
A thought brushed by her: How if he were absent ?
It relaxed her stroke of arms and legs. He had doubled the
salt sea's rapture, and he had shackled its gift of freedom. She
turned to float, gathering her knees for the funny sullen kick,
until she heard him near. At once her stroke was renewed vig-
orously; she had the foot of her pursuer, and she called, "Adieu,
Matey Weyburn!
Her bravado deserved a swifter humiliation than he was able
to bring down on her; she swam bravely: and she was divine to
see as well as overtake.
Darting to the close parallel, he said, “What sea-nymph sang
me my name ? »
She smote a pang of her ecstasy into him: "Ask mine! »
“ Browny! ”
(
## p. 9936 (#344) ###########################################
9936
GEORGE MEREDITH
>
They swam; neither of them panted; their heads were water-
flowers that spoke at ease.
“We've run rom school; we won't go back. ”
«We've a kingdom. ”
“Here's a big wave going to be a wall. ”
“Off he rolls. ”
“He's like the High Brent broad meadow under Elling
Wood. ”
“Don't let Miss Vincent hear you. ”
« They're not waves: they're sighs of the deep. ”
"A poet I swim with! He fell into the deep in his first of
May-morning ducks. We used to expect him. ”
“I never expected to owe them so much. "
Pride of the swimmer and the energy of her joy embraced
Aminta, that she might nerve all her powers to gain the half.
minute for speaking at her ease.
“Who'd have thought of a morning like this? You were
looked for last night. ”
“A lucky accident to our coach. I made friends with the
skipper of the yawl. ”
“I saw the boat. Who could have dreamed — ? Anything
may happen now.
”
For nothing further would astonish her, as he rightly under-
stood her; but he said, “You're prepared for the rites? Old
Triton is ready. ”
“Float, and tell me. ”
They spun about to lie on their backs. Her right hand, at
piano-work of the octave-shake, was touched and taken, and she
did not pull it away. Her eyelids fell.
«Old Triton waits. ”
“Why? ”
“We're going to him. ”
« Yes ? »
Customs of the sea. ”
« Tell me. ”
"He joins hands. We say, “Browny - Matey,' and it's done. ”
She splashed, crying "Swim," and after two strokes, You
want to beat me, Matey Weyburn. "
«How ? »
«Not fair! "
“Say what. ”
»
(
»
-
## p. 9937 (#345) ###########################################
GEORGE MEREDITH
9937
»
“Take my breath. But, yes! we'll be happy in our own way.
We're sea-birds. We've said adieu to land. Not to one another.
We shall be friends?
"Always. ”
« This is going to last ? ”
«Ever so long. ”
They had a spell of steady swimming, companionship to inspirit
it. Browny was allowed place a little foremost, and she guessed
not wherefore, in her flattered emulation.
“I'm bound for France. ”
«Slue a point to the right: southeast by south. We shall hit
Dunquerque. ”
“I don't mean to be picked up by boats. ”
“We'll decline. ”
“You see I can swim. ”
I was sure of it. »
They stopped their talk — for the pleasure of the body to be
savored in the mind, they thought; and so took Nature's counsel
to rest their voices awhile.
Considering that she had not been used of late to long immer-
sions, and had not broken her fast, and had talked much for a
sea-nymph, Weyburn spied behind him on a shore seeming flat
down, far removed.
“France next time,” he said: “we'll face to the rear. ”
«Now? » said she, big with blissful conceit of her powers, and
incredulous of such a command from him.
“You may be feeling tired presently. "
The musical sincerity of her “Oh no, not I! ” sped through
his limbs: he had a willingness to go onward still some way.
But his words fastened the heavy land on her spirit, knocked
at the habit of obedience. Her stroke of the arms paused. She
inclined to his example, and he set it shoreward.
They swam silently, high, low, creatures of the smooth green
roller.
He heard the water-song of her swimming. She, though
breathing equably at the nostrils, lay deep. The water shocked
at her chin, and curled round the under lip. He had a faint
anxiety; and not so sensible of a weight in the sight of land as
she was, he chattered by snatches, rallied her, encouraged her
to continue sportive for this once, letting her feel it was but a
once and had its respected limit with him. So it was not out of
the world.
XVII-622
## p. 9938 (#346) ###########################################
9938
GEORGE MEREDITH
Ah, friend Matey! And that was right and good on land; but
rightness and goodness flung earth's shadow across her brilliancy
here, and any stress on “this once ” withdrew her liberty to revel
in it, putting an end to a perfect holiday; and silence, too, might
hint at fatigue. She began to think her muteness lost her the
bloom of the enchantment, robbing her of her heavenly frolic
lead, since friend Matey resolved to be as eminently good in salt
water as on land. Was he unaware that they were boy and girl
again ? — she washed pure of the intervening years, new born, by
blessing of the sea; worthy of him here! — that is, a swimmer
worthy of him, his comrade in salt water.
« You're satisfied I swim well ? ” she said.
“It would go hard with me if we raced a long race. ”
"I really was out for France. ”
“I was ordered to keep you for England. ”
She gave him Browny's eyes.
« We've turned our backs on Triton. ”
“The ceremony was performed. ”
«When? ”
«The minute I spoke of it and you splashed. ”
“Matey! Matey Weyburn! »
“Browny Farrell! >>
"O Matey! she's gone! ”
She's here. "
« Try to beguile me, then, that our holiday's not over. You
won't forget this hour ? ”
“No time of mine on earth will live so brightly for me. ”
“I have never had one like it. I could go under and be
happy; go to old Triton and wait for you; teach him to speak
your proper Christian name. He hasn't heard it yet — heard
Matey'— never yet has been taught Matthew. ) »
"Aminta ! »
"O my friend! my dear! ” she cried, in the voice of the
wounded, like a welling of her blood, “my strength will leave
me. I may play — not you: you play with a weak vessel. Swim,
and be quiet. How far do you count it ? »
"Under a quarter of a mile. ”
"Don't imagine me tired. ”
"If you are, hold on to me. ”
Matey, I'm for a dive. ”
He went after the ball of silver and bubbles, and they came
up together. There is no history of events below the surface,
(
)
## p. 9939 (#347) ###########################################
GEORGE MEREDITH
9939
She shook off her briny blindness, and settled to the full
sweep of the arms, quite silent now. Some emotion, or exhaus-
tion from the strain of the swimmer's breath in speech, stopped
her playfulness. The pleasure she still knew was a recollection
of the outward swim, when she had been privileged to cast
away sex with the push from earth, as few men will believe
that women, beautiful women, ever wish to do; and often and
ardently during the run ahead they yearn for Nature to grant
them their one short holiday truce.
But Aminta forgave him for bringing earth so close to her
when there was yet a space of salt water between her and shore;
and she smiled at times, that he might not think she was look-
ing grave.
They touched the sand at the first draw of the ebb; and this
being earth, Matey addressed himself to the guardian and ab-
solving genii of matter-of-fact by saying, “Did you inquire about
the tides ? »
Her head shook, stunned with what had passed. She waded
to shore, after motioning for him to swim on.
Men, in the comparison beside their fair fellows, are so little
sensationally complex, that his one feeling now as to what had
passed, was relief at the idea of his presence having been a war-
rantable protectorship. Aminta's return from sea-nymph to the
state of woman crossed annihilation on the way back to senti-
ence, and picked-up meaningless pebbles and shells of life, be-
tween the sea's verge and her tent's shelter: hardly her own life
her understanding yet, except for the hammer Memory became
to strike her insensible, at here and there a recollected word or
nakedness of her soul. What had she done, what revealed, to
shiver at for the remainder of her days!
He swam along the shore to where the boat was paddled,
spying at her bare feet on the sand, her woman's form. He
waved, and the figure in the striped tunic and trousers waved
her response, apparently the same person he had quitted.
Dry and clad, and decently formal under the transformation,
they met at Mrs. Collett's breakfast table; and in each hung the
doubt whether land was the dream, or sea.
## p. 9940 (#348) ###########################################
9940
GEORGE MEREDITH
FROM MODERY LOVE)
A
LL other joys of life he strove to warm,
And magnify, and catch them to his lip;
But they had suffered shipwreck with the ship.
And gazed upon him sallow from the storm.
Or if Delusion came, 'twas but to show
The coming minute mock the one that went.
Cold as a mountain in its star-pitched tent
Stood high philosophy, less friend than foe;
Whom self-caged passion, from its prison-bars,
Is always watching with a wondering hate.
Not till the fire is dying in the grate
Look we for any kinship with the stars.
Oh, Wisdom never comes when it is gold,
And the great price we pay for it full worth;
We have it only when we are half earth:
Little avails that coinage to the old!
EVENING
W"
E SAW the swallows gathering in the sky,
And in the osier-isle we heard their noise.
We had not to look back on summer joys,
Or forward to a summer of bright dye;
But in the largeness of the evening earth
Our spirits grew as we went side by side.
The hour became her husband and my bride.
Love that had robbed us so, thus blessed our dearth!
The pilgrims of the year waxed very loud
In multitudinous chatterings as the flood
Full brown came from the West, and like pale blood
Expanded to the upper crimson cloud.
Love, that had robbed us of immortal things,
This little moment mercifully gave,
Where I have seen across the twilight wave
The swan sail with her young beneath her wings.
## p. 9941 (#349) ###########################################
9941
PROSPER MÉRIMÉE
(1803-1870)
BY GRACE KING
Kne of the magisterial critics of Mérimée's day, passing judg-
ment upon his writings, dismisses personal details about the
author with the remark: "As for the biography of Prosper
Mérimée, it is like the history of a happy people,- it does not exist.
One knows only that he was educated in a college of Paris, that he
has studied law, that he has been received as a lawyer, that he has
never pleaded; and the papers have taken
pains to inform us that he is to-day secre-
tary to M. le Comte d'Argout. Those who
know him familiarly see in him nothing
more than a man of very simple manners,
with a solid education, reading Italian and
modern Greek with ease, and speaking Eng-
lish and Spanish with remarkable purity. ”
This was written in 1832, when Mérimée
in his thirtieth year had attained celebrity
not only in the literary world of Paris, but
in the world of literary Europe, as the
author of the Theatre de Clara Gazul);
"La Guzla'; 'La Chronique de Charles IX. '; PROSPER MÉRIMÉE
(Mateo Falcone); Tamango'; 'La Partie
de Tric-Trac'; 'Le Vase Etrusque); La Double Méprise); “La Vision
de Charles XI. ': most of which Taine pronounced masterpieces of
fiction, destined to immortality as classics.
No tribute could have been better devised to please Mérimée, and
praise his writings, than this one to the impersonality of his art, and
the dispensation of it from any obligation to its author. “We should
write and speak,” he held, so that no one would notice, at least
immediately, that we were writing or speaking differently from any
one else. ” But as that most impersonal of modern critics, Walter
Pater, keenly observes: “Mérimée's superb self-effacement, his imper-
sonality, is itself but an effective personal trait, and transferred to
art, becomes a markedly peculiar quality of literary beauty. ” And
he pronounces in a sentence the judgment of Mérimée's literary pos-
terity upon him: "For in truth this creature who had no
care for
half-lights, and like his creations, had no atmosphere about him,
## p. 9942 (#350) ###########################################
9942
PROSPER MÉRIMÉE
-
an
-
gifted as he was with pure mind, with the quality which secures
flawless literary structures, — had on the other hand nothing of what
we call soul in literature. ”
And the brilliant young secretary and successful author, whose
happiness furnishes presumptive evidence against a biography, was no
more relieved from the fact of it than the hypothetical happy people
of their history. With that unfaltering rectification of contempo-
raneous values which time and the gravitation to truth bring about,
Mérimée's position in regard to his works is quite the reverse of
what he contemplated and aimed for. Of the published volumes of
his writings, the many containing his artistic works could be better
spared than the few containing his letters. And of his letters, that
volume will longest carry his name into the future which contains
his most intimate, most confidential, least meditated, in short most
genuinely personal and most artistically perfect revelations,— his
Lettres à une Inconnue) (Letters to an Unknown Woman).
Prosper Mérimée was born in Paris in 1803, of parentage that
made his vocation, it would seem, mandatory. His father was
artist of note, a pupil of David's, and long secretary of the École des
Beaux-Arts. His mother was also, and in a double measure, an artist.
Her talent was for portraits of children, whose quiet sittings she
secured by her other talent of relating stories,- a gift inherited from
her grandmother, Madame de Beaumont, a charming writer of child-
ren's stories, and the author of the famous and entrancing Beauty
and the Beast. ' At twenty, having finished his collegiate studies,
Mérimée, in obedience to the will of his parents, began to fit himself
for the legal profession. Following his own tastes, however, he had
already sought and gained admission into the salons of the men of
letters, and was already under his first and only literary influence,-
that of Henri Beyle, the progenitor of modern French realism. It
was in one of these salons that he, not yet twenty-one, read his first
composition, a drama, Cromwell); an effort inspired by Shakespeare
and composed according to the doctrines of Beyle. It was never
published. Shortly afterwards, in the same place and to the same
audience, he read aloud his second attempt, The Spaniards in Den-
mark); and Heaven and Hell, a little dramatic scene which met
with spontaneous applause, and was praised as extremely witty and
still more undevout. Successive readings followed in successive even-
ings, under the encouragement of applause; and the collection, by a
last stroke of audacious wit, in which author and audience collab-
orated, was published as the “Théâtre de Clara Gazul' (an imaginary
Spanish actress), with the portrait of Mérimée, in low-necked dress
and mantilla, for frontispiece.
The strong individuality of Mérimée's art is as easily discernible
to-day, under the thin disguise of his pseudonym, as his features
1
## p. 9943 (#351) ###########################################
PROSPER MÉRIMÉE
9943
under his travesty: his clear, cold, impartial realism, unflinching wit,
and a trait attributed also to his mother— his invincible irreligion.
The success of the mystification was immediate and effective. His
next adventure was of the same kind: the publication of 'La Guzla,'
a collection of prose ballads, pseudo-translations from the Dalmatian
folk-songs, with prefatory notices, appendices, and biographical sketch
of the author, the bard Magdanovitch, accompanied by a dissertation
on vampires and the evil eye. The intrinsic beauty of the ballads,
the barbaric strength of the imagination, in the musical rhythm of
French prose, contributed to render the mystification one of the most
perfect in literary history. Goethe wrote an article upon it, Push-
kin made translations from it, and German scholars rejoiced in print
to find in it some long-lost Illyrian metrical measure. This success
disgusted Mérimée with “local color,” — the shibboleth of the young
French Romantic school,— seeing, as he said, how easy it was to fab-
ricate it.
The Famille Carvajal, a continuation of the Spanish vein,- a
weird, grewsome, and pitiless tale,— and “Le Jacquerie,' a dramatic
historical recital in the Shakespearean vein, followed. His next
venture was in historical fiction : (The Chronicle of Charles IX. ,' an
evident inspiration from Walter Scott. From an English point of
view, it is the masterpiece of French fiction in historical domain; and
one, with a few reservations, not unworthy the hand of “Waverley »
himself.
In 1830 came the visit to Spain, related in his published letters,
and the forming of the friendship with the Countess of Montijo which
led to a correspondence, of which the fragments published are war-
rant that it will prove in the future an invaluable guide to the social,
literary, and political history of Paris during the yet controverted
period of the Empire. Always sensitive to feminine influence, if not
to local color, it is to the Countess of Montijo that Mérimée owes the
Spanish inspiration, as it may well be called, which bore fruit in his
incomparable relation of Carmen. ' And while a guest of his friend,
listening to her charming tales of the Alhambra and the Generalife,
Mérimée formed his historical friendship with the Empress Eugénie,
then a little girl playing around her mother's knee.
Appointed inspector-general of the historical monuments of France,
Mérimée threw his archæological erudition into diligent performance
of official duties. His reports, written with minute and even pedan-
tic conscientiousness, bear out Faguet's assertion that — archæologist,
traveler, art critic, historian, and philologist, man of the world and
senator, and competent and sure
as each
he would and should
have belonged to four academies; it was only his discretion that re-
stricted him to two,— the Académie Française and Académie des
Inscriptions. As a compatriot states, it was the inspector-general that
u
## p. 9944 (#352) ###########################################
9944
PROSPER MÉRIMÉE
related to him two of his most perfect stories, the Venus d'Ille?
and 'Colomba,' while it was the philologist who found the episode of
Carmen. '
It was at this point of his life, at the meridian of age and success,
that he received his first letter from the Inconnue, a graceful tribute
from the graceful pen of a woman, who yielded to an impulse to
express her admiration, yet guarded her identity beyond possibility
of discovery. The correspondence ensued that a posthumous publi-
cation under the editorship of H. Taine has revealed to the public.
In it, for one who knows how to read the letters, as Taine says,
Mérimée shows himself gracious, tender, delicate, truly in love, and a
poet. After nine years of expostulation and entreaty he obtained an
interview; and his mysterious friend proved to be a Mademoiselle
Jenny Dacquin, the daughter of a notary of Boulogne. The friend-
ship that ensued waxed into love through the thirty succeeding years,
and waned again into a friendship that ended only with Mérimée's
life; his last letter to the Inconnue, a few lines, was written two
hours before he died.
Mérimée's (Studies in the History of Rome,' his "Social War,' and
Catiline,' were to have been followed and closed by a study of
Cæsar. Circumstances, however, adjourned the task, which was after-
wards ceded to an illustrious competitor, or collaborator,-- Napoleon
III. In 1844 he was elected to the French Academy. On the follow-
ing day he published Arsène Guillot. ) Had the publication preceded
the election, the result might have been different; for repentant
Academicians pronounced immoral the tale which Anglo-Saxon critics
have generally selected as the most simple, most pathetic, and only
human one the author ever wrote.
In 1852, the little girl whose growth and development Mérimée
had watched with tenderest interest became Empress of the French.
He was appointed life senator in the reconstructed government; and
became one of the most familiar members of the new and brilliant
court at the Tuileries, and always a conspicuous one. His pleased,
tender, sad, gay, and always frank and critical commentary of the
court and its circles, forms the interest of his weekly bulletins to
the Countess of Montijo. His conversational charm, his wit, and his
ever ready response to demands upon his artistic and historical lore,
in questions of etiquette, costumes, and precedent; his versatility as
dramatist and actor, and his genius for friendship with women,-
made him not only a favorite, but a spoiled favorite, in the royal cir-
cle. His coldness, reserve, cynicism, frank speech, and independent
political opinions saved him from even a suspicion of being a courtier.
He nevertheless lost none of his diligence in literature.
period of his edition of Henri Beyle and of Brantôme, of numerous
miscellaneous articles in reviews, and of those excursions into Russian
It was the
## p. 9945 (#353) ###########################################
PROSPER MÉRIMÉE
9945
literature — critical dissertations upon Gogol, Pushkin, and Tourgué-
nieff — which may be considered the pioneer of that advance into
Russian literature which has resulted in throwing it open to, and
making it one with, the literature of Europe.
To this period also belongs his friendship with Panizzi, the ad-
ministrator of the British Museum; and the voluminous correspond-
ence in which he reveals himself in all the fineness and breadth of
his culture,- as Taine puts it, the possessor of six languages with
their literature and history, man of the world and politician, as well
as philosopher, artist, and historian.
So shrewd an observer of men and politics could not be unpre-
pared for the catastrophe of 1870. He had never been free from
vague apprehensions, and the acute presentiment overshadows the
gayety in his letters. In addition he was growing old, and infirm
health drove him during the winter months into annual exile at
Cannes. It was there that, in a crisis of his malady, the journals, in
anticipation of the end, published his death, and M. Guizot in conse-
quence made official announcement of it at the Academy. Mérimée
lived, however, to return to Paris, and suffer through to the end of
the tragedy. He dragged himself to the Tuileries, had a last inter-
view with his mistress, sat for the last time in his seat in the Senate,
and voted for adjournment to a morrow which never came. Four
days afterwards he departed for Cannes, where a fortnight later he
died. He was buried in the Protestant cemetery.
“A gallant man and a gentleman,” says Faguet, «he has had the reward
he would have wished. He has been discreetly and intimately enjoyed by
delicate tastes.
