Page:French Poets and Novelists.djvu/404

Rh the easy, full-flavoured, flexible prose to which Mérimée treats his correspondent will certainly feel the charm that prompted it. Prosper Mérimée's title to fame has hitherto consisted in a couple of dozen little tales, varying from ten to a hundred pages in length. They have gradually come to be considered perfect models of the narrative art; and we confess our own admiration for them is such that we feel like declaring it a capital offence in a young story-teller to put pen to paper without having read them and digested them. It was a very handsome compliment to pure quality (to the sovereignty of form) when Mérimée, with his handful of little stories, was elected to the French Academy. The moral element in his tales is such as was to be expected in works remarkable for their pregnant concision and for a firmness of contour suggesting hammered metal. In a single word they are not sympathetic. Sympathy is prolix, sentiment is diffuse, and our author, by inexorably suppressing emotion, presents his facts in the most salient relief. These facts are, as a general thing, extremely disagreeable—murder and adultery being the most frequent and the catastrophe being always ingeniously tragical. Where sentiment never appears, one gradually concludes that it does not exist; and we had mentally qualified this frigid artist as a natural cynic. A