Page:The Writings of Prosper Merimee-Volume 1.djvu/18

x think, a tolerably open one. Few people seem to have been able to keep an even hand between the consideration of Mérimée's character as a man and the consideration of his character as an author. Some of them have been so much interested in the former that they have had apparently little or no time or attention to spare for the latter; some have found the man so unsympathetic that they have allowed their disapprobation or distaste to colour and vitiate their appreciation of the literature. Hardly anybody, so far as I know, has unreservedly and methodically used both keys and both lights—the literature to unlock and irradiate the life, the life to illustrate and open the literature.

The difficulty may have been complicated, notwithstanding the passing of a whole generation since his death, by the fact that, except to his most intimate friends (who were few), the living Mérimée was to a very great extent a disguise and travesty of the true man; and that nearly fifty years of persistent, though leisurely, publication left even the literature in a most disastrous need of correction and illumination by that part of it which could not be known in the author's lifetime. A certain power of