Page:The Writings of Prosper Merimee-Volume 1.djvu/19

Rh literary divination indeed might have remedied this, and did in a few cases; but literary, like other divination, is not precisely the gift of the man in the street. Even now, when every competent critic admits that the Mérimée of the Letters insists on being heard in explanation and justification of the Mérimée who was known as a man before 1870, comparatively few have admitted the testimony in similar rectification of judgments of the writer. It is this task, combined with a thorough critical examination of the whole literary Mérimée, absent from, as well as present, in this new English appearance of his work, that is the purpose of the present Introduction. I hope that readers will not find it too long; I could find it in my own heart to make it very much longer.

Among the uneventful lives of most modern men of letters, Mérimée's is almost distinguished by its exceptional want of distinguished event. Except that he was once put in prison —a curious experience for a most respectable member of society, a government official of high rank at the time, and before long to be a Senator—and excepting also the tragic circumstance of his death amid the imminent ruin of his country, nothing could possibly be less "accidented" than