Page:The Writings of Prosper Merimee-Volume 1.djvu/43

Rh The Hawthorn of Veliko) are indeed little more than clever imitations of Scott and Byron and Percy plus Illyrian "local colour." But the Chant de Mort and Le Seigneur Mercure, and the Vampyre poems, and L'Amant en Bouteille are not far short of masterpieces, and they supply an important "note" for the general appreciation of their author.

The "plays," under which head we may take not only Clara Gazul with the additions made to it later, but La Famille Carvajal, the Jacquerie, the more definitely dramatic volume entitled Les Deux Héritages, and the curious Les Mécontents, give us not merely a larger, but a more complicated and difficult subject. Authorities of the most diverse opinions have held that the connection between literature and drama is to a great extent fortuitous—that is to say, not, as it has been sometimes misunderstood, that a play may be thoroughly successful on the stage and have no literary qualities (which though true enough is immaterial), but that the qualities of literature as such, and the qualities of acted drama as such, are independent. Mérimée illustrates this remarkably from one side.

All the pieces referred to above are literature, generally of a high and sometimes of quite the highest class. Scarcely one gives, as we read