Page:The Writings of Prosper Merimee-Volume 1.djvu/51

Rh powers were not displayed at their very happiest in the Chronique de Charles IX, though Mérimée never did better things than the book contains. The demand for "unity" is sometimes thought a pedantic one; and Apollo knows only too well how often it has been made in a pedantic spirit. But to say "The Devil take all Unity" is as dangerous in literature as to say "The Devil take all Order" has often proved to be in war, before and since Shakespeare formulated it in those words. The Chronique, with all its brilliant sliding scenes, all its panorama as of a vivid dream, is certainly deficient in unity of any kind, whether of action, of character, or even that uncovenanted mercy the "Unity of Interest." And it is unluckily sure to be confronted with other work of the same time, or nearly so, in which, whether unity of action and character is present or not, unity of interest certainly is—the work of Dumas. I am myself extremely fond of the Chronique,—neither because nor in spite of the fact that I once translated it. But I can quite understand others failing to like it, and I can see that it has some positive defects. I should be much less accommodating in the case of the shorter tales, from L'Enlèvement de la Redoute to Colomba. The last quarter of the