Page:The Writings of Prosper Merimee-Volume 1.djvu/55

Rh, where Don Juan is present at the last possible mass for his own soul, is almost unbelievably good. Again, I know nothing like it anywhere.

The two, tragi-comic stories of society, La Double Méprise and Le Vase Etrusque may be very slightly injured now (as all stories of society are) by the fact that their atmosphere is of the day before yesterday; but that will come right as in other cases, and their merits will remain.

Colomba and Carmen—the latter perhaps by the more adventitious and rather treacherous aid of music and acting than in itself, but still also in itself—are so much the best known things of their author that it is rather difficult to write of them; but they are also so much the most "considerable," in plenary combination of most of the senses of that word, that they can not be shirked. There can be no reasonable doubt that their author intended them as pendant studies of the South, and of the women of the South. As such, they could not—no such work from a man of Mérimée's age could—escape a slightly Byronic touch; but Mérimée's intense feeling for the absurd, the purity of his taste, and the detachment which it would be too complimentary to modernity to call, modern in him, have completely kept off the rancid and the grotesque