Page:The Writings of Prosper Merimee-Volume 1.djvu/69

Rh for clearness and polish themselves, it is almost without a rival.

Perhaps it would have been impossible to better the selection of such a style (even if most people had not now come around to the inevitable identification of style with idiosyncrasy), for Mérimée's subjects, taking these, in their quintessential and truly literary forms, to be prose fiction on the smaller scale, and the composition of passionate or familiar letters. For everywhere in both of these departments, there is the opportunity for the blend or rather the contrast of surface and subsoil or undercurrent, which even M. d'Haussonville—by no means a very favourable, and I think sometimes a distinctly mistaken critic of Mérimée—admits. All satirists live upon the perception and the expression of contrasts; but the greater and more passionate of them heighten and widen the contrasts most while at the same time managing to present them in the least crude or staring fashion. How you take Mérimée's antinomies, will of course depend upon taste and method. M. d'Haussonville thought that Mérimée was perpetually "out of sympathy with his readers," was at least perpetually warning them not to take him too seriously. For myself, I can see in this only the same hopeless blunder as that