Page:The Writings of Prosper Merimee-Volume 1.djvu/70

lxii of those who think "Only a woman's hair" an expression of callousness, and "She should have died hereafter" a sign that Macbeth had lost all affection for his wife. Swift and Shakespeare do not think or write in that fashion; neither does Mérimée. There are two ends and two sides to most things, and if you will take the wrong one, it is not the fault of the things themselves, nor of their creators, but yours. So it is possible for anyone, even after the warning of the Letters, to see in Colomba only the old Hume-and-Voltaire ridicule of the uncertainty of human conception of virtue and crime; in Carmen, mere lampooning of the wickedness of women and the weakness of men; in Arsène Guillot, mere Mephistophelanism, everywhere the cloven foot or the mere detection of the cloven foot.

So be it. But those who are of another house, while perfectly admitting, perfectly perceiving, the "colour" of all this and for all this which exists, will take it to be in the other sense merely "colourable"—at most mainly intended to bring out and set off and express things very different. They will use the implorer of those interviews with the Inconnue which quite evidently gave Mephistopheles no occasion for sniggering, to throw light on the methods of