Page:The Writings of Prosper Merimee-Volume 7.djvu/42

xxvi PROSPER MERIMEE fortnight, had nothing better to do. For writing The Guzla, the recipe is simple: to procure statistics referring to Ulyria, to get the travels of the Abbe Fortis, and to learn five or six Slav words. This resolution not to over- estimate himself comes to be in the end an affectation. So great is his dread of appearing pedantic that he flies to the opposite extreme, and the result is his tone of flip- pancy, his unceremonious manner of the man of society. The day may come when this will prove to be his vulner- able point, when it will be asked whether this perpetual air of irony is not intentional; whether he is justified in joking in the very midst of tragedy; whether his apparent callousness is not due to the fear of ridicule; whether his free-and-easy tone is not the effect of embarrassment; whether the gentleman has not been harmful to the author; whether his art was suflBciently dear to him. On more than one occasion, notably in The Venus of Ille, he availed him- self of this to mystify the reader. Elsewhere, in Lokis,^ a grotesque idea, with double meaning, hes at the founda- tion of the tale, hke a toad in a chiselled casket. He seemed to find delight in seeing a woman's fingers unlock the casket, and a pretty face terrified by the sight of some object of loathing made him laugh. It appears that he wrote almost always at random, to amuse himself, to pass the time, without allowing himself to be swayed by an idea, with no conception of a great unity of purpose, with no self-subordination to his work. In this, as in all else, he was disenchanted, and we find him finally out of tune with life. Scepticism engenders ' Letters to an Unknown, Vol. H, p. 294.