ld exhibit human documents illustrating the
whole social life of his time; "the administration, the church, the
army, the judicature, the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the
proletariat, the peasantry, the artists, the journalists, the men
of letters, the actors, ... the shopkeepers of every degree, the
criminals," should all appear in his vast tableau of society. His
record should include scenes from private life, scenes from Parisian,
provincial, political, military, rural life, with philosophical
studies in narrative and analytic treatises on the passions. The
spirit of system took hold upon Balzac; he had, in common with Victor
Hugo, a gift for imposing upon himself with the charlatanry of
pseudo-ideas; to observe, to analyse, to evoke with his imagination
was not enough; he also would be among the philosophers--and Balzac's
philosophy is often pretentious and vulgar, it is often banal. Outside
the general scheme of the human comedy lie his unsuccessful attempts
for the theatre, and the _Contes Drolatiques_, in which the
pseudo-antique Rabelaisian manner and the affluent power do not
entirely atone for the anachronism of a grossness more natural in
the sixteenth than in the nineteenth century.

V

Was it possible to be romantic without being lyrical? Was it possible
to produce purely objective work, reserving one's own personality,
and glancing at one's audience only with an occasional look of
superior irony? Such was the task essayed by PROSPER MERIMEE (1803-70).
With some points of resemblance in character to Beyle, whose ideas
were influential on his mind, Merimee possessed the plastic
imagination and the craftsman's skill, in which Beyle was deficient.
"He is a gentleman," said Cousin, and the words might serve for
Merimee's epitaph; a gentleman not of nature's making, or God
Almighty's kind, but constructed in faultless bearing according to
the rules. Such a gentleman must betray no sensibility, must express
no sentiment, must indulge no enthusiasm, must attach himself to no
faith, must be superior to all human infirmities, except the infirmity
of a pose which is impressive only by its correctness; he may be
cynical, if the cynicism is wholly free from emphasis; he may be
ironical, if the irony is sufficiently disguised; he may mystify his
fellows, if he keeps the pleasure of mystification for his private
amusement. Should he happen to be an artist, he must appear to be
only a dilettante. He must never incur