tre--it is quite the greatest. But of
this group _La Venus d'Ille_ is my favourite, perhaps for a rather
illegitimate reason. That reason is the possibility of comparing it with
Mr. Morris's _Ring given to Venus_--a handling of the same subject in
poetry instead of in prose, with a happy ending instead of an unhappy
one, and pure Romantic in every respect instead of, as _La Venus d'Ille_
is, late classical, with a strong Romantic _nisus_.[224]

For, though it might be improper here to argue out the matter, these
last words can be fitted to Merimee's _ethos_ from the days of "Clara
Gazul" and "Hyacinthe Maglanovich" to those when he wrote _Lokis_ and
_La Chambre Bleue_. A deserter from Romanticism he was never; a Romantic
free-lance (after being an actual Romantic pioneer) with a strong
Classical element in him he was always.

[Sidenote: Those of _Carmen_; _Arsene Guillot_.]

The almost unavoidable temptation of taking _Colomba_ and _Carmen_
together has drawn us away from the companions, as they are usually
given, of the Spanish story among Merimee's earlier works. More than
two-thirds of the volume, as most people have seen it, consist of
translations from the Russian of Poushkin and Gogol, which need no
notice here. But _Arsene Guillot_ and _L'Abbe Aubain_, the two pieces
which immediately follow _Carmen_, can by no means be passed over. If
(as one may fairly suppose, without being quite certain) the selection
of these for juxtaposition was authentic and deliberate, it was
certainly judicious. They might have been written as a trilogy, not of
sequence, but of contrast--a demonstration of power in essentially
different forms of subject. _Arsene Guillot_, like _Carmen_, is tragedy;
but it is _tragedie bourgeoise_ or _sentimentale_. There are no daggers
or musquetoons, and though (since the heroine throws herself out of a
window) there is some blood, she dies of consumption, not of her wounds.
She is only a _grisette_ who has lost her looks, the one lover she ever
cared for, and her health; while the other characters of importance
(Merimee has taken from the stock-cupboard one of the cynical,
rough-mannered, but really good-natured doctors common in French and not
unknown in English literature) are the lover or gallant himself, Max de
Saligny (quite a good fellow and perfectly willing, though he had tired
of Arsene, to have succoured her had he known her distress), and the
Lady Bountiful, Madame de Piennes. How a "tria