y make up
his mind to one thing--that he is not, and--but by some marvellous
exertion of the grace of God--never will be, a critic. He may have in
him the elements of a capital convict or a faithful father of a family;
he may be a poet--poets, though sometimes very good, have sometimes been
very bad critics--or a painter, or a philosopher, as distinguished as
any of those whose names the Bertram girls learnt; or an elect
candlestick-maker, fit to be an elder of any Little Bethel. But of
criticism he can have no jot or tittle, no trace or germ. The question
is, for once, not one of anything that can be called merely or mainly
"taste." A man who is not a hopelessly bad critic, though he may not
have in him the _catholicon_ of critical goodness, may fail to
appreciate _La Morte Amoureuse_ because of its dreaminess and
supernaturality and all-for-loveness; _Carmen_ because Carmen shocks
him; _La Venus d'Ille_ because of its _macabre_ tone; _Les Jeune-France_
because of their _goguenarderie_ or _goguenardise_. But the case of the
_Redoute_ is one of those rare instances where the intellect and the
aesthetic sense approach closest--almost merge into each other,--as,
indeed, they did in Merimee himself. The principles as well as the
practice of narrative are here at once reduced to their lowest and
exalted to their highest terms. The thing is not merely fermented but
distilled; not so much a fact as a formula, with a formula's precision
but without its dryness. If we take the familiar trichotomy of body,
soul, and spirit and apply it to subject, style, and narrative power in
a story, we shall find them all perfectly achieved and perfectly wedded
here.[226]

[Sidenote: The _Dernieres Nouvelles_; _Il Viccolo di Madama Lucrezia_.]

About the same time as that at which _Carmen_ was published (indeed a
year earlier) Merimee wrote a shorter, but not very short story, _Il
Viccolo di Madama Lucrezia_, which for some reason only appeared, at
least in book form, long after, with the _Dernieres Nouvelles_ and
posthumously. It is, I think, his one attempt in the explained[227]
supernatural--a kind for which I have myself no very great affection.
But it is extremely well done, and if there are some suggestions of
impropriety in it, Hymen, to use Paul de Kock's phrase (it is really
pleasant to think of Paul and Prosper--the farthest opposites of French
contemporary novel-craft--together), covers up the more recent of them
with his mantle.