, by the circumstances of
the case, exceptional; almost as men turn in despair to gambling or
narcotics, and in a little while the narcotic, the game of chance or
skill, is valued for its own sake. The vocation of the artist, of the
student of life or books, will be realised with something--say! of
fanaticism, as an end in itself, unrelated, unassociated. The science
he turns to will be a science of crudest fact; the passion extravagant,
a passionate love of passion, varied through all the exotic phases of
French fiction as inaugurated by Balzac; the art exaggerated, in matter
or form, or both, as in Hugo or Baudelaire. The development of these
conditions is the mental story of the nineteenth century, especially as
exemplified in France.

In no century would Prosper Merimee have been a theologian or
metaphysician. But that sense of negation, of theoretic insecurity,
was in the air, and conspiring with what was of like tendency in
himself made of him a central type of disillusion. In him the passive
ennui of Obermann became a satiric, aggressive, almost angry conviction
of the littleness of the world around; it was as if man's fatal
limitations constituted a kind of stupidity in him, what the French
call betise. Gossiping friends, indeed, linked what was constitutional
in him and in the age with an incident of his earliest years.
Corrected for some childish fault, in passionate distress, he overhears
a half-pitying laugh at his expense, and has determined, [14] in a
moment, never again to give credit--to be for ever on his guard,
especially against his own instinctive movements. Quite unreserved,
certainly, he never was again. Almost everywhere he could detect the
hollow ring of fundamental nothingness under the apparent surface of
things. Irony surely, habitual irony, would be the proper complement
thereto, on his part. In his infallible self-possession, you might
even fancy him a mere man of the world, with a special aptitude for
matters of fact. Though indifferent in politics, he rises to social,
to political eminence; but all the while he is feeding all his
scholarly curiosity, his imagination, the very eye, with the, to him
ever delightful, relieving, reassuring spectacle, of those
straightforward forces in human nature, which are also matters of fact.
There is the formula of Merimee! the enthusiastic amateur of rude,
crude, naked force in men and women wherever it could be found; himself
carrying ever,