awdry light literature, but in very deed a
fine art. The Chronique du Regne de Charles IX., an unusually
successful specimen of historical romance, links his imaginative work
to the third group of Merimee's writings, his historical essays. One
resource of the disabused soul of our century, as we saw, would be the
empirical study of facts, the empirical science of nature and man,
surviving all dead metaphysical philosophies. Merimee, perhaps, may
have had in him the making of a master of such science, disinterested,
patient, exact: scalpel in hand, we may fancy, he would have penetrated
far. But quite certainly he had something of genius for the exact
study of history, for the pursuit of exact truth, with a keenness of
scent as if that alone existed, in some special area of historic fact,
to be determined by his own peculiar mental preferences. Power here
too again,--the crude power of men and women which mocks, while it
makes its use of, average human nature: it was the magic function of
history to put one in living [17] contact with that. To weigh the
purely physiognomic import of the memoir, of the pamphlet saved by
chance, the letter, the anecdote, the very gossip by which one came
face to face with energetic personalities: there lay the true business
of the historic student, not in that pretended theoretic interpretation
of events by their mechanic causes, with which he dupes others if not
invariably himself. In the great hero of the Social War, in Sylla,
studied, indeed, through his environment, but only so far as that was
in dynamic contact with himself, you saw, without any manner of doubt,
on one side, the solitary height of human genius; on the other, though
on the seemingly so heroic stage of antique Roman story, the wholly
inexpressive level of the humanity of every day, the spectacle of man's
eternal betise. Fascinated, like a veritable son of the old pagan
Renaissance, by the grandeur, the concentration, the satiric hardness
of ancient Roman character, it is to Russia nevertheless that he most
readily turns--youthful Russia, whose native force, still unbelittled
by our western civilisation, seemed to have in it the promise of a more
dignified civilisation to come. It was as if old Rome itself were here
again; as, occasionally, a new quarry is laid open of what was thought
long since exhausted, ancient marble, cipollino or verde antique.
Merimee, indeed, was not the first to discern the fitness for
i