the grotesque accidents of
violent death he records with visual exactness, and no pains to relieve
them; the ironic indifference, for instance, with which, on the
scaffold or the battle-field, a man will seem to grin foolishly at the
ugly rents through which his life has passed. Seldom or never has the
mere pen of a writer taken us so close to the cannon's mouth as in the
Taking of the Redoubt, while Matteo Falcone--twenty-five short
pages--is perhaps the cruellest story in the world.

Colomba, that strange, fanatic being, who has a code of action, of
self-respect, a conscience, all to herself, who with all her virginal
charm only does not make you hate her, is, in truth, the type of a sort
of humanity Merimee found it pleasant to dream of--a humanity as alien
as the animals, with whose moral affinities to man his imaginative work
is often directly concerned. Were they so alien, after all? Were
there not survivals of the old wild creatures in the gentlest, the
politest of us? Stories that told of sudden freaks of gentle, polite
natures, straight back, not into Paradise, were always welcome to men's
fancies; and that could only be because they found a psychologic truth
in them. With much success, with a credibility insured by his literary
tact, Merimee tried his own hand at such stories: unfrocked the [29]
bear in the amorous young Lithuanian noble, the wolf in the revolting
peasant of the Middle Age. There were survivals surely in himself, in
that stealthy presentment of his favourite themes, in his own art. You
seem to find your hand on a serpent, in reading him.

In such survivals, indeed, you see the operation of his favourite
motive, the sense of wild power, under a sort of mask, or assumed
habit, realised as the very genius of nature itself; and that interest,
with some superstitions closely allied to it, the belief in the
vampire, for instance, is evidenced especially in certain pretended
Illyrian compositions--prose translations, the reader was to
understand, of more or less ancient popular ballads; La Guzla, he
called the volume, The Lyre, as we might say; only that the instrument
of the Illyrian minstrel had but one string. Artistic deception, a
trick of which there is something in the historic romance as such, in a
book like his own Chronicle of Charles the Ninth, was always welcome to
Merimee; it was part of the machinery of his rooted habit of
intellectual reserve. A master of irony also, in Madam