mee, a literary artist, was not a man who used two words where one
would do better, and he shines especially in those brief compositions
which, like a minute intaglio, reveal at a glance his wonderful faculty
of design and proportion in the treatment of his work, in which there
is not a touch but counts. That is an art of which there are few
examples in English; our somewhat diffuse, or slipshod, literary
language hardly lending itself to the concentration of thought and
expression, which are of the essence of such writing. It is otherwise
in French, and if you wish to know what art of that kind can come to,
read Merimee's little romances; best of all, perhaps, La Venus d'Ille
and Arsene Guillot. The former is a modern version of the beautiful
old story of the Ring given to Venus, given to her, in [32] this case,
by a somewhat sordid creature of the nineteenth century, whom she looks
on with more than disdain. The strange outline of the Canigou, one of
the most imposing outlying heights of the Pyrenees, down the mysterious
slopes of which the traveller has made his way towards nightfall into
the great plain of Toulouse, forms an impressive background, congruous
with the many relics of irrepressible old paganism there, but in entire
contrast to the bourgeois comfort of the place where his journey is to
end, the abode of an aged antiquary, loud and bright just now with the
celebration of a vulgar worldly marriage. In the midst of this
well-being, prosaic in spite of the neighbourhood, in spite of the
pretty old wedding customs, morsels of that local colour in which
Merimee delights, the old pagan powers are supposed to reveal
themselves once more (malignantly, of course), in the person of a
magnificent bronze statue of Venus recently unearthed in the
antiquary's garden. On her finger, by ill-luck, the coarse young
bridegroom on the morning of his marriage places for a moment the
bridal ring only too effectually (the bronze hand closes, like a wilful
living one, upon it), and dies, you are to understand, in her angry
metallic embraces on his marriage night. From the first, indeed, she
had seemed bent on crushing out men's degenerate bodies and souls,
though the supernatural horror of the tale is adroitly made credible by
a certain vagueness in the [33] events, which covers a quite natural
account of the bridegroom's mysterious death.

The intellectual charm of literary work so thoroughly designed as
Merimee's depends