eeded. There they stand--Carmen, Colomba, the
"False" Demetrius--as detached from him as from each other, with no
more filial likeness to their maker than if they were the work of
another person. And to his method of conception, Merimee's
much-praised literary style, his method of expression, is strictly
conformable--impersonal in its beauty, the perfection of nobody's
style--thus vindicating anew by its very impersonality that much worn,
but not untrue saying, that the style is the man:--a man, impassible,
unfamiliar, impeccable, veiling a deep sense of what is forcible, nay,
terrible, in things, under the sort of personal pride that makes a man
a nice observer of all that is most conventional. Essentially unlike
other people, he is always fastidiously in the fashion--an expert in
all the little, half- [37] contemptuous elegances of which it is
capable. Merimee's superb self-effacement, his impersonality, is
itself but an effective personal trait, and, transferred to art,
becomes a markedly peculiar quality of literary beauty. For, in truth,
this creature of disillusion who had no care for half-lights, and, like
his creations, had no atmosphere about him, gifted as he was with pure
mind, with the quality which secures flawless literary structure, had,
on the other hand, nothing of what we call soul in literature:--hence,
also, that singular harshness in his ideal, as if, in theological
language, he were incapable of grace. He has none of those
subjectivities, colourings, peculiarities of mental refraction, which
necessitate varieties of style--could we spare such?--and render the
perfections of it no merely negative qualities. There are masters of
French prose whose art has begun where the art of Merimee leaves off.

NOTES

11. *A lecture delivered at the Taylor Institution, Oxford, and at the
London Institution. Published in the Fortnightly Review, Dec. 1890,
and now reprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors.

RAPHAEL*

[38] By his immense productiveness, by the even perfection of what he
produced, its fitness to its own day, its hold on posterity, in the
suavity of his life, some would add in the "opportunity" of his early
death, Raphael may seem a signal instance of the luckiness, of the good
fortune, of genius. Yet, if we follow the actual growth of his powers,
within their proper framework, the age of the Renaissance--an age of
which we may say, summarily, that it enjoyed itself, and foun