Contenu introduction I. Chapitre dans de prosper merimee, perspective pédagogique

CONCLUSION
The very polished styles are, as a rule, wanting in life and warmth, the very clear styles, in colour and energy. But Mérimée's lacks none of these good things, while for clearness and polish themselves, it is almost without a rival.
Perhaps it would have been impossible to better the selection of such a style even if most people had not now come around to the inevitable identification of style with idiosyncrasy, for Mérimée's subjects, taking these, in their quintessential and truly literary forms, to be prose fiction on the smaller scale, and the composition of passionate or familiar letters. For everywhere in both of these departments, there is the opportunity for the blend or rather the contrast of surface and subsoil or undercurrent, which even M. d'Haussonville—by no means a very favourable, and I think sometimes a distinctly mistaken critic of Mérimée—admits. All satirists live upon the perception and the expression of contrasts; but the greater and more passionate of them heighten and widen the contrasts most while at the same time managing to present them in the least crude or staring fashion. How you take Mérimée's antinomies, will of course depend upon taste and method. M. d'Haussonville thought that Mérimée was perpetually "out of sympathy with his readers," was at least perpetually warning them not to take him too seriously. For myself, I can see in this only the same hopeless blunder as that of those who think "Only a woman's hair" an expression of callousness, and "She should have died hereafter" a sign that Macbeth had lost all affection for his wife. Swift and Shakespeare do not think or write in that fashion; neither does Mérimée. There are two ends and two sides to most things, and if you will take the wrong one, it is not the fault of the things themselves, nor of their creators, but yours. So it is possible for anyone, even after the warning of the Letters, to see in Colomba only the old Hume-and-Voltaire ridicule of the uncertainty of human conception of virtue and crime; in Carmen, mere lampooning of the wickedness of women and the weakness of men; in Arsène Guillot, mere Mephistophelanism, everywhere the cloven foot or the mere detection of the cloven foot.
So be it. But those who are of another house, while perfectly admitting, perfectly perceiving, the "colour" of all this and for all this which exists, will take it to be in the other sense merely "colourable"—at most mainly intended to bring out and set off and express things very different. They will use the implorer of those interviews with the Inconnue which quite evidently gave Mephistopheles no occasion for sniggering, to throw light on the methods of the supposed satirist of love and materialist in it. They will not mistake the constant and apparently irresistible attraction of this esprit fort to the supernatural, and the fact that in no single instance where the supernatural is introduced is it introduced to be ridiculed, or degraded, or rationalised, or even smiled at. Perhaps they will go even farther and maintain that Mérimée, for all his open breach with the personnel of the Romantic movement, for all his jokes at local colour, and the rest, all his expressed distaste for poetry, all the fanfaronnade in which these dreaders of dupery so often indulge, remained to the very last a Romantic, pure, hardened, immutable in every quality except that mere outward extravagance which is at best and worst but a very separable accident of Romanticism. Gautier, though much more of a poet and therefore more of an idealist than Mérimée, is less really a Romantic; Hugo, himself, putting extravagances aside and once more allowing for poetry, is not more so. The extreme outward precision of Mérimée's style, its horror of the bombastic and the dishevelled, has no doubt deceived some as to the presence in him of the Romantic passion, the Romantic colour, the Romantic vogue. But they are all there; to be seen by whoso chooses, or at any rate (for perhaps this power is necessary) by whoso chooses and can.
Therefore, unless I myself mistake grossly, it is a mistake and a grave one to speak of Mérimée as having no "soul," a mistake almost as great as to take him for an exponent of cynical disbelief in life and of arid and limited correctness in literature. His work at its best always glows with "earth-born and absolute fire"; his life often palpitates with what is nothing less than tragedy. This word is often used of authors, but for the most part improperly