accident, in the presence of Colomba, no violent death by Orso's own
hand could have been more to her mind. In that last hard page of
Merimee's story, mere dramatic propriety itself for a moment seems to
plead for the forgiveness, which from Joseph and his brethren to the
present day, as we know, has been as winning in story as in actual
life. Such dramatic propriety, however, was by no means [27] in
Merimee's way. "What I must have is the hand that fired the shot,"
she had sung, "the eye that guided it; aye! and the mind moreover--
the mind, which had conceived the deed!" And now, it is in idiotic
terror, a fugitive from Orso's vengeance, that the last of the
Barricini is dying.

Exaggerated art! you think. But it was precisely such exaggerated
art, intense, unrelieved, an art of fierce colours, that is needed by
those who are seeking in art, as I said of Merimee, a kind of
artificial stimulus. And if his style is still impeccably correct,
cold-blooded, impersonal, as impersonal as that of Scott himself, it
does but conduce the better to his one exclusive aim. It is like the
polish of the stiletto Colomba carried always under her mantle, or
the beauty of the fire-arms, that beauty coming of nice adaptation to
purpose, which she understood so well--a task characteristic also of
Merimee himself, a sort of fanatic joy in the perfect pistol-shot, at
its height in the singular story he has translated from the Russian
of Pouchkine. Those raw colours he preferred; Spanish, Oriental,
African, perhaps, irritant certainly to cisalpine eyes, he
undoubtedly attained the colouring you associate with sun-stroke,
only possible under a sun in which dead things rot quickly.

Pity and terror, we know, go to the making of the essential tragic
sense. In Merimee, certainly, we have all its terror, but without