the primitive energy of the creatures of his fancy, as the Lettres a
une Inconnue discovered to general gaze, after his death, a certain
depth of [15] passionate force which had surprised him in himself.
And how forcible will be their outlines in an otherwise insignificant
world! Fundamental belief gone, in almost all of us, at least some
relics of it remain--queries, echoes, reactions, after-thoughts; and
they help to make an atmosphere, a mental atmosphere, hazy perhaps,
yet with many secrets of soothing light and shade, associating more
definite objects to each other by a perspective pleasant to the
inward eye against a hopefully receding background of remoter and
ever remoter possibilities. Not so with Merimee! For him the
fundamental criticism has nothing more than it can do; and there are
no half-lights. The last traces of hypothesis, of supposition, are
evaporated. Sylla, the false Demetrius, Carmen, Colomba, that
impassioned self within himself, have no atmosphere. Painfully
distinct in outline, inevitable to sight, unrelieved, there they
stand, like solitary mountain forms on some hard, perfectly
transparent day. What Merimee gets around his singularly
sculpturesque creations is neither more nor less than empty space.

So disparate are his writings that at first sight you might fancy
them only the random efforts of a man of pleasure or affairs, who,
turning to this or that for the relief of a vacant hour, discovers to
his surprise a workable literary gift, of whose scope, however, he is
not precisely aware. His sixteen volumes nevertheless range
themselves in three compact groups. There are his letters [16] --
those Lettres a une Inconnue, and his letters to the librarian
Panizzi, revealing him in somewhat close contact with political
intrigue. But in this age of novelists, it is as a writer of novels,
and of fiction in the form of highly descriptive drama, that he will