count for most:--Colomba, for instance, by its intellectual depth of
motive, its firmly conceived structure, by the faultlessness of its
execution, vindicating the function of the novel as no tawdry light
literature, but in very deed a fine art. The Chronique du Regne de
Charles IX., an unusually successful specimen of historical romance,
links his imaginative work to the third group of Merimee's writings,
his historical essays. One resource of the disabused soul of our
century, as we saw, would be the empirical study of facts, the
empirical science of nature and man, surviving all dead metaphysical
philosophies. Merimee, perhaps, may have had in him the making of a
master of such science, disinterested, patient, exact: scalpel in
hand, we may fancy, he would have penetrated far. But quite
certainly he had something of genius for the exact study of history,
for the pursuit of exact truth, with a keenness of scent as if that
alone existed, in some special area of historic fact, to be
determined by his own peculiar mental preferences. Power here too
again,--the crude power of men and women which mocks, while it makes
its use of, average human nature: it was the magic function of
history to put one in living [17] contact with that. To weigh the
purely physiognomic import of the memoir, of the pamphlet saved by
chance, the letter, the anecdote, the very gossip by which one came
face to face with energetic personalities: there lay the true
business of the historic student, not in that pretended theoretic
interpretation of events by their mechanic causes, with which he
dupes others if not invariably himself. In the great hero of the
Social War, in Sylla, studied, indeed, through his environment, but
only so far as that was in dynamic contact with himself, you saw,
without any manner of doubt, on one side, the solitary height of
human genius; on the other, though on the seemingly so heroic stage
of antique Roman story, the wholly inexpressive level of the humanity