"They happen to be right. In the big game I'm not wanted. If the need came-do you think I could give up all this the days in the open, and the smell of a horse-Cicely, you know I couldn't, and so do I. Let's be honest about it."

"Perhaps I should like you less if you could," she said by and by.

cut to a nicety. No moss or weed brightened the smooth surface of the road. It was a house the very approach to which put folk on their best behavior, though it lay cradled by moors so free and rugged that makebelieve seemed out of place.

The house-front was the same. She glanced impatiently at it before going in. There were the decorous, whitepainted windows, the Michaelmas daisies tied neatly into clumps, that she knew of old. There was nowhere an eyelash out of place. It was as if house and garden had been fashioned by an architect who had an orderly, clear mind, but never a human soul that had travailed and found beauty. (To be continued)

And then they talked of Brussels, of the journey and the parting, and at last they said good-bye. And in the girl's heart, as she crossed the strip of woodland and went up the winding drive, there was rebellion. All was so tidy here. The drive was swept free of fallen leaves. The formal yews and laurels that bordered it were The Times.

THE SHORT STORY IN FRANCE.

It was during the period when the genius of romanticism had saturated the public with exuberant rhetoric and eloquent sentimentalism, typified by Victor Hugo and George Sand, that the contes of Mérimée and Gautier revindicated, in different fashion and by opposite methods, the supreme value of form in composition and of that unity of effect which is twin to structural completeness. Neither, it is true, escaped the infection of contemporary taste. The infatuation of the monstrous and the exceptional possessed the imaginations of both writers, and the themes they selected by preference are insulated by abnormality of character and incident,

1. "La Venus d'Ille, etc." By Prosper Mérimée. Paris. 1830-1847.

2. "Nouvelles." By Theophile Gautier. Paris. 1836 et seq.

3. "Contes et Nouvelles." By Alfred de Musset. 1830-1839.

4. "Lettres de mon Moulin, etc." By 1866 et seq. Alphonse Daudet. Paris. 5. "L'Etui de Nacre." By Anatole France. Paris. 1892.

6. "Claire de Lune, Contes de la Becasse, etc." By Guy de Maupassant. Paris. 1883-1890.

7. "Stello." By Alfred de Vigny. Paris. 1832.

or detached by remoteness of time and place, from ordinary experience. Mérimée's pages are dyed with sanguinary extravagances, as in "Carmen," "Les Ames du Purgatoire," and "Lokis"; Gautier portrays to satiety the Byronic frenzies of sensuous passion in his "Fortunio," "Le Roi Caudaule," and La Morte Amoureuse." But apart from a similar tendency towards the exotic and the abnormal, and apart from their place as pioneers of the doctrine of art for art's sake, no two artists ever reached their goals by more contrary paths. Gautier sought his end in concentration, Mérimée in elimination of detail. Gautier, by accumulated touches, all conducing to one effect, attained his special quality-pictorial unity. Mérimée with trained precision resumed in some few clearly outlined traits whole groups of minutiæ. Further, Mérimée carried to perfection the economy of words. "La Vénus d'Ille," a modernized version of the ring given to the goddess, illustrates the process.

le jour allait se lever. Alors j'entendis distinctement les mêmes pas lourds. Cela me parut singulier." A pause-he listensthere comes a cry, bells ring, steps pass hither and thither, servants run to and fro. The guest rises, dresses in haste; he seeks the corridor; the door of the nuptial-room is open wide. Across the bed the body of the bridegroom is stretched-"il était déja raide et froid. Ses dents serrées . . . on eût dit qu'il avait été étreint dans un cercle de fer. Mon pied posa sur quelque chose de dur qui se trouvait sur le tapis; je me baissai et vis la bague."

A Parisian archæologist is the guest du matin of a provincial confrère. His host owns an antique Venus of dubious date and sinister aspect. The statue stands at an angle of the garden hedge which bounds the village tennisground. The son of the house, bridegroom-elect, has possessed himself of an antique ring for the approaching marriage ceremony. The suggestion of the whole plot is contained in these two presentments: the ring-the statue. The guest depicts the tedious family life, trite, vulgar, pretentious; but now here, now there, comes a glimpse of some undercurrent of dim horror. Soon the first hint of vitality in the sullen, inanimate bronze is given. The Venus, "l'idole," is in ill repute with the superstitious villagers. As the guest gazes from his window at dusk some lads in passing have caught sight of the ominous idol, the "coquine." A stone is thrown-there is a cry, a sound of clumsy flight. "Elle me l' a rejetée!" She has thrown it back at me! The story progresses; its surface the usual, the familiar; its understrata the abnormal, the impossible. The traditional incidents follow. Upon the wedding-eve there is tennis play; the bridegroom joins the play, he sets his ring for safety upon the finger of the malignant effigy, forgets it, seeks it at nightfall. "Elle a serré le doigt," stammers the bridegroom to the guest. He has been drinking hard at the marriage feastmaybe it was a drunken illusion. The supper ended, the Parisian retreats to his own bedchamber located in the wing allotted to the newly-wedded couple. Night has come. "Le silence régnait depuis quelque temps lorsqu'il fut troublé par des pas lourds qui montaient l'escalier. Les marches craquèrent fortement. pressed with some sense of disquiet he sleeps a disturbed sleep; when he awakens, "Il pouvait être cinq heures

Op

Few authors have shown more skill than Mérimée in expressing a character by an isolated action, or a complete personality by one type-feature. The prefatory incident in the story of Arsène Guillot when Arsène, abandoned by her lovers, expends her last five-franc piece in votive candles to the intent that her livelihood may be assured in her unavowable trade, elucidates the whole course of the narrative. It is the casual episode that determines the nature of the ensuing catastrophe, nor could pages of analytic psychology characterize more completely the attitude of heart and mind belonging to the naïve sinner of her forlorn class. Mastery in the art of such abbreviations is a leading factor throughout Mérimée's fiction. Having presented his "signe" he states his facts with studied moderation and inimitable conciseness of phrase and diction. The very violence of the action depicted in many instances facilitates his aim. Extremes admit of no superlatives and invite little annotation. He leaves them unexplained, uninterpreted; they need no commentary. Logically enchained, episode succeeds episode with calculated crescendo of emphasis. They are viewed from one standpoint only

no

the bystander's. Mérimée makes pretence to be the depositary of human secrets; his is not the office of the confessor but of the detective, and his psychology lies not in the dissection of mental states but in their visible outcome and exposure.

In a different way it is for the sense of sight that Gautier wrote, as with rapid visualizing touches he regretted that "less happy than painter or musician, he could only present the objects not simultaneously but in succession." His stories resolve themselves into sequences of scenes; "Le Roi Candaule," "La Toison d'Or," "Le Nid de Rossignols," are picture-narratives. Color and form engross the author's attention. Where the conte cruelle of literature sought sensational stimulus from instincts of physical or moral repulsion, Gautier, on the other hand, sought it in the principle of non-moral physical attraction. Beauty is the decorum of his art; and as for the moralist goodness is the redemption of life, so for Gautier beauty is the veil cast over the deformities and distortions of nature. In it he sought immortality, "dans l'art les événements passent et la beauté seule reste." In excess of detail he approaches Balzac; but where Balzac inventories, Gautier depicts; his catalogue consists of illustrations. Every non-pictorial element is ignored, nor is any pictorial element admitted which is not in close relation to the color, outline, and movement of the picture. In his use of words the translation of things seen to things written is as direct as language permits. To present, not to suggest, is his endeavor; hence his general avoidance of allegorical and emblematic imagery whenever the dictionary could supply a term, however recondite and technical, sufficiently distinctive to characterize the object treated.

8 "Hist. du Romantisme." T. Gautier. 1874.

He is no doubt driven, as all writers must be at times, to employ descriptive metaphorical diction, but when it occurs it lies as close to the object described as the mould to the cast. "La pluie hachait le ciel à fils menus." "Le houblon du treillage passait familièrement sa petite main verte par un carreau cassé."

"Une Nuit de Cléopâtre" is perhaps the most brilliant example of an art where the pen acts as a substitute for the brush. The hot desolation of the vast Egyptian necropolis of mystery and granite, "where the sole occupation of the living would appear to be the embalming of the dead," is outstretched before our eyes, threaded by the opaque waters of the sluggard Nile. Over all "une lumière crue, éclatante et poussiéreuse à force d'intensité, ruisselait en torrents de flamme, l'azur du ciel blanchissait de chaleur comme un métal Â. la fournaise."

The scene shifts to the queen's garden, with its pools and fountains, its verdurous luxuriance of leaf and blossom. Thither Meïamoun penetrates Actaeon-wise death the penalty. Cleopatra arrests the doom; his life is in truth forfeit, but it pleases her first to pay its price-the payment, one night, "une nuit de Cléopâtre." Again the scene shifts. Meïamoun as a god sits enthroned beside that womanglory of the ancient world. The death-cup is outpoured, Meïamoun lifts it. For a moment Cleopatra's touch retards the crisis, for a moment only; the sound of trumpets breaks the spell; Anthony's heralds ride into the vast hall, and Cleopatra's detaining hand falls from her lover's arm. "C'est l'heure où les beaux rêves s'envolent." Meïamoun raises the cup to the lips Cleopatra has kissed. "Whose is the dead body lying upon the marble?" Anthony asks, as he greets the queen.

...

Gautier was essentially a specialist of the Short Story. Compare the method of "Cléopâtre" with Flaubert's conte-"Hérodias" belonging to the same epoch of Eastern life. The Flaubert of "Hérodias" manifests himself as the novelist-genius who reconstructed history at length in "Salammbô" and whose psychological study of Madame Bovary was the chef-d'œuvre of its species. The Gautier of "Cléopâtre" shows the true genius of the conte-writer whose attempts at prolonged romance as in "Le Capitaine Fracasse" and "Mademoiselle de Maupin" displayed a total lack of structural unity both in the dislocations of plot and the inconsequences of character. The contrast of conte with conte illustrates at once the diversity of method and the diversity of talent between two artists essentially gifted to create different forms of fiction. In each story there is the same objectivity of treatment, the same withdrawal of the author's personality from view, the same search for exactitude in the descriptive word, the same perfection of pictorial effect.

In the hands both of Mérimée and of Gautier, as in those of d'Aurevilly and l'Isle Adam, the art of the French conte remained for the most part definitely objective, and in this quality, despite differences of constituent elements, it was a legitimate descendant of the novella of Boccaccio, of Bandelio, and of Strapparola, whose love of beauty equalled Gautier's. All these French writers dealt primarily with exteriorized passions, with events and actions; they told what happened and what was the end of the happening; their design was to kindle interest and excite curiosity. For them, as for the Italian novelists, action the mainspring of invention. It fell, by poet-right, to Alfred de Vigny the thinker, to Alfred de Musset the lover, to inaugurate the distinctively

was

subjective Short Story, where emotional values supersede all others and where success lies in the evocation of sympathy.

The fever of romanticism was at its height when Alfred de Vigny, amongst romantics "le plus, peut-être leseul, penseur"" published the "Episodes" which form the volume where Stello, the melancholic patient of "le docteur Noir," is distracted from his malady of mortal egoism by the three narratives of his physician's professional experiences. For Vigny, whose star, in Gautier's memorable tribute, "burnt less brilliantly than its fellows because it rode higher in the heavens," form and structure, the mould of art, were of secondary importance. The preoccupation of the thinker had SO impregnated Vigny's imagination that, even in the classic sentimental masterpiece of Kitty Bell and the starving of Chatterton, he is not content to abide by the emotional issue of the catastrophe. The moral is epitomized in the concluding incident. “England" -Chatterton is made to declaim— "England is a magnificent vessel, we are her mariners all, to each his own task." Beckford, the poet's interlocutor, beneficent patron of the commonplace, listens unmoved. "C'est bien, mon enfant; mais que diable peut faire le Poète dans la manoeuvre?" "Le Poète," cries the doomed genius, "cherche aux étoiles quelle route nous montre le doigt du Seigneur." The protest of the divine apologist is unheeded, the world of Mammon has its own compass to steer by, and the starved boy in his empty garret, the torn sheets of unpublished poems scattered around, ends the short chapter of his life. A note "un petit billet" -lies amidst the torn poetic manuscripts. "Que lui offrait donc M. Beckford dans son petit billet?" in

9 "Hist. de la Litterature Francaise." G. Lanson. Paris. 1909.