In such survivals, indeed, you see the operation of his favourite
motive, the sense of wild power, under a sort of mask, or assumed
habit, realised as the very genius of nature itself; and that
interest, with some superstitions closely allied to it, the belief in
the vampire, for instance, is evidenced especially in certain
pretended Illyrian compositions--prose translations, the reader was
to understand, of more or less ancient popular ballads; La Guzla, he
called the volume, The Lyre, as we might say; only that the
instrument of the Illyrian minstrel had but one string. Artistic
deception, a trick of which there is something in the historic
romance as such, in a book like his own Chronicle of Charles the
Ninth, was always welcome to Merimee; it was part of the machinery of
his rooted habit of intellectual reserve. A master of irony also, in
Madame Lucrezia he seems to wish to expose his own method cynically;
to explain his art--how he takes you in--as a clever, confident
conjuror might do. So properly were the readers of La Guzla taken in
that he followed up his success in that line by the Theatre of Clara
Gazul, purporting to be from a rare Spanish original, the work [30]
of a nun, who, under tame, conventual reading, had felt the touch of
mundane, of physical passions; had become a dramatic poet, and
herself a powerful actress. It may dawn on you in reading her that
Merimee was a kind of Webster, but with the superficial mildness of
our nineteenth century. At the bottom of the true drama there is
ever, logically at least, the ballad: the ballad dealing in a kind of
short-hand (or, say! in grand, simple, universal outlines) with those
passions, crimes, mistakes, which have a kind of fatality in them, a
kind of necessity to come to the surface of the human mind, if not to
the surface of our experience, as in the case of some frankly
supernatural incidents which Merimee re-handled. Whether human love
or hatred has had most to do in shaping the universal fancy that the