those letters does but emphasise the fact that impersonality was, in
literary art, Merimee's central aim. Personality versus
impersonality in art:--how much or how little of one's self one may
put into one's work: whether anything at all of it: whether one can
put there anything else:--is clearly a far-reaching and complex
question. Serviceable as [36] the basis of a precautionary maxim
towards the conduct of our work, self-effacement, or impersonality,
in literary or artistic creation, is, perhaps, after all, as little
possible as a strict realism. "It has always been my rule to put
nothing of myself into my works," says another great master of French
prose, Gustave Flaubert; but, luckily as we may think, he often
failed in thus effacing himself, as he too was aware. "It has always
been my rule to put nothing of myself into my works" (to be
disinterested in his literary creations, so to speak), "yet I have
put much of myself into them": and where he failed Merimee succeeded.
There they stand--Carmen, Colomba, the "False" Demetrius--as detached
from him as from each other, with no more filial likeness to their
maker than if they were the work of another person. And to his
method of conception, Merimee's much-praised literary style, his
method of expression, is strictly conformable--impersonal in its
beauty, the perfection of nobody's style--thus vindicating anew by
its very impersonality that much worn, but not untrue saying, that
the style is the man:--a man, impassible, unfamiliar, impeccable,
veiling a deep sense of what is forcible, nay, terrible, in things,
under the sort of personal pride that makes a man a nice observer of
all that is most conventional. Essentially unlike other people, he
is always fastidiously in the fashion--an expert in all the little,
half- [37] contemptuous elegances of which it is capable. Merimee's
superb self-effacement, his impersonality, is itself but an effective
personal trait, and, transferred to art, becomes a markedly peculiar