desillusionne, who had found in Kant's negations the last word
concerning an unseen world, and is living, on the morrow of the
Revolution, under a monarchy made out of hand, might seem cut off
from certain ancient natural hopes, and will demand, from what is to
interest him at all, something in the way of artificial stimulus. He
has lost that sense of large proportion in things, that all-embracing
prospect of life as a whole (from end to end of time and space, it
had seemed), the utmost expanse of which was afforded from a
cathedral tower of the Middle Age: by the church of the thirteenth
century, that is to say, with its consequent aptitude for the
co-ordination of human effort. Deprived of that exhilarating yet
pacific outlook, imprisoned now in the narrow cell of its own
subjective experience, the action of a powerful nature will be
intense, but exclusive and peculiar. It will come to art, or
science, to the experience of life itself, not as to portions of
human nature's daily food, but as to [13] something that must be, by
the circumstances of the case, exceptional; almost as men turn in
despair to gambling or narcotics, and in a little while the narcotic,
the game of chance or skill, is valued for its own sake. The
vocation of the artist, of the student of life or books, will be
realised with something--say! of fanaticism, as an end in itself,
unrelated, unassociated. The science he turns to will be a science
of crudest fact; the passion extravagant, a passionate love of
passion, varied through all the exotic phases of French fiction as
inaugurated by Balzac; the art exaggerated, in matter or form, or
both, as in Hugo or Baudelaire. The development of these conditions
is the mental story of the nineteenth century, especially as
exemplified in France.

In no century would Prosper Merimee have been a theologian or