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The intimacy, the effusion, the so freely exposed personality of 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 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-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 quality of literary beauty. For, in truth, this creature of disillusion who had no care for half-lights, and, like his creations, had no atmosphere about him, gifted as he was with pure mind, with the quality which secures flawless literary structure, had, on the other hand, nothing of what we call soul in literature:–hence, also, that singular harshness in his ideal, as if, in theological language, he were incapable of grace. He has none of those subjectivities, colourings, peculiarities of mental refraction, which necessitate varieties of style–could we spare such?–and render the perfections of it no merely negative qualities. There are masters of French prose whose art has begun where the art of Merimee leaves off.