Far better, each one is, in its little setting, a record of human nature, a record, complete and of far-reaching import, to which a philosopher, a moralist, may return year after year without exhausting its interest.
Multitudes of dissertations on primitive and savage instinct, wise treatises, like those of Schopenhauer, on the metaphysics of love and of death, can not be compared in value to the hundred pages of _Carmen_.
The wax taper of _Arsène Guillot_ summarises many volumes concerning the religion of the common people and of the inmost feelings of courtesans. I know of no more scathing sermon against the blunders of credulity or of imagination than _The Double Mistake_, and _The Etruscan Vase_. In the year 2000 _The Game of Backgammon_ will be read again, probably, to learn what it costs to cheat.
Notice, finally, that at no time does the author force himself on our notice that he may emphasise the lesson, but remains in the background, leaving us to draw our own conclusions. He effaces himself even deliberately so as to appear altogether absent. Future readers will show consideration for a host so polite, so graceful, so discreet in doing the honours of his own home. Good manners are at all times pleasing, and a more courteous host than Mérimée it would be impossible to find. Greeting his guests at the threshold, he introduces them and then withdraws, leaving them at liberty to examine and to criticise undisturbed. He is not obtrusive; he does not call attention to his treasures; never will he be caught in the act of a display of vanity. Instead of exposing his knowledge, he conceals it; to listen to him, it would seem as if any one at all might have written his book. Now it is an anecdote related to him by one of his friends, and which he has transcribed on the spot; now it is “a selection” from Brantôme, and from d’Aubigné. If he wrote _The Experiments of an Adventurer_, it was because he had once, for a fortnight, had nothing better to do. For writing _The Guzla_, the recipe is simple: to procure statistics referring to Illyria, to get the travels of the Abbé Fortis, and to learn five or six Slav words. This resolution not to over-estimate himself comes to be in the end an affectation. So great is his dread of appearing pedantic that he flies to the opposite extreme, and the result is his tone of flippancy, his unceremonious manner of the man of society.