‘The Perfection of Nobody’s Style’: Impersonality and Emotion in Pater’s Prosper Mérimée

1At the close of a brilliant study of Mérimée, Pater raises the question of impersonality: ‘Personality versus impersonality: —how much or how little of one’s self one may put into one’s work: when anything at all: whether one can put there anything else: —is clearly a far-reaching and complex question.’1 One knows the fame attached to the very word when the Modernists used it to profess the complete detachment of the artist before the work, thus reducing him or her to be the mere mouthpiece of an impersonal voice freely expressing itself to constitute the canon.2 Brilliant theses have the knack of foreclosing the reflections that have nourished them and one too often forgets that the nineteenth century too had its thinkers who faced the issue of artistic impersonality such as Walter Pater whose writings on literature are often neglected. Without forgetting the fundamental theses of The Renaissance, I would like to focus on the issue of impersonality in Prosper Mérimée, which was first a conference that Pater gave at the Taylor Institute in 1890 before publishing it. The legend has it that Wilde was present at the talk where Pater ‘read his lecture in a low monotonous voice.’3 Asked by Pater whether he had listened to it, Wilde answered: ‘we’ve had this indiscretion.’ This to introduce emotion, a personal emotion that Pater hid behind soft-spoken lectures or conferences and a sober conversation which surprised many visitors.4 His characteristic unobtrusiveness raises the issue of his own enunciative position and deserves a whole study which will not be attempted here.

2This reading belongs to Freudian-lacanian psychoanalysis, which might be called a science of impersonality and emotion, and which rose in parallel to High Modernism and its structuralist sequel. ‘Who is this Other that speaks through me?’ Lacan asks, after Freud who, in his clinic, had been confronted with an interrogation that had disclosed itself in women and unbeknownst to them. The voice of the Other, which manifests itself in mispellings, dreams, symptoms, the voice which makes all subjects of the unconscious a mere relation to language, is also the voice that Pater strove to delineate in his portraits.

3In Prosper Mérimée, ‘impersonality’ appears in relation to subjectivity embodied by Flaubert who professes to be absent from his writings.5 But Pater thinks that Flaubert ‘often failed in thus effacing himself, as he too was aware.’ (24) Flaubert stands for an artist who has striven to absent himself from his works, only to find himself defeated when they reveal a large part of the man. But which one, we might be tempted to ask? That of an ego sustained by imaginary identifications or that of a subject sustained by the Einziger Zug (trait unaire) of the ego ideal, the very cipher that everyone has impressed at the back of their necks, according the French writer Marcel Jouhandeau?6 Pater answers the question by choosing the second term: Flaubert, the perfect writer, whose style he praised in the eponymous article (1888), makes the unique and singular voice of the subject of the unconscious heard. However, he makes this point by taking what might be called the anti-Flaubert example, Mérimée, the writer of complete withdrawal.

4Conversely to Flaubert, Mérimée offers the example of an absence whose meaning Pater will explain: ‘where he failed Mérimée succeeded. There they stand Carmen, Colomba, ... 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.’ (24) The issue of impersonality is first that of the relationship between the creative mind and the created characters which has been thought of as a filial resemblance since the Romantics and which accounts for Pater reflecting that Mérimée and his characters are endowed with the same emptiness: ‘Carmen, Colomba, that impassioned self within himself, have no atmosphere.’ (5) This perfect similitude will be ascribed to a certain enunciative position.

5Mérimée’s writings are not confessional either. On the contrary: ‘Mérimée’s much praised literary style, his method of expression, is strictly comformable—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.’ (24) And yet, this absence of resemblance, this absolute refusal is the characteristic feature of Mérimée, endowing him with an absolute singularity: ‘Mérimée’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.’ (24) Whereas some writers are unfortunately too present in their writings, Mérimée raises his absence to the dignity of a presence, and reduces his pen to the stylus that gave ‘style.’ The raising of the absence to the dignity of a presence is the function of the logos which both Mérimée and Flaubert embody. But Pater stresses that Mérimée ‘gifted as he was with pure mind, with the quality which secures flawless literary structure, had... nothing of what we call soul in literature.’ (24)

6To better understand this cryptic statement, let us go back to Style where Pater differentiated between soul and mind, a difference that allowed him to cast a penetrating glance on literature before concluding on Flaubert’s eulogium.7

7Mind belongs to logic and to the art of composition: ‘that architectural conception of work, which foresees the end in the beginning and never loses sight of it, and in every part is conscious of all the rest, till the last sentence does but, with undiminished vigour, unfold and justify the first.’ (18) It is the ability to conceive the work as such, to have in mind its end as early as the beginning, i.e. the ability to conceive totality from lack, such as Mérimée for whom ‘Structure, proportion, design, a sort of architectural coherency’ are ‘the aim of his method.’ Defining his characters, Pater will laud their ‘absolute clarity of outline,’ (9) and praise Mérimée’s style which ‘does but conduce the better to its exclusive aim.’ (15-6)

8As for soul, it belongs to the singular qualities through which a writer moves his reader and produces the emotion on which Pater had predicated his aesthetics in 1873.8 ‘[S]oul is a fact, in certain writers—the way they have of absorbing language, of attracting it into the peculiar spirit they are of, with a subtlety which makes the actual result seem like some inexplicable inspiration.... By soul, [the artist] reaches us, somewhat capriciously perhaps, one and not another, through vagrant sympathy and a kind of immediate contact.’ (Style 23, italics mine) Soul is that something that escapes the intellectual grasp to appear in an immediate perception to the subject, unpredictably since the same work of art may move only some of us. Soul is the uncharacterizable characteristics of the artist, its touch, its signature, what generates emotion. Pater significantly gives the example of religious discourse: ‘The way in which theological interests sometimes avail themselves of language is perhaps the best illustration of the force I mean to indicate generally in literature, by the word soul.’ (Style 22) All great religious texts are imbued with soul and their doctrinal strength is buffeted by the power of persuasion which is the hallmark and the effect of soul. However, soul does not exclusively partake of the religious sphere: ‘But something of the same kind acts with similar power in certain writers... this quality lends to profane writers a kind of religious influence. At their best, these writers become, as we say sometimes, “prophets.”’ (Style 23, italics mine) Soul partakes of that influence which has generated a Newman in religion or a prophet in profane discourses, that is to say, a subject seen as a spiritual leader, thus occupying the place of the ego ideal which is at the basis of further (imaginary) identification.

9Pater goes on, freely borrowing ninetenth-century scientific analogies: ‘such character depending on the effect not merely of their matter, but of their matter as allied to, in “electric affinity” with, peculiar form, and working in all cases by an immediate sympathetic contact, on which account it is that it may be called soul... in style.’ (Style 23, italics mine) Soul is what allows one to enter into sympathy with someone as if by some electrical affinity. We may recognize Schelling’s Einfülhung which Anne Henry has traced in Pater9 but which we read in a Freudian perspective as a manifestation of the intime of the subject addressed to the intime of the Other, in a two-fold relation between two lacks. Soul belongs to the aesthetic sphere and to the subject-founding good/bad division, as is evidenced by the subject’s possible feeling of repulsion, a sign that the limit between pleasure and jouissance has been crossed, as Pater underlines: ‘Mind we cannot choose but approve where we recognise it; soul may repel us, not because we misunderstand it.’ (24)

10Soul is beyond words and appears as perfume or color,10 as what psychoanalysis locates as the intime of the subject which language cannot utter: ‘it is still a characteristic of soul, in this sense of the word, that it does but suggest what can never be uttered, not as being different from, or more obscure than, what actually gets said, but as containing that plenary substance of which there is only one phase or facet in what is there expressed?’ (Style 24)

11Pater stresses that what we understand as ‘the influence of a living person’ (Style 23) may give us a fair idea of soul. But, rather than influence, one should talk about what makes us think ‘It’s him/her’ or ‘It’s a Chagall,’ ‘a Giacometti’ in the aesthetic encounter. Soul designates the definitional trait beyond all signifying grasp.

12Yet Pater assimilates the absence of soul in Mérimée to an absence of grace,11 which makes it difficult to conceive that Mérimée is deprived of a soul, unless he stands for a psychiatric case or a theoretical impossibility. ‘[G]ifted as he was with pure mind,’ Mérimée raises the issue of a singular enunciative position, a position where the soul absents itself, where the subject appears as an absence while keeping his intime to himself, with such smartness that the reader is fooled: ‘There is the formula of Mérimée! the enthusiastic amateur of rude, crude, naked force in men and women wherever it could be found, himself carrying ever, as a mask, the conventional attire of the modern world—carrying it with an infinite, contemptuous grace, as if that too, were an all-sufficient end in itself.’ (4) Mérimée or the impersonal author who delegates a mask on the world’s stage that will represent him to the Other, the man of the strategic withdrawal whose position Pater is going to pinpoint.

13The issue of his impersonality gets clearer thanks to a comparison with Walter Scott: ‘his style is still impeccably correct, cold-blooded, impersonal as that of Scott himself.’ (15) Scott adopts the position of an omniscient author of historical narratives, the position of a subject rewriting History according to his desires, thus gently fooling the reader with his permission. Scott’s impersonality is that of an author who adopts the third grammatical person to dominate the narrated events, a position that is avowed, obvious and understandable by a reader called to share with him the temporary exclusion of the real for the sake of fantasy. This is precisely what S. T. Coleridge theorized as that ‘willing suspension of disbelief... which constitues true poetic faith,’12 a suspension of disbelief which amounts to an implicit pact between reader and author who both know that the usual conditions of truth no longer apply as the historical novel rests upon a denegation of a reality which is acknowledged elsewhere as common reality.

14Such is not Mérimée’s position since in him ‘Artistic deception, [was] a trick [which] was part of the machinery of his rooted habit of intellectual reserve,’ (17-8) i.e. pertained to quite another dimension. His Chronicle of Charles the Ninth shows that he was especially interested in the question of truth: ‘he had something of genius for the exact study of history, for the pursuit of exact truth, with a keenness of scent as if that alone existed, in some special area of historic fact, to be determined by its own peculiar mental preferences.’ (6, italics mine) Mérimée’s relation to truth is different from Scott’s or from a professional historian’s as Pater makes clear: ‘To weigh the purely physiognomic import of the memoir, of the pamphlet saved by chance, the letter, the anecdote, the very gossip by which one came face to face with energetic personalities: there lay the true business of the historic student, not in that pretended theoretic interpretation by their mechanic causes, with which he dupes others, if not invariably himself.’ (6) Whereas the historian tries to find an a priori causal law about the events he pretends to reconstruct (which is sheer nonsense), Mérimée lays emphasis on the discursive nature of History which usually remains unquestioned. He is interested in what Pater called ‘the sense of fact’ in Style, stating that one never deals with raw facts but only with facts as they are verbalized.

15Mérimée’s style represents a singular position vis-à-vis truth and the Other, a problem that is linked to the conditions of a disbelieving century as we shall see. His enunciative position is different from Scott’s. Mérimée may appear as a realist writer by his ‘simple and unconcerned’ style (7) his ‘almost phlegmatic discovery of the facts, in all their crude natural colouring as if he but held up to view, as a piece of evidence, some harshly dyed oriental carpet... on which blood had fallen,’ (7) as the painter of a human condition deprived of embellishments by his topics, but he is more certainly the exposer of social hypocrisy which he reveals with a ‘design’ to shock the reader. One will remember that in Antiquity, the hypocrite was an actor hidden behind the persona of the mask and that it is precisely this subject that Mérimée has in mind to goad into disclosure. Mérimée pursues a truth stifled by or hiding behind social conventions which he suddenly unmasks for the sake of a reader who will be amused, shocked but never indifferent.

16Pater immediately sees that Mérimée’s art aims at the truth taken as the object of discourse. A form of truth which compels him to adopt this ‘unconcerned’ style, this singularly detached enunciative position. His writings hide the art of the story-teller who fools his reader unbeknownst to him: ‘The intellectual charm of literary work so thoroughly designed as Mérimée’s depends in part on the sense as you read... that you are dealing with a composition, the full secret of which is only to be attained in the last paragraph, that with the last word in mind you will retrace your steps, more than once... noting then the minuter structure, also the natural or wrought flowers by the way.’ (21) Whereas Coleridge turns the willing suspension of disbelief into the a priori condition of reading, Mérimée triggers it, plays with it and finally exposes it, an original position which was bound to attract Pater. His impersonality is not the sign of an absent soul but the sign of a soul which has withdrawn, leaving the intellect alone on the literary stage. A soul which adopts an ironic position whereas Scott’s impersonality evidenced a much simpler withdrawal that could be described as the withdrawal from the diegetic stage to engineer it from behind. In Mérimée, the division is not between the subject and the self as in Scott, but between the subject of the utterance and the subject of the enunciation, which makes him adopt this ‘habitual irony [as] the proper complement thereto, on his part.’ (3) Scott is off-stage directing the show while Mérimée is the man outside the stage-play, exposing what goes inside as a sham.

17His stance is not that of a humorist where ‘the spirit of the superego is being exerted at the expense of the ego, i.e. a discourse where the subject has left the character which represents him in the world to its own devices to withdraw in the Empyrean heights where he exhorts the poor dear... to rise up above miserable misfortunes,’13 but rather that of an ironist whose ‘shaft [is no longer] directed against the ego, but against somebody else,’ (Rey-Flaud 200) the somebody being Mérimée’s reader. Yet Mérimée is not cruel for cruelty’s sake and Pater stresses that he ‘was no more wanting than others in those natural sympathies... which happily are no extraordinary component in men’s natures.’ (21) What Mérimée, having deserted his ego, aims at is ‘what masks the true object of the attack,’ which is ‘the system of values and ideals that support the beliefs of a given community.’ (Rey-Flaud 200) Rey-Flaud from whom we borrow this analysis goes on: ‘the ego of the speaker is put within parentheses... the subject of the utterance no longer withdraws from the ego... but more surprisingly from the discourse itself, so that the “ironic” utterance takes itself as an object to expose the derision of all the semblances on which language is predicated. The subject of discourse turns out not to have taken the place of the superego but that of the ego ideal.’14 This is where we find Mérimée occupying the position of the ego ideal, i.e. at the place of soul as Pater had argued, which accounts for the fact that his ego is necessarily absent for others since the subject aims at fooling them. Seen from those heights, the social game appears in its derision, while the impassibility of the speaking I indicates that the subject has withdrawn from the common emotional sphere, as Pater underlines that Mérimée was ‘a man impassible, unfamiliar, impeccable, veiling a deep sense of what is... terrible, in things under the sort of personal pride that makes a man a nice observer of all that is most conventional.’ (24) Mérimée occupies the most comfortable position to achieve his literary goal which consists in ‘draw[ing] back the veil of time from the true greatness of old Roman character... the veil of modern habit from the primitive energy of the creatures of his fancy.’ (4) And Pater shows that in his writings, Mérimée seeks to lift the repressions upon which civilization has built itself15: the limit between men and animals, between good and bad, right and wrong, life and death, sanity and madness. This lifted repression which is ‘his favorite motive’ (17) discovers the horror of the human condition: ‘the sense of a wild power, under a sort of mask, or assumed habit, realised as the very genius of nature itself.’ (17) And Pater underlines ‘the mental constitution of the writer, which alike in fact and fiction, could hardly have horror enough.’ (19)

18Mérimée’s position is that of a subject who has deserted the world’s stage and has delegated this mask to represent him before other people. His impersonality is not the impersonality of a ‘tradition’ speaking through him but the impersonality of a subject who delegates his persona as a State delegates an ambassador to represent it (and to protect it as well) while he remains above, in the higher world where he knows that the truth is a construct, striving to get that dreary message across to a reader who finds himself ‘in a flash’ called in the place of the ego ideal where he gets the lesson which ‘unmasks the semblances which constitute the universe of belief he had been living hitherto.’16 Mérimée’s style is akin to ‘the polish of the stiletto Colomba carried always under her mantle, or the beauty of fire-arms’ (15-6) and the emotion aimed at in the reader is that ‘sort of fanatic joy in the perfect pistol-shot, at its height in the singular story he has translated from... Pouchkine.’ (16) His impersonality is not meant to renegociate the literary pact through which reader and writer agree to pretend that the story is true but to cast doubt on the reader’s universe, on the reality principle which is never questioned in fiction. Mérimée’s impersonality does not aim at the suspension of disbelief but at belief as such, at what I call ontological disbelief, a (dis) belief in the other whose master he becomes by arousing his credulity to better expose it in fine.

19As an example, the Vénus d’Ille is a fantastic text presenting itself hidden under a realist narrative to appear at the last moment as truly fantastic: ‘From the first, indeed [Vénus] had seemed bent on crushing out men’s degenerate bodies and souls, though the supernatural horror of the tale is adroitly made credible by a certain vagueness in the events, which covers a quite natural account of the bridegroom’s mysterious death.’ (20) Thus the reader sees his suspension of disbelief twice denied while the text closes on a literal suspension which leaves him in radical doubt as to his own reality insofar as it is supported by the same structure as that of the fictional Vénus.

20To account for Mérimée’s stance, Pater recounts a personal anecdote on the young writer which records his passage from credulity to radical scepticism: ‘Corrected for some childish fault, in passionate distress, he overhears a half-pitying laugh at his expense, and has determined, in a moment, never again to give credit—to be for ever on his guard, especially against his own instinctive movements. Quite unreserved, certainly, he never was again.’ (3)

21The anecdote is precious for its exemplary character as Mérimée experiences the Other’s duplicity, an experience we all have undergone and which determines our relation to truth, to belief and to knowledge in the sense that we believe to deny our knowledge and where our knowledge undermines our belief while truth is unable to be fully expressed.17 Mérimée became sceptic when he found out about the Other’s duplicity. This is precisely this ‘slavish capacity of being duped, in average mankind’ (7) that he wants his reader to experience through impersonal writings where truth not only appears as a fiction but as a fooling. Reeling under the Other’s duplicity, Mérimée retorts by hurling it on the Other of the readership for he knows that truth is a matter of belief which he will master by the production of fictions that expose themselves as such in the last moment; or, another tour de force, which announce themselves as such, defying their reader to disbelieve them: ‘A master of irony in Madame Lucrezia, he seems to wish to expose his own method cynically; to explain his art—how it takes you in—as a clever, confident conjuror might do.’ (18)

22The reader can only have the same experience as the young Mérimée, as if, by such a repetition, Mérimée sought to overcome a logical duplicity he has experienced as a trauma. Deceived by the Other, Mérimée becomes a deceiver, confessing with his times that there ‘is no Other of the Other’ (Lacan), that there is no foundation for truth and raising this to the dignity of a work of art by pretending to master the point of origin of belief which is also the point whence our cultural ideals originate.

23His rhetoric corresponds to what Pater calls ‘the mental story of the nineteenth century,’18 which went from transcendence to what Lacan calls the ‘idiot’s jouissance.’19 Mérimée is the offspring of a disillusioned century and Pater accounts for his existential malaise by an explanation linking the issue of the Mérimean impersonality to the modern condition.

24The truth which Mérimée seeks is indeed linked to belief and significantly the text begins with a portrait of the modern conditions of belief,20 stressing the disappearance of transcendance and of ‘a great outlook.’ (1) Deprived of ‘underlying principles once thought eternal’ (1) subjected to ‘that sense of negation, of theoretic insecurity,’ (3) ‘imprisoned in the narrow cell of [their] own subjective experience,’ (2) men became ‘désillusionnés’ as certainty disappears before (dis) belief.

25In a century where there appears to be no Other of the Other, the only thing left is empiricism and ‘a somewhat novel attitude towards practical interests in life’ which gives rise to a strange relation to art, science and passion. ‘Art: the passions, above all, the ecstasy and sorrow of love: a purely empirical knowledge of nature and man: these still remained, at last for pastime.’ (2) In a universe where the Freudian Thing has disappeared, there comes the substitutive object. Certainty which has been deemed impossible returns with a vengeance under the guise of those objects upon which the shadow for the vanished Thing falls and which Pater describes as: ‘something that must be... 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.’ (2) The substitutive object soon becomes an addictive object, while the subject falls prey to a credulity which may appear as ‘fanaticism.’21 Fanaticism can be defined as a transference of the originary credulity which has been denied to a substitutive object (art, passion, science) defined as never missing. But there is another possibility that Mérimée illustrates by having this kind of intimate relation with truth taken as an object. Mérimée is a truth addict and he adopts the only position fit to expose it as a construct, the withdrawal of the soul, the irony which ‘says the Other does not exist, that social links are indeed a fraud, that there is no discourse which does not partake of the semblance,’22 an irony whose master he will be, while others are its dupes. Mérimée masks his soul for the sake of a mind which exposes the semblance of all discourses. ‘Fundamental belief gone, in almost all of us, at least some relics of it remain... and they help to make an atmosphere, a mental atmosphere, hazy perhaps, yet with secrets of soothing light and shade.... Not so with Mérimée! For him the fundamental criticism has nothing more than it can do; and there are no half-lights. The last traces of hypothesis, of supposition, are evaporated’ (4-5): the common man will hold fast to his denied belief but Mérimée endures it as that ‘empty space’ at the core of his characters and himself, and pretends to master it, mastering the division of the subject; a pretention which will be twice defeated.

26Mérimée who appeared as an ‘amateur of power, of the spectacle of power and force, followed minutely but without sensibility’ (22) on the public stage, finds himself unexpectedly caught red-handed23 by an affection whose strength he was unaware of in himself, when he starts to correspond with an Unknown lady (Jenny Dacquin). From being the master of the social comedy, he falls ‘in the power and at the disposition of another.’ (21) A lady to whom he unceasingly asks ‘a frankness, he would have been the last to grant,’ (22) the sign or the testimony of her good faith, being always unsatisfied by her responses: ‘Mérimée is always pleading but always complaining that he gets only her second thoughts, that is, of a reserved, self-limiting nature, well under the yoke of convention, like in own.’ (22) Unwillingly in love, the sceptic ‘displays all the tricks of love, its casuistries, its exigency, its superstitions aye! even its vulgarities.’ (23) Mérimée’s desire of being sure of the Other oversteps the bounds of decency, revealing that the object sought by the writer is the ignoble heart of the Thing which he supposes to his Lady. All Mérimée’s infantile and denied credulity comes back with a vengeance to defeat the master of the literary illusions.

27And as a matter of fact, the reader can but agree with Pater discovering that Mérimée was struck by the credulity he had so many times striven to arouse in the other, only to poke fun at it, that: ‘There, too, had been the blind and naked force of nature and circumstance, surprising him in the uncontrollable movements of his so carefully guarded heart.’ (23) In Mérimée’s case, the backlash of irony is the utmost intolerance to the supposed duplicity of the other which in turn gives rise to the utmost submissiveness, to a compulsory credulity we might say; a compulsion bound never to be satisfied.

28Pater underlines that Mérimée’s private disclosure was redoubled with the publication of the Lettres à une inconnue ‘which discovered to general gaze, after his death, a certain depth of passionate force which had surprised him in himself.’ (4) Mérimée is defeated by the Other he had so many times tried to deceive and which now appears as the voyeur of his most essential doubts. ‘It was perhaps no fitting return for a friendship of over thirty years to publish posthumously those Lettres à une inconnue which reveal that reserved, sensitive, self-centered nature... in the power, at the disposition of another’ (21) as Pater underlines, as the publication aimed at publicly unmasking Mérimée’s persona to put him back in a position he had believed he could master.

29Pater’s Mérimée is paradoxical as he is the most impersonal writer, thus turning the art of the literary portrait into a tightrope exercise as the portraitist has to highlight not only a relation to language which unceasingly manifests itself as style but to pinpoint a singular enunciative position. Mérimée raises the mask to the dignity of a masterpiece through the detached and impersonal style Pater explains so forcefully.

30Mérimée is a writer who absents himself from his writings and whose absence constitutes the hallmark, the trace which arrests Pater wondering: ‘whether one can put there anything else,’ (23) before he dismisses the question by a trick (like Mérimée) which consists in addressing the issue of the difference between Mérimée and his characters, i.e. by underlining Mérimée’s withdrawal as the subject of his discourse. His withdrawal is no effacement of the ‘I’ but an ironic stance with Mérimée proving that the ironic withdrawal can be a manifestation of the subject as valid as Flaubert’s martyrdom. Rather than addressing the eclipses of the ego, the question of impersonality and emotion covers the question of the subject, a position which has not always been fully appreciated with regard to Pater.

31Mérimée enables Pater to locate a position which he analyzes in the context of an epoché where doubt had replaced ancient truths with the effect of creating ‘an art of fierce colours, that is needed, by those who are seeking in art... a kind of artificial stimulus.’ (15) The issue of impersonality is therefore linked to an ontological condition which accounts for the nineteenth-century ‘mental history.’24 Within the range of responses to the question of the Other of the Other, Mérimée again stands for a peculiar position as he chooses knowledge and exposes all beliefs. Pater concludes: ‘There are masters of French prose whose art has begun where the art of Mérimée leaves off’ (24) leaving open the door to potential ironical successors, some of whom being labelled ‘dubious.’25 But then, is irony not something which Modernism claimed as its own? Is it not an answer to the impossibility of an Other of the Other, an answer that the Modernists thought they had invented, thus denying the lesson of some Victorian masters? To believe them is to become their dupes.