X Méry
Another most delightful friend had Lola—he whom she refers to in her autobiography as “the celebrated poet, Méry.” To describe this charming and impossible personage as a poet, is to indicate only one department of his genius: as a dramatist he was not far inferior to his great contemporaries, as a novelist he revealed an amazing power of paradox, and a bewildering fertility of imagination. He wrote descriptions of countries he had never seen (though he had travelled far), which, by their accuracy and colour, deceived and delighted the very natives. He was not merely rich in rhymes, said Dumas, he was a millionaire. He could write, too, in more serious vein, and was a profound and ardent classicist.
In 1845 Méry was approaching his half-century. Thirty years before he had come to Paris from Marseilles in hot pursuit of a pamphleteer who had dared to attack him. He found time to cross swords with somebody else, and got the worst of the encounter. As a result he took a voyage to Italy for the benefit of his health. His adventures remind us alternatively of those of Brantôme and Benvenuto Cellini. At a later period he was associated with Barthélemy in an intrigue for the restoration of the Bonapartes; and went to pay his respects to Queen Hortense, while his colleague vainly endeavoured to talk with the Eaglet through the gilded bars of his cage.
Méry could, in short, do everything, and everything very well. He possessed the faculty of turning base metal into gold. Geese in his eyes became swans, and in every lump of literary coke he saw a diamond of the purest ray. It was, above all, in his dramatic criticism, remarks De Banville, that this faculty produced the most surprising results.
“One day, reading in Méry’s review the pretended recital of a comedy of which I was the author, I could not but admire its gaiety, grace, unexpected turns, and happy confusion, and I said to myself: ‘Ah, if only this comedy were really the one I wrote!’”
On another occasion, says the poet, at the theatre,
“he said to me: ‘What a superb drama!’—and he was perfectly right. The play, as he described it to me, was, in fact, superb, only unfortunately it had been entirely reconstructed by Méry on the absurd foundation imagined by Mr. * * *. The dénouement he invented—for though the third act was not finished, he spoke of the fifth as an old acquaintance—was of such tragic power and daring originality, that after hearing him expound it, I had no desire to witness Mr. * * *’s.”
Reviewers and dramatic critics of this kind are now, unhappily, rare.
These few anecdotes sufficiently justify De Banville’s claim that Méry was something altogether unheard of and fabulously original. He should have been (and probably was) the happiest of men, and his peculiar powers must have lightened his critical labours as much as they benefited those he criticised. He was as incapable of envy as Dumas was of rancour. Certainly no more lovable and agreeable creature ever haunted the slopes of Parnassus.
I doubt if such men would be appreciated in our society. Ours is the reign of the glum Bœotian. We know not how to converse, and wits are as dead as kings’ jesters. There is no scholarship in our senate, and the standard of oratory there would not have satisfied an Early Victorian debating society. If we talk less, assuredly we do not think the more. Every social, political, and religious idea that occupies our dull brains had entered into the consciousness of the men of the ’forties. They thought quickly and talked brilliantly. Their young men were youths—full of fire, enthusiasm, love, and fun. They did not talk about the advantages of devotion to business in early life. They were not born tired. Wonderful, too, as it may seem, people in those days used to like to meet each other in social converse, and were not ashamed to admit it. It was not then fashionable to affect a disinclination for society—the handiest excuse for an inability to talk and to think. Lola Montez learned in Paris what was meant by the joie de vivre. In ’45 wit was at the prow and pleasure at the helm.