FOR twenty-five cents and one hour and twelve minutes one may get in this present detailed world a bit of unforgettable complete enchantment.
So I found to-day in a moving-picture theater. A Carmen, the real Carmen of Prosper Mérimée glowed, vibrated, lived and died with passion on a white screen.
Of all prose writers I know Prosper Mérimée is the one—(intimate and sensitively alive as if I had lain against his shoulder as I read 'La Guzla' and 'Venus d'Ille'—he melts into my veins—)whom I would most eagerly see interpreted. Of all fiction characters—if she is fiction—the poignant Carmen is the one I would most eagerly see realized.
Carmen is one of those fictions which are truer to life than life is. Such fiction-things are all around, touching everybody: the spoken truths which grow false at being spoken: the thought lies which turn to truths the moment they touch words.
I have heard Carmen sung and seen her filmed by the lustrous Farrar, and I have seen her play-acted by some lesser lights. But Bizet's opera, a sparkling music-storm, creates a sonant objective Carmen, a beautiful bloody lyric, remote from Mérimée who
