All the world knows _Carmen_, though it may be feared that the knowledge has been conveyed to more people by the mixed and inferior medium of the stage and music than by the pure literature of the original tale. Yet it may be generously granted that the lower introduction may have induced some to go on, or back, to the higher. Of the unfaulty faultlessness of that original there has never been any denial worth listening to; the gainsayers having been persons who succumbed either to non-literary prejudice[221] of one kind or another or to the peculiarly childish habit of going against established opinion. For combined interest of matter and perfection of form I should put it among the dozen best short stories of the world so far as I am acquainted with them. The appendix about the gipsies is indeed a superfluity, induced, it would seem, partly by Merimee's wish to have a gibe at Borrow for being a missionary, and partly by a touch of inspectorial-professorial[222] habit in him which is frequently apparent and decidedly curious. But it is an appendix of the most appendicious, and can be cut away without the slightest Manx-cat effect. From the story itself not a word could be abstracted without loss nor one added to it without danger. The way in which the narrator--it is impossible to tell the number of the authors who have wrecked themselves over the narrator when he has to take part in the action--and the guide are put and kept in their places, as well as the whole part of Jose Navarro, are _impayables_. If the Hispanolatry of French Romanticism had nothing but Gastibelza and L'Andalouse in verse and Jose Navarro in prose to show, it would stand justified and crowned among all the literary manias in history. [Sidenote: Carmen.] About Carmen herself there has been more--and may justly be a little more--question. Is her _diablura_ slightly exaggerated? Or, to put the complaint in a more accurately critical form, has Merimee attended a little too much to the task of throwing on the canvas a typical Rommany _chi_ or _callee_, and a little too little to that of bodying forth a probable and individual human girl? As an advocate I think I could take a brief on either side of the question without scandalising the, on this point, almost neurotic conscience of the late Mr. Anthony Trollope. But, as a juryman, my verdict on either indictment would be "Not guilty, and _please_ do it again."