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."

But I had much rather decline both functions and all litigious
proceedings, and go from the courts of law to the cathedral of
literature and thank the Lord thereof for this wonderful triumph of
letters. And, in the same way, if any quarrelsome person says, "But only
a few pages back you were in parallel ecstasies about _La Morte
Amoureuse_," I decline the daggers. Each is supreme in its kind, though
the kinds are different. Of each it may