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 made a Carmen
intensely peculiar to his own subjective art. And the stage-Carmen
has always been a stage-Carmen waiting in dusty, draughty wings
for her cues. It remained for the cinematograph, which is a true
literal mirror of human expression, to make Carmen burst into violent
physical life.
But it was less the scopes of the films which made Carmen animate
than it was the virile woman who played her. It was acting--but
acting in the sense of losing and sinking and saturating and
dissolving herself in another woman’s temperament: and by it she
achieved some strong sword, keen shadings of the Carmen character--to
the hair’s-breadth.
And she _looked_ like Carmen. It was not important to the vigorous
fire of her acting but it made bewitchment in the portrait. No one
I have before seen play Carmen fitted the elusive points of her
description.
‘Her eyes were set obliquely in her head but they were
magnificent and large. Her lips, a little full but beautifully
shaped, revealed a set of teeth as white as newly-skinned
almonds. Her hair was black with blue lights on it like a
raven’s wing, long and glossy. To every blemish she united some
advantage which was perhaps all the more evident by contrast.
There was something strange and wild about her beauty. Her face
surprised you at first sight but nobody could forget it. Her
eyes especially had an expression of mingled sensuality and
fierceness which I had never seen in any human glance. Gypsy’s
eye, wolf’s eye’--
This (from the English translation of the story by Lady Mary Loyd)
fitted to a charm the pictured vision of the foreign-looking
woman--her name is Theda Bara--who flung a throbbing Carmen across
the screen with indescribable heat and color and luster. It was
comparable only to the muscular force of the original which that
Mérimée rubs nervously and heavily into one’s thoughts. I felt it
someway satisfyingly unbelievable--an illusion more actual than
actuality: a dream which outbore fact.
I suppose there’s no other character like Carmen for flaming
roundness in all fiction: filled with her treacheries yet purely true
to herself, without fear, utterly game: fierce, coarse, ruthless and
reckless yet wrapped in a maddening unwitting pathos: strong and bold
and cruelly poised yet capable of sudden complete surrender: ignorant
and abandoned and criminal in every instinct yet beyond every
littleness, every pettiness: sensual yet contemptuous and indifferent
in it, a woman of essential chastity. Carmen is the one criminal
conception in whom there is no vulgar evil, no personal maculateness
though wrecking all the wildness of her temper in her tempestuous
days’-journeys. She is a romantic murderous appeal to human
superjudgment. It was this isolate quality of her which Theda Bara
gave out with mystic masterful art. She gauged the personal odors
and blood-pressures of Carmen. She slipped into Carmen’s skin and
first sucked in and then breathed out the irresistible menacingness
and arresting ruination of her beautiful diabolic spirit. A little
feverish artistic thrill ran in my veins as I sat in the dark
watching.
‘She had thrown her mantilla back,’ says Don José in the
translated tale, ‘to show her shoulders and a great bunch of
acacias that was thrust into her chemise. She had another acacia
bloom in the corner of her mouth and she walked along swaying
her hips like a filly from the Cordova stud farm. In my country
anyone who had seen a woman dressed in that fashion would
have crossed himself. In Seville every man paid her some bold
compliment on her appearance. She had an answer to each and all
with her hand on her hip--“Come, my love,” she began again, “make
me seven ells of lace for my mantilla, my pet pin-maker.” And
taking the acacia blossom out of her mouth she flipped it at me
with her thumb so that it hit me just between the eyes. I tell
you, sir, I felt as if a bullet had struck me.’
This first meeting of Carmen with the dragoon was pictured in a
brilliant hot-looking plaza as if before the cigarette factory in
Seville. This woman in throwing the flower at the soldier expressed
wonderfully in one fleet moment, by hand and lip and eye, the savage
sordid poetry and passionate freedom--that unearthly fragrance--which
_is_ Carmen.
The film version followed the scenes of the opera rather than the
story, which took nothing from the headlong truth of the central
figure.
But no picturing can equal the star-clarity of Mérimée’s prose in
Carmen’s death-scene--a thing of a piercing pathos comparable to
nothing I know in writing.
‘After we had gone a little distance I said to her, “So, my
Carmen, you are quite ready to follow me, isn’t it so?”
She answered, “Yes, I’ll follow you to the death--but I won’t
live with you any more.”
We had reached a lonely gorge. I stopped my horse.
“Is this the place?” she said.
And with a spring she reached the ground. She took off her
mantilla and threw it at her feet, and stood motionless with one
hand on her hip, looking at me steadily.
“You mean to kill me, I see that well,” she said. “It is fate.
But you’ll never make me give in.”
I said to her: “Be rational, I implore you; listen to me. All
the past is forgotten. Yet you know it is you who have been my
ruin--it is because of you that I am a robber and a murderer.
Carmen, my Carmen, let me save you, and save myself with you.”
“José,” she answered, “what you ask is impossible. I don’t love
you any more. You love me still and that is why you want to kill
me. If I liked I might tell you some other lie, but I don’t
choose to give myself the trouble. Everything is over between us
two. You are my rom and you have the right to kill your romi,
but Carmen will always be free. A calli she was born and a calli
she’ll die.”
“Then you love Lucas?” I asked.
“Yes, I have loved him--as I loved you--for an instant--less than
I loved you, perhaps. And now I don’t love anything. And I hate
myself for ever having loved you.”
I cast myself at her feet, I seized her hands, I watered them
with tears, I reminded her of all the happy moments we had spent
together, I offered to continue my brigand’s life, if that would
please her. Everything, sir, everything--I offered her everything
if she would only love me again.
She said: “Love you again? That’s not possible. Live with you? I
will not do it.”
I was wild with fury. I drew my knife. I would have had her look
frightened and sue for mercy--but that woman was a demon. I
cried: “For the last time I ask you, Will you stay with me?”
“No! No! No!” she said and she stamped her foot. Then she
pulled a ring I had given her off her finger and cast it into
the brushwood. I struck her twice over--I had taken Garcia’s
knife because I had broken my own. At the second thrust she
fell without a sound. It seems to me that I can still see her
great black eyes staring at me. Then they grew dim and the
lids closed.--For a good hour I lay there prostrate beside the
corpse.’--
No play-acting could make the scene so pregnant and palpitant with
human-stuff and alive in vision as that translucent jewel-prose
of Mérimée. But so close as one art may counterfeit another, by
drinking-up the fiery spirit essence which informs it, so close
did this actor-woman compass and consummate the strong delicious
unafraidness of Carmen’s death-hour.
The scene was staged as in the opera--a court outside the
bull-fighting arena, with Carmen richly bejeweled and dressed in
the lacy smart-lady clothes of the Toreador’s mistress. But that
was nothing. The gypsy wildness of the written scene was in every
insolently splendid bodily movement and each fateful loveliness of
eyes and lips of the fulfilling Theda Bara.
I can still see the dark drooping-lidded dying eyes. I sensed Carmen
in conscious chambers of my Mind. I felt her in my throat. It was
Carmen herself living and breathing near me, the fearsomely adorable
Carmen who has haunted the edge of my thoughts since I first read her.
There are some odd crudenesses in Theda Bara’s acting which had the
effect of making her un-stagey, unobvious. They made her humanly
vibrant. And they added a devilish wistfulness to her Carmen and a
surprising feel of genuineness to the whole masque.
The actor’s art brings out the romance which is in human
bone-and-flesh. And Theda Bara seems someway a master of its physical
and spiritual subtleties. She expressed the swift emotion of Carmen
by ringing slightest possible changes on her own virile and mobile
body: insolence by kimboing an elbow: cruelty by the twitch of a
wrist: sensual feeling by moving a knee and an ankle: murder in the
twisting of her waistline: a fleet repressed animal tenderness by a
posture of shoulder and breast: a heartbreak of mirth in her careless
vivid lips: the desperate bravery of that death by the tilt of her
potent chin: the hurricane-freedom of Carmen’s soul by lifting her
face and her arms in the night wind. She worked with an exquisite
muscular sincerity, as if she strongly gave her best of brain and
blood and mettle to the part.
I looked at photographs of her which decorated the lobby of the
theater. She looks a beautiful and earnest-seeming girl of a mental
rather than a physical caste, with melancholy dark eyes, a childlike
mouth-profile and the slim patrician hands of a Bourbon duchess. She
will live in my warmed memory as the star of all the Carmens.
A flood of life and color goes into the staging of a Carmen film: a
throng of attractive faces and bodies of people, women and men and
lovely children, move through it in a pulsating gay pageant: flowers
and Spanish prettinesses of costume and country-side and street
and café are all over it, bright as life: and sweet winds blow in
it and leaves and grasses wave and flutter, and the sunshine melts
and mellows the air--all as if one saw it thrice-enlarged through
windows. It is not poetry--it is not in itself any art, but a dear
delectable counterfeit of it, a miracle-_taste_ of the outer-looking
madly-peopled world.
For me it meant my long-adored Mérimée given sudden brief life, the
haunting Carmen turned into flesh: a spell of silent human-music
which glowed and burned upon me like gentle fire.
Often is God thus capriciously kind to me.
_A fascinating creature_