Page:I, Mary MacLane (1917).pdf/181

 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