Page:The Writings of Prosper Merimee-Volume 1.djvu/56

xlviii flavour and colour which usually mar Byronism. I have said that I think Colomba was meant to be, and that I think she is, quite a good girl, and quite a "nice" though rather a formidable one. It is less a point of faith whether Mérimée has entirely freed her brother from the touch of comparative unmanliness which is almost inevitably suggested by such a Pallas-Diana of a sister. But the fact I think, is that Orso, Lydia, her father, the Prefect, the bandits, and all the rest are designedly, and in the case allowably, intended to be foils and sets-off to this Pallas-Diana herself. The pains which Mérimée has taken with her are extraordinary, and some of their results—the touch of literary interest in Dante, the camaraderie with the colonel and other things—may escape the careless; but they should not. Although knowing it to be wrong, one desiderates a sequel; and I should like to ask Mr. "Anthony Hope" whether Phroso owes anything consciously to Colomba.

In Carmen, on the other hand, the interest is very much less centred in the heroine; indeed I am heretically inclined to think that the wicked gitana is much less really the heroine than José Navarro is the hero. She has a little too much of what I have just called her "the wicked gitana" in other words, of the type—that