THE AUTHORS OF "FROUFROU."

No doubt it will surprise some theatre-goers who are not special students of the stage to be told that the authors of Froufrou are the authors also of the Grande Duchesse de Gérolstein and of La Belle Hélène, of Carmen and of Le Petit Duc. There are a few, I know, who think that Froufrou was written by the fertile and ingenious M. Victorien Sardou, and who, without thinking, credit M. Jacques Offenbach with the composition of the words as well as the music of the Grande Duchesse; and as for Carmen, is it not an Italian opera, and is not the book, like the music, the work of some Italian? As a matter of fact, all these plays, unlike as they are to each other, and not only these, but many more—not a few of them fairly well known to the American play-goer—are due to the collaboration of M. Henri Meilhac and M. Ludovic Halévy.

Born in 1832, M. Henri Meilhac, like M. Émile Zola, dealt in books before he began to make them. He soon gave up trade for journalism, and contributed with pen and pencil to the comic Journal pour Rire. He began as a dramatist in 1855 with a two-act play at the Palais Royal Theatre: like the first pieces of Scribe and of M. Sardou, and of so many more who have afterward abundantly succeeded on the stage, this play of M. Meilhac's was a failure; and so also was his next, likewise in two acts. But in 1856 the Sarabande du Cardinal, a delightful little comedy in one act, met with favor at the Gymnase. It was followed by two or three other comediettas equally clever. In 1859, M. Meilhac made his first attempt at a comedy in five acts, but the Petit fils de Mascarille had not the good fortune of his ancestor. In 1860, for the first time, he was assisted by M. Ludovic Halévy, and in the twenty years since then their names have been linked together on the title-pages of two score or more plays of all kinds—drama, comedy, farce, opera, operetta and ballet. M. Meilhac's new partner was the nephew of the Halévy who is best known out of France as the composer of the Jewess, and he was the son of M. Léon Halévy, poet, philosopher and playwright. Two years younger than M. Henri Meilhac, M. Ludovic Halévy held a place in the French civil service until 1858, when he resigned to devote his whole time, instead of his spare time, to the theatre. As the son of a dramatist and the nephew of a popular composer, he had easy access to the stage. He began as the librettist-in-ordinary to M. Offenbach, for whom he wrote Ba-ta-clan in 1855, and later the Chanson de Fortunio, the Pont des Soupirs and Orphée aux Enfers. The first very successful play which MM. Meilhac and Halévy wrote together was a book for M. Offenbach; and it was possibly the good fortune of this operetta which finally affirmed the partnership. Before the triumph of the Belle Hélène in 1864 the collaboration had been tentative, as it were: after that it was as though the articles had been definitely ratified—not that either of the parties has not now and then indulged in outside speculations, trying a play alone or with an outsider, but this was without prejudice to the permanent partnership.

This kind of literary union, the long-continued conjunction of two kindred spirits, is better understood amongst us than the indiscriminate collaboration which marks the dramatic career of M. Eugène Labiche, for instance. Both kinds were usual enough on the English stage in the days of Elizabeth, but we can recall the ever-memorable example of Beaumont and Fletcher, while we forget the chance associations of Marston, Dekker, Chapman and Ben Jonson. And in contemporary literature we have before us the French tales of MM. Erckmann-Chatrian and the English novels of Messrs. Besant and Rice. The fact that such a union endures is proof that it is advantageous. A long-lasting collaboration like this of MM. Meilhac and Halévy must needs be the result of a strong sympathy and a sharp contrast of character, as well as of the possession by one of literary qualities which supplement those of the other.

One of the first things noticed by an American student of French dramatic literature is that the chief Parisian critics generally refer to the joint work of these two writers as the plays of M. Meilhac, leaving M. Halévy altogether in the shade. At first this seems a curious injustice, but the reason is not far to seek. It is not that M. Halévy is some two years the junior of M. Meilhac: it lies in the quality of their respective abilities. M. Meilhac has the more masculine style, and so the literary progeny of the couple bear rather his name than his associate's. M. Meilhac has the strength of marked individuality, he has a style of his own, one can tell his touch; while M. Halévy is merely a clever French dramatist of the more conventional pattern. This we detect by considering the plays which each has put forth alone and unaided by the other. In reading one of M. Meilhac's works we should feel no doubt as to the author, while M. Halévy's clever pictures of Parisian society, wanting in personal distinctiveness, would impress us simply as a product of the "Modern French School."

Before finally joining with M. Halévy, M. Meilhac wrote two comedies in five acts of high aim and skilful execution, and two other five-act pieces have been written by MM. Meilhac and Halévy together. The Vertu de Célimène and the Petit fils de Mascarille are by the elder partner—Fanny Lear and Froufrou are the work of the firm. Yet in these last two it is difficult to see any trace of M. Halévy's handiwork. Allowing for the growth of M. Meilhac's intellect during the eight or ten years which intervened between the work alone and the work with his associate, and allowing for the improvement in the mechanism of play-making, I see no reason why M. Meilhac might not have written Fanny Lear and Froufrou substantially as they are had he never met M. Halévy. But it is inconceivable that M. Halévy alone could have attained so high an elevation or have gained so full a comic force. Perhaps, however, M. Halévy deserves credit for the better technical construction of the later plays: merely in their mechanism the first three acts of Froufrou are marvellously skilful. And perhaps, also, his is a certain softening humor, which is the cause that the two later plays, written by both partners, are not so hard in their brilliance as the two earlier comedies, the work of M. Meilhac alone.

It may seem something like a discussion of infinitesimals, but I think M. Halévy's co-operation has given M. Meilhac's plays a fuller ethical richness. To the younger writer is due a simple but direct irony, as well as a lightsome and laughing desire to point a moral when occasion serves. Certainly, I shall not hold up a play written to please the public of the Palais Royal, or even of the Gymnase, as a model of all the virtues. Nor need it be, on the other hand, an embodiment of all the cardinal sins. The frequenters of the Palais Royal Theatre are not babes; young people of either sex are not taken there; only the emancipated gain admittance; and to the seasoned sinners who haunt theatres of this type these plays by MM. Meilhac and Halévy are harmless. Indeed, I do not recall any play of theirs which could hurt any one capable of understanding it. Most of their plays are not to be recommended to ignorant innocence or to fragile virtue. They are not meant for young men and maidens. They are not wholly free from the taint which is to be detected in nearly all French fiction. The mark of the beast is set on not a little of the work done by the strongest men in France. M. Meilhac is too clean and too clever ever to delve in indecency from mere wantonness: he has no liking for vice, but his virtue sits easily on him, and though he is sound on the main question, he looks upon the vagaries of others with a gentle eye. M. Halévy, it seems to me, is made of somewhat sterner stuff. He raises a warning voice now and then—in Fanny Lear, for instance, the moral is pointed explicitly—and even where there is no moral tagged to the fable, he who has eyes to see and ears to hear can find "a terrible example" in almost any of these plays, even the lightest. For the congregation to which it was delivered there is a sermon in Toto chez Tata, perhaps the piece in which, above all others, the Muse seems Gallic and égrillarde. That is a touch of real truth, and so of a true morality, where Tata, the fashionable courtesan, leaning over her stairs as Toto the school-boy bears off her elderly lover, and laughing at him, cries out, "Toi, mon petit homme, je te repincerai dans quatre ou cinq ans!" And a cold and cutting stroke it is a little earlier in the same little comedy where Toto, left alone in Tata's parlor, negligently turns over her basket of visiting-cards and sees "names which he knew because he had learnt them by heart in his history of France." Still, in spite of this truth and morality, I do not advise the reading of Toto chez Tata in young ladies' seminaries. Young ladies in Paris do not go to hear Madame Chaumont, for whom Toto was written, nor is the Variétés, where it was played, a place where a girl can take her mother.

It was at the Variétés in December, 1864, that the Belle Hélène was produced: this was the first of half a score of plays written by MM. Meilhac and Halévy for which M. Jacques Offenbach composed the music. Chief among these are Barbe-bleue, the Grande Duchesse de Gérolstein, the Brigands and Périchole. When we recall the fact that these five operas are the most widely known, the most popular and by far the best of M. Offenbach's works, there is no need to dwell on his indebtedness to MM. Meilhac and Halévy, or to point out how important a thing the quality of the opera-book is to the composer of the score. These earlier librettos were admirably made: they are models of what a comic opera-book should be. I cannot well imagine a better bit of work of its kind than the Belle Hélène or the Grande Duchesse. Tried by the triple test of plot, characters and dialogue, they are nowhere wanting. Since MM. Meilhac and Halévy have ceased writing for M. Offenbach they have done two books for M. Charles Lecoq—the Petit Duc and the Grande Demoiselle. These are rather light comic operas than true opéras-bouffes, but if there is an elevation in the style of the music, there is an emphatic falling off in the quality of the words. From the Grande Duchesse to the Petit Duc is a great descent: the former was a genuine play, complete and self-contained—the latter is a careless trifle, a mere outline sketch for the composer to fill up. The story—akin in subject to Mr. Tom Taylor's fine historical drama Clancarty—is pretty, but there is no trace of the true poetry which made the farewell letter of Périchole so touching, or of the true comic force which projected Général Bourn. Carmen, which, like Périchole, owes the suggestion of its plot and characters to Prosper Mérimée, is little more than the task-work of the two well-trained play-makers: it was sufficient for its purpose, no more and no less.

Of all the opera-books of MM. Meilhac and Halévy, that one is easily first and foremost which has for its heroine the Helen of Troy whom Marlowe's Faustus declared

In the Belle Hélène we see the higher wit of M. Meilhac. M. Halévy had been at the same college with him, and they had pored together over the same legends of old time, but working without M. Meilhac on Orphée aux Enfers, M. Halévy showed his inferiority, for Orphée is the old-fashioned anachronistic skit on antiquity—funny if you will, but with a fun often labored, not to say forced—the fun of physical incongruity and exaggeration. But in the Belle Hélène the fun, easy and flowing, is of a very high quality, and it has root in mental, not physical, incongruity. Here indeed is the humorous touchstone of a whole system of government and of theology. And, allowing for the variations made with comic intent, it is altogether Greek in spirit—so Greek, in fact, that I doubt whether any one who has not given his days and nights to the study of Homer and of the tragedians, and who has not thus taken in by the pores the subtle essence of Hellenic life and literature, can truly appreciate this French farce. Planché's Golden Fleece is in the same vein, but the ore is not as rich. Frere's Loves of the Triangles and some of his Anti-Jacobin writing are perhaps as good in quality, but the subjects are inferior and temporary. Scarron's vulgar burlesques and the cheap parodies of many contemporary English play-makers are not to be mentioned in the same breath with this scholarly fooling. There is something in the French genius akin to the Greek, and here was a Gallic wit who could turn a Hellenic love-tale inside out, and wring the uttermost drop of fun from it without recourse to the devices of the booth at the fair, the false nose and the simulation of needless ugliness. The French play, comic as it was, did not suggest hysteria or epilepsy, and it was not so lacking in grace that we could not recall the original story without a shudder. There is no shattering of an ideal, and one cannot reproach the authors of the Belle Hélène with what Theophrastus Such calls "debasing the moral currency, lowering the value of every inspiring fact and tradition."

Surpassed only by the Belle Hélène is the Grande Duchesse de Gérolstein. It is nearly fifteen years since all the world went to Paris to see an Exposition Universelle and to gaze at the "sabre de mon père," and since a Russian emperor, going to hear the operetta, said to have been suggested by the freak of a Russian empress, sat incognito in one stage-box of the little Variétés Theatre, and glancing up saw a Russian grand duke in the other. It is nearly fifteen years since the tiny army of Her Grand-ducal Highness took New York by storm, and since American audience after audience hummed its love for the military and walked from the French Theatre along Fourteenth street to Delmonico's to supper, sabring the waiters there with the venerated weapon of her sire. The French Theatre is no more, and Delmonico's is no longer at that Fourteenth-street corner, and Her Highness Mademoiselle Tostée is dead, and M. Offenbach's sprightly tunes have had the fate of all over-popular airs, and are forgotten now. Où sont les neiges d'antan?

It has been said that the authors regretted having written the Grande Duchesse, because the irony of history soon made a joke on Teutonic powers and principalities seem like unpatriotic satire. Certainly, they had no reason to be ashamed of the literary quality of their work: in its class it yields only to its predecessor. There is no single figure as fine as Calchas—Général Boum is a coarser outline—but how humorous and how firm is the drawing of Prince Paul and Baron Grog! And Her Highness herself may be thought a cleverer sketch of youthful femininity than even the Hellenic Helen. It is hard to judge the play now. Custom has worn its freshness and made it too familiar: we know it too well to criticise it clearly. Besides, the actors have now overlaid the action with over-much "business." But in spite of these difficulties the merits of the piece are sufficiently obvious: its constructive skill can be remarked; the first act, for example, is one of the best bits of exposition on the modern French stage.

Besides these plays for music, and besides the more important five-act comedies to be considered later, MM. Meilhac and Halévy are the authors of thirty or forty comic dramas—as they are called on the English stage—or farce-comedies in one, two, three, four, and even five acts, ranging in aim from the gentle satire of sentimentality in La Veuve to the outspoken farce of the Réveillon. Among the best of the longer of these comic plays are Tricoche et Cacolet and La Boule. Both were written for the Palais Royal, and they are models of the new dramatic species which came into existence at that theatre about twenty years ago, as M. Francisquc Sarcey recently reminded us in his interesting article on the Palais Royal in The Nineteenth Century. This new style of comic play may be termed realistic farce—realistic, because it starts from every-day life and the most matter-of-fact conditions; and farce, because it uses its exact facts only to further its fantasy and extravagance. Consider La Boule. Its first act is a model of accurate observation; it is a transcript from life; it is an inside view of a commonplace French household which incompatibility of temper has made unsupportable. And then take the following acts, and see how on this foundation of fact, and screened by an outward semblance of realism, there is erected the most laughable superstructure of fantastic farce. I remember hearing one of the two great comedians of the Théâtre Français, M. Coquelin, praise a comic actor of the Variétés whom we had lately seen in a rather cheap and flimsy farce, because he combined "la vérité la plus absolue avec la fantasie la plus pure." And this is the merit of La Boule: its most humorous inventions have their roots in the truth.

Better even than La Boule is Tricoche et Cacolet, which is the name of a firm of private detectives whose exploits and devices surpass those imagined by Poe in America, by Wilkie Collins in England, and by Gaboriau in France. The manifold disguises and impersonations of the two partners when seeking to outwit each other are as well-motived and as fertile in comic effect as any of the attempts of Crispin or of some other of Regnard's interchangeable valets. Is not even the Légataire Universel, Regnard's masterpiece, overrated? To me it is neither higher comedy nor more provocative of laughter than either La Boule or Tricoche et Cacolet; and the modern plays, as I have said, are based on a study of life as it is, while the figures of the older comedies are frankly conventional. Nowhere in Regnard is there a situation equal in comic power to that in the final act of the Réveillon—a situation Molière would have been glad to treat.

Especially to be commended in Tricoche et Cacolet is the satire of the hysterical sentimentality and of the forced emotions born of luxury and idleness. The parody of the amorous intrigue which is the staple of so many French plays is as wholesome as it is exhilarating. Absurdity is a deadly shower-bath to sentimentalism. The method of Meilhac and Halévy in sketching this couple is not unlike that employed by Mr. W.S. Gilbert in H.M.S. Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance. Especially to be noted is the same perfectly serious pushing of the dramatic commonplaces to an absurd conclusion. There is the same kind of humor too, and the same girding at the stock tricks of stage-craft—in H.M.S. Pinafore at the swapping of children in the cradle, and in Tricoche et Cacolet at the "portrait de ma mère" which has drawn so many tears in modern melodrama. But MM. Meilhac and Halévy, having made one success, did not further attempt the same kind of pleasantry—wiser in this than Mr. Gilbert, who seems to find it hard to write anything else.

As in the Château à Toto MM. Meilhac and Halévy had made a modern perversion of Dame Blanche, so in La Cigale did they dress up afresh the story of the Fille du R'egiment. As the poet asks—

I have cited La Cigale, not because it is a very good play—for it is not—but because it shows the present carelessness of French dramatists in regard to dramatic construction. La Cigale is a very clever bit of work, but it has the slightest of plots, and this made out of old cloth; and the situations, in so far as there are any, follow each other as best they may. It is not really a play: it is a mere sketch touched up with Parisianisms, "local hits" and the wit of the moment. This substitution of an off-hand sketch for a full-sized picture can better be borne in a little one-act play than in a more ambitious work in three or four acts.

And of one-act plays Meilhac and Halévy have written a score or more—delightful little genre pictures, like the Été de Saint-Martin, simple pastels, like Toto chez Tata, and vigorous caricatures, like the Photographe or the Brésilien. The Frenchman invented the ruffle, says Emerson: the Englishman added the shirt. These little dramatic trifles are French ruffles. In the beginning of his theatrical career M. Meilhac did little comedies like the Sarabande and the Autographe, in the Scribe formula—dramatized anecdotes, but fresher in wit and livelier in fancy than Scribe's. This early work was far more regular than we find in some of his latest, bright as these are: the Petit Hôtel, for instance, and Lolotte are etchings, as it were, instantaneous photographs of certain aspects of life in the city by the Seine or stray paragraphs of the latest news from Paris.

It is perhaps not too much to say that Meilhac and Halévy are seen at their best in these one-act plays. They hit better with a single-barrel than with a revolver. In their five-act plays, whether serious like Fanny Lear or comic like La Vie Parisienne, the interest is scattered, and we have a series of episodes rather than a single story. Just as the egg of the jelly-fish is girt by circles which tighten slowly until the ovoid form is cut into disks of independent life, so if the four intermissions of some of Meilhac and Halévy's full-sized plays were but a little longer and wider and deeper they would divide the piece into five separate plays, any one of which could fairly hope for success by itself. I have heard that the Roi Candaule was originally an act of La Boule, and the Photographe seems as though it had dropped from La Vie Parisienne by mistake. In M. Meilhac's earlier five-act plays, the Vertu de Celimène and the Petit fils de Mascarille, there is great power of conception, a real grip on character, but the main action is clogged with tardy incidents, and so the momentum is lost. In these comedies the influence of the new school of Alexandre Dumas fils is plainly visible. And the inclination toward the strong, not to say violent, emotions which Dumas and Angier had imported into comedy is still more evident in Fanny Lear, the first five-act comedy which Meilhac and Halévy wrote together, and which was brought out in 1868. The final situation is one of truth and immense effectiveness, and there is great vigor in the creation of character. The decrepit old rake, the Marquis de Noriolis, feeble in his folly and wandering in helplessness, but irresistible when aroused, is a striking figure; and still more striking is the portrait of his wife, now the Marquise de Noriolis, but once Fanny Lear the adventuress—a woman who has youth, beauty, wealth, everything before her, if it were not for the shame which is behind her: gay and witty, and even good-humored, she is inflexible when she is determined; hers is a velvet manner and an iron will. The name of Fanny Lear may sound familiar to some readers because it was given to an American adventuress in Russia by a grand-ducal admirer.

After Fanny Lear came Froufrou, the lineal successor of The Stranger as the current masterpiece of the lachrymatory drama. Nothing so tear-compelling as the final act of Froufrou had been seen on the stage for half a century or more. The death of Froufrou was a watery sight, and for any chance to weep we are many of us grateful. And yet it was a German, born in the land of Charlotte and Werther,—it was Heine who remarked on the oddity of praising the "dramatic poet who possesses the art of drawing tears—a talent which he has in common with the meanest onion." It is noteworthy that it was by way of Germany that English tragedy exerted its singular influence on French comedy. Attracted by the homely power of pieces like The Gamester and Jane Shore, Diderot in France and Lessing in Germany attempted the tragédie bourgeoise, but the right of the "tradesmen's tragedies"—as Goldsmith called them—to exist at all was questioned until Kotzebue's pathetic power and theatrical skill captured nearly every stage in Europe. In France the bastard offspring of English tragedy and German drama gave birth to an equally illegitimate comédie larmoyante. And so it happens that while comedy in English literature, resulting from the clash of character, is always on the brink of farce, comedy in French literature may be tinged with passion until it almost turns to tragedy. In France the word "comedy" is elastic and covers a multitude of sins: it includes the laughing Boule and the tearful Froufrou: in fact, the French Melpomene is a sort of Jeanne qui pleure et Jeanne qui rit.

So it happens that Froufrou is a comedy. And indeed the first three acts are comedy of a very high order, full of wit and rich in character. I mentioned The Stranger a few lines back, and the contrast of the two plays shows how much lighter and more delicate French art is. The humor to be found in The Stranger is, to say the least, Teutonic; and German humor is like the simple Italian wines: it will not stand export. And in The Stranger there is really no character, no insight into human nature. Misanthropy and Repentance, as Kotzebue called his play (The Stranger was Sheridan's title for the English translation he revised for his own theatre), are loud-sounding words when we capitalize them, but they do not deceive us now: we see that the play itself is mostly stalking sententiousness, mawkishly overladen with gush. But in Froufrou there is wit of the latest Parisian kind, and there are characters—people whom we might meet and whom we may remember. Brigard, for one, the reprobate old gentleman, living even in his old age in that Bohemia which has Paris for its capital, and dyeing his few locks because he feels himself unworthy to wear gray hair,—Brigard is a portrait from life. The Baron de Cambri is less individual, and I confess I cannot quite stomach a gentleman who is willing to discuss the problem of his wife's virtue with a chance adorer. But the cold Baronne herself is no commonplace person. And Louise, the elder daughter of Froufrou, the one who had chosen the better part and had kept it by much self-sacrifice,—she is a true woman. Best, better even than Brigard, is Gilberte, nicknamed "Froufrou" from the rustling of her silks as she skips and scampers airily around. Froufrou, when all is said, is a real creation, a revelation of Parisian femininity, a living thing, breathing the breath of life and tripping along lightly on her own little feet. Marrying a reserved yet deeply-devoted husband because her sister bid her; taking into her home that sister, who had sacrificed her own love for the husband; seeing this sister straighten the household which she in her heedless seeking for idle amusement had not governed, then beginning to feel herself in danger and aware of a growing jealousy, senseless though it be, of the sister who has so innocently supplanted her by her hearth, and even with her child; making one effort to regain her place, and failing, as was inevitable,—poor Froufrou takes the fatal plunge which will for ever and at once separate her from what was hers before. What a fine scene is that at the end of the third act, in which Froufrou has worked herself almost to a frenzy, and, hopeless in her jealousy, gives up all to her sister and rushes from the house to the lover she scarcely cares for! And how admirably does all that has gone before lead up to it! These first three acts are a wonder of constructive art. Of the rest of the play it is hard to speak so highly. The change is rather sudden from the study of character in the first part to the demand in the last that if you have tears you must prepare to shed them now. The brightness is quenched in gloom and despair. Of a verity, frivolity may be fatal, and death may follow a liking for private theatricals and the other empty amusements of fashion; but is it worth while to break a butterfly on the wheel and to put a humming-bird to the question? To say what fate shall be meted out to the woman taken in adultery is always a hard task for the dramatist. Here the erring and erratic heroine comes home to be forgiven and to die, and so after the fresh and unforced painting of modern Parisian life we have a finish full of conventional pathos. Well, death redeems all, and, as Pascal says, "the last act is always tragedy, whatever fine comedy there may have been in the rest of life. We must all die alone."

J. BRANDER MATTHEWS.