Ah, World of ours, are you so gray, And weary, World, of spinning, That you repeat the tales to-day You told at the beginning? For lo! the same old myths that made The early stage-successes Still hold the boards, and still are played With new effects and dresses.
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.