Page:Poet Lore, volume 28, 1917.djvu/69



T is with keen enjoyment that I turn from reading the collected plays of Eugène Labiche, to the writing of this article. The author has long been no utter stranger to me. I still recall the pleasure with which, during the days of our High School studies, I accompanied Perrichon upon his holiday jaunt through Switzerland. The memory of many a hearty laugh at the expense of the Malingears and the Ratinois, as well as my admiration of the bluff, kindly Uncle Robert, is still vivid. The plays gave me amusement, which interminable thumbings of the dictionary were unable to dissipate. And today I find the same fun, intensified and broadened, in visiting more extensively the field in which I so laboriously weeded irregular verbs, and tried to raise alternate crops of grammar and syntax. The weeds were thick and tough; grammar and syntax made sickly growth; but time was when I reaped a rich harvest of laughter, and in reaping, found that I had sown better than I knew. It is in this same spirit that I would attempt to study the work of Eugène Labiche. I would not seem to take him too seriously, or at any rate more seriously than he was pleased to take himself.

Among the French dramatists of the nineteenth century Eugène Labiche was one of the most active and most prolific. He was lucky; he was rich. And he wisely retired from the stage when he was at the height of his popularity. He was primarily a writer of farces and vaudevilles, which deprived of their couplets, offer delicious little farce-comedies as one would care to read, extending from one to five acts, and in numerous scenes. For the purpose of study I shall, perhaps rather arbitrarily separate these plays into three classes, each of which is more or less distinct. First, there are the plays which are pure, sheer farces of boisterous and rollicking fun. Second, there is an intermediate group of plays, not altogether farces, nor yet of sufficient merit