Page:Poet Lore, volume 28, 1917.djvu/74

60 In his "Voyage de Monsieur Perrichon," a well-handled farce-comedy, often approaching to comedy of a high order, Labiche has lost an excellent opportunity. He starts out with another truth, and then through lack of concentration, or haste, or what not, he loses sight of his main issue amid salvos of rollicking laughter. The aimlessness of treatment is evident from the fact that the whole fourth act develops from the episode of the hotel register, in the third. We realize that the plot has some unity of impression, but this is not unity of action. There is no reason for interest and action to deviate from the ungratefulness of Perrichon to the interference of Armand. This, we must admit, looks like slip-shod craftsmanship.

In his treatment of the "Chapeau du Paille d'Italie," he has created a pattern — a masterpiece of its fantastic burlesquing kind; much, however, to the discomfiture and chagrin of Scribe, who considered that all his principles had been flagrantly violated. We mention the play here, chiefly because of its peculiar plot structure, and the swiftness of its action.

For variety of comic incident, as well as for further exemplification of the author's methods of treatment, we shall, perhaps, be unable to find more apt illustration, than in the "Plus Heureux Des Trois," "Celimare Le Bien-Aimé" and "La Cagnotte." The first two of these plays, perilously "risqué" at times, are not, in their characteristically Parisian attitude toward adultery, such things as may be read or witnessed with profit by sentimental nincompoops, or by callow adolescents, or in fact by any of the ilk possessing an overdeveloped propensity for plucking the mote from the eyes of their erring brethren. But for those who enjoy large and hearty merriment, and can see the humorous side of a subject conventionally considered somewhat shady, these plays will afford much normal pleasure and wholesome enjoyment. Of "La Cagnotte" little need be said in moral justification of our choice; it is innocuous; and may be unqualifiedly recommended for use as a text for seminaries, being, as it is, merely the rough-and-tumble adventures of a crowd of provincials, who come up to Paris for a holiday, and come to comic grief.

In each of the two pieces mentioned as unfit for youthful perusal, we see an attempt at the illustration of a philosophic truth. In "Celimare" it is the fact that our secret sins, no matter how we scheme, will eventually find us out, while in "Le Plus Heureux Des Trois" we are shown the exact converse of this proposition. It is simply a case of "before and after": Celimare