Page:Poet Lore, volume 28, 1917.djvu/78

64 but it never oversteps that bound. This is no mere catering to sensualism. It is rather, the broad and hearty wit of a wholesome-minded man.

No vanity of false modesty mars the talent of Eugène Labiche; he is sincere to the core. He is modest; he is skillful. Like his types he has an incomparable exterior, and in addition, a piquant charm of personality which dares say what it thinks of life as it sees it.

It now remains but to sum up our varied impressions of the man and his work. Labiche was a bourgeois and an artist as well; in his chosen field, even a great artist, for he accomplished in an admirable manner that which he set himself to do. With good sense, imagination, logic, fantasy, simplicity and sincerity, he infused his work with the peculiar flavor of his own contradictory and original personality. Unconsciously, it must have been, he brought to his plays little bits of his own nature, which he treated with a stirring power of life and happiness. He disregarded the self-appointed task of the moralist, and cultivated an exclusively comic view of existence. In passion and vice he saw nothing but ridicule and nonsense. He laughed at everything but that which he considered to be his duty. He left to wiser heads than his the exploration of states of mind and soul, preferring rather to picture things as they appeared in the large. He has the saving grace of simplicity and clarity. He did not desire to waste his energies in strife for fine writing, nor did he pose as a titan of logic and psychology. He did not give us slices of experience without reason, nor would he have us think that life is one round of unalloyed gaiety, or a series of incoherent accidents — as false in theory as it often is in practice. He was not melancholy or suggestive, and his work was founded upon the truth as he saw it to be. What more shall we say of him, that he was lacking in ambition? Just so, but he has labored much to amuse us, and much may be forgiven him.

At the outset I remarked that Labiche rated himself but lightly, and I also said that I should like to try to take him at his own valuation, rather than to treat him too seriously. Well?