Parisian Points of View | Page 2

story
unrolls itself, also, as rapidly as does a comedy. The movement is
straightforward. There is the cleverness and the ingenuity of the
accomplished dramatist, but the construction has the simplicity of the
highest skill. The arrangement of incidents is so artistic that it seems
inevitable; and no one is ever moved to wonder whether or not the tale
might have been better told in different fashion.

Nephew of the composer of "La Juive"--an opera not now heard as
often as it deserves, perhaps--and son of a playwright no one of whose
productions now survives, M. Halévy grew up in the theatre. At
fourteen he was on the free-list of the Opéra, the Opéra-Comique, and
the Odéon. After he left school and went into the civil service his one
wish was to write plays, and so to be able to afford to resign his post. In
the civil service he had an inside view of French politics, which gave
him a distaste for the mere game of government without in any way
impairing the vigor of his patriotism; as is proved by certain of the
short stones dealing with the war of 1870 and the revolt of the Paris
Communists. And while he did his work faithfully, he had spare hours
to give to literature. He wrote plays and stories, and they were rejected.
The manager of the Odéon declared that one early play of M. Halévy's
was exactly suited to the Gymnase, and the manager of the Gymnase
protested that it was exactly suited to the Odéon. The editor of a daily
journal said that one early tale of M. Halévy's was too brief for a novel,
and the editor of a weekly paper said that it was too long for a short
story.
In time, of course, his luck turned; he had plays performed and stories
published; and at last he met M. Henri Meilhac, and entered on that
collaboration of nearly twenty years' duration to which we owe
"Froufrou" and "Tricoche et Cacolet," on the one hand, and on the other
the books of Offenbach's most brilliant operas--"Barbebleue," for
example, and "La Périchole." When this collaboration terminated,
shortly before M. Halévy wrote _The Abbé Constantin_, he gave up
writing for the stage. The training of the playwright he could not give
up, if he would, nor the intimacy with the manners and customs of the
people who live, move, and have their being on the far side of the
curtain.
Obviously M. Halévy is fond of the actors and the actresses with whom
he spent the years of his manhood. They appear again and again in his
tales; and in his treatment of them there is never anything
ungentlemanly as there was in M. Jean Richepin's recent volume of
theatrical sketches. M. Halévy's liking for the men and women of the
stage is deep; and wide is his knowledge of their changing moods. The
young Criquette and the old Karikari and the aged Dancing-master--he
knows them all thoroughly, and he likes them heartily, and he

sympathizes with them cordially. Indeed, nowhere can one find more
kindly portraits of the kindly player-folk than in the writings of this
half-author of "Froufrou"; it is as though the successful dramatist felt
ever grateful towards the partners of his toil, the companions of his
struggles. He is not blind to their manifold weaknesses, nor is he the
dupe of their easy emotionalism, but he is tolerant of their failings, and
towards them, at least, his irony is never mordant.
Irony is one of M. Halévy's chief characteristics, perhaps the chiefest. It
is gentle when he deals with the people of the stage--far gentler then
than when he is dealing with the people of Society, with fashionable
folk, with the aristocracy of wealth. When he is telling us of the young
loves of millionaires and of million-heiresses, his touch may seem
caressing, but for all its softness the velvet paw has claws none the less.
It is amusing to note how often M. Halévy has chosen to tell the tale of
love among the very rich. The heroine of _The Abbé Constantin_ is
immensely wealthy, as we all know, and immensely wealthy are the
heroines of Princesse, of _A Grand Marriage,_ and of In the
Express.[A] Sometimes the heroes and the heroines are not only
immensely wealthy, they are also of the loftiest birth; such, for instance,
are the young couple whose acquaintance we make in the pages of Only
a Waltz.
[Footnote A: Perhaps the present writer will be forgiven if he wishes to
record here that _In the Express (Par le Rapide)_ was published in Paris
only towards the end of 1892, while a tale not wholly unlike it, In the
Vestibule Limited, was published in New York in the spring of