THE PROGRESS OF FRENCH COMEDY. 2$ Scribe, and following him Eugene Labiche. The first, with a hardly surpassable faculty of divining and satisfying the taste of his day, came decidedly short of the perfection of style which lasting work demands, and this was all the more remarkable as he not unfrequently essayed comedy of a somewhat dignified kind. M. Labiche, aiming as a rule at the lightest of light comedy only, has succeeded in elabor- ating a style so admirably fitted to it that he has not undeservedly been elected to the Academy, and that his work, as far as it is possible to its kind, is not unlikely to go down to the future unforgotten. In this same lighter kind of comedy an immense volume of work has been produced, including some in a kind almost peculiar to the time, such as the musical burlesques of Offenbach, which, thanks to the excellent librettos composed for them by MM. Meilhac and Halevy, deserve some rank in literature as well as in the class of social documents. M. Gondinet is another writer of light comedy deserving mention, and still more M. Pailleron, the latter of whom in some slight pieces, such as Le Chevalier Trumeau, has succeeded in uniting the best characteristics of the eighteenth-century tale with those of the Proverbe after Musset’s fashion. It should be noted as being far from unimportant that the connection between novel-writing and play-writing has in these latter days been very close, a successful novel being more often than not dramatised either by the author himself or by him in collaboration with a more practised dramatist. There are three comic, or chiefly comic, dramatists who in more elaborate work rank far ahead of all others during the latter part of the period now under review, and these three exhibit to the fullest extent the peculiarity of the whole time, that is to say, the close copying of contemporary ideas and manners. They are Alexandre Dumas fils, Emile Augier, and Victorien Sardou. Alexandre Dumas — the son of the still greater novelist of that name, who was himself one of the most accomplished dramatists of the century, though hardly in comic matter— has particularly taken up half-political, half-ethical questions, and has worked them out doubtless with much talent, but in a spirit of determined moralising
