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Updated: May 12, 2025
He made some justifiable criticisms of the libretto of the last work, although he admitted that the composer had contrived to write beautiful passages. "We cannot praise Halévy too highly," he wrote, "for the firmness with which he resists every temptation, to which many of his contemporaries succumb, to steal easy applause by relying blindly on the talent of the singers.
To most American readers of fiction I fancy that M. Ludovic Halévy is known chiefly, if not solely, as the author of that most charming of modern French novels, The Abbé Constantin.
But in spite of its inherent improbabilities, M. Halévy succeeded in making many converts to his theory, including Prof. Friedrich Delitzsch and a number of the younger school of German Assyriologists. More conservative scholars, such as Sir Henry Rawlinson, M. Oppert, and Prof.
M. Sorel must have felt the need of closer statement, for in a letter to Daniel Halèvy, published in the second edition, he makes his position much clearer. "Revolutionary myths ..." we read, "enable us to understand the activity, the feelings, and the ideas of a populace preparing to enter into a decisive struggle; they are not descriptions of things, but expressions of will."
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.
Their object was to establish a fund for the assistance of the poorer members of their craft something like the Royal Literary Fund of London. The letter addressed to him was signed by Baron Taylor, Ingres, Ambroise Thomas, Auber, Meyerbeer, Adolphe Adam, Jules Simon, Zimmermann, Halevy, and others.
Unluckily, we do not possess all the poems written by Halevy, who, moreover, was not a very prolific author. In what has come down to us his talent is abundantly proved by the charm of his individual style and the wealth of his images. The reader feels that the breath of the Revolution has blown through his pages.
As a matter of fact, all these plays, unlike as they are to each other, and not only these, but many more not a few of them fairly well known to the American play-goer are due to the collaboration of M. Henri Meilhac and M. Ludovic Halévy. Born in 1832, M. Henri Meilhac, like M. Émile Zola, dealt in books before he began to make them.
Allowing for the growth of M. Meilhac's intellect during the eight or ten years which intervened between the work alone and the work with his associate, and allowing for the improvement in the mechanism of play-making, I see no reason why M. Meilhac might not have written Fanny Lear and Froufrou substantially as they are had he never met M. Halévy.
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.
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