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In the library hung a small, full-length drawing of Georges, done in color by Miss Betty's grandmother; and this she carried to her own room an& studied long and ardently, until sometimes the man himself seemed to stand before her, in spite of the fact that Mile. Meithac had not a distinguished talent and M. Meilhac's features might have been anybody's.
I have heard that the Roi Candaule was originally an act of La Boule, and the Photographe seems as though it had dropped from La Vie Parisienne by mistake. In M. Meilhac's earlier five-act plays, the Vertu de Celimène and the Petit fils de Mascarille, there is great power of conception, a real grip on character, but the main action is clogged with tardy incidents, and so the momentum is lost.
And perhaps, also, his is a certain softening humor, which is the cause that the two later plays, written by both partners, are not so hard in their brilliance as the two earlier comedies, the work of M. Meilhac alone. It may seem something like a discussion of infinitesimals, but I think M. Halévy's co-operation has given M. Meilhac's plays a fuller ethical richness.
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.
M. Meilhac's new partner was the nephew of the Halévy who is best known out of France as the composer of the Jewess, and he was the son of M. Léon Halévy, poet, philosopher and playwright. Two years younger than M. Henri Meilhac, M. Ludovic Halévy held a place in the French civil service until 1858, when he resigned to devote his whole time, instead of his spare time, to the theatre.
He soon gave up trade for journalism, and contributed with pen and pencil to the comic Journal pour Rire. He began as a dramatist in 1855 with a two-act play at the Palais Royal Theatre: like the first pieces of Scribe and of M. Sardou, and of so many more who have afterward abundantly succeeded on the stage, this play of M. Meilhac's was a failure; and so also was his next, likewise in two acts.
In reading one of M. Meilhac's works we should feel no doubt as to the author, while M. Halévy's clever pictures of Parisian society, wanting in personal distinctiveness, would impress us simply as a product of the "Modern French School."
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