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Updated: May 7, 2025
There is something pretty and arch in the notion of the Duchess's falling in love with the impregnably faithful and innocent Fritz; and the extravagance of the whole, with the satire upon the typical little German court, is delightful. But "La Belle Helene" is a wittier play than "La Grande Duchesse," and it is the vividest expression of the spirit of opera bouffe.
This is felt in the more important character of Valentin Belgarde, a fascinating character in spite of its defects, perhaps on account of them and a sort of French Lord Warburton, but wittier, and not so good. "These are my ideas," says his sister-in-law, at the end of a number of inanities. "Ah, you call them ideas!" he returns, which is delicious and makes you love him.
"But, of course," I continued, to give a slight turn aside in our talk, "it is very wrong of us to have such sophisticated tastes. We ought to love these lonely hills and meadows far more. The natural man revels in solitude, and wants no wittier company than birds and flowers. Wordsworth made a constant companion of a pet daisy.
'Will you explain to me then how, if you are so much shrewder and wittier and cleverer than us, it does not make you richer, more prosperous, and more contented? 'I could do that too but I'm losing the birds. There's a cock now. Well done! I see you can shoot a bit. Look here, major, there's a deal in race in the blood of a people. It's very hard to make a light-hearted, joyous people thrifty.
When all is said, nothing is said; and Montaigne's Que scais-je, besides being briefer and wittier, was infinitely more informing. But we dwell too long with disease; the writer nourished on thought, whose nerves are braced and his loins girt to struggle with a real meaning, is not subject to these tympanies.
I do not say that it may not have been wickeder and wittier than I found it; I only report what I saw and heard in Bohemia on my first visit to New York, and I know that my acquaintance with it was not exhaustive. When I came the next year the Saturday Press was no more, and the editor and his contributors had no longer a common centre.
If the best he had to expect was exile on a pittance, a consulship at Genoa, a governorship at Guadeloupe, where would he find a more beautiful, a wittier, a gayer companion? And for her birth a fico! His great-grandfather had made money in stays; and the money was gone!
Waldo Emerson thought himself the intellectual inferior of his brother Charles; and good observers loved to maintain that John Holmes was wittier than Oliver Wendell, and Ezekiel Webster a better lawyer than Daniel. Applied to the literary history of a race, this principle is suggestive.
Another light of the Edinburgh Review, who at this time took Brougham at his own valuation, did an incidental service to Bentham. The noodle utters all the commonplaces by which the stupid conservatives, with Eldon at their head, met the demands of reformers. Nothing could be wittier than Smith's brilliant summary. Whigs and Radicals for the time agreed in ridiculing blind prejudice.
"Yes," I persisted, angered by his disdain, "wittier, and more humorous than 'As You Like It, or 'Much Ado. Strange to say, too, it is on a higher intellectual level. I can only compare it to the best of Congreve, and I think it's better." With a grunt of disapproval or rage the great man of the daily press turned away to exchange bleatings with one of his confrères.
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