Labiche.
Perhaps the most characteristic and individual part of his work is that in which he has given his invention full swing, and allowed his humour to play its maddest pranks at will. Moi is an admirable comedy, and De la Porcheraie is almost hideously egoistic; the Voyage de M. Perrichon is delightful reading,
and Perrichon is as pompous an ass as I know; but the Chapeau de Paille, the Cagnotte, the Trente Millions, the Sensitive, the Deux Merles Blancs, the Doit-On le Dire, and their compeers—with them it is other-guess work altogether. In these whimsical phantasmagorias men and women move and speak as at the bidding of destinies drunk with laughing-gas. Time and chance have gone demented, fate has turned comic poet, society has become its own parody, everybody is the irrepressible caricature of himself. You are in a topsy-turvy world, enveloped in an atmosphere instinct with gaiety and folly, where burlesque is natural and only the extravagant is normal; where your Chimæra has grown frolic, your Nightmare is first Cousin to the Cheshire Cat, and your Sphinxes are all upon the spree; and where you have as little concern for what is real as you have in that hemisphere of the great globe of Molière—that has Scapin and Sganarelle for its breed-bates, and Pourceaugnac for its butt, and Pancrace and Marphurius for its scientific men, and Lélie and Agnès for its incarnations of love and beauty. That the creator of such a world as this should have aspired to the Academy’s spare arm-chair—that one above all others but just vacated by the respectable M. de Sacy—was a fact that roused the Revue des Deux Mondes even to satire. But if the arm-chair brought honour with it, then no man better deserved the privilege than Eugène
Labiche, for he had amused and kept awake the public for nearly forty years—for almost as long, that is, as the Revue had been sending it to sleep. There are times and seasons when a good laugh makes more for edification than whole folios of good counsel. ‘I regarded him not,’ quoth Sir John of one that would have moved him to sapience, ‘and yet he talked wisely.’ Now Sir John, whatever his opinion of the Revue, would never have said all that—the second part of it he might—of anything signed ‘Eugène Labiche,’ nor—so I love to believe—would his august creator either. For is not his work so full of quick, fiery, and delectable shapes as to be perpetual sherris? And when time and season fit, what more can the heart of man desire?