Teniers or Daumier?
To the maker of Poirier and Fabrice, of Séraphine and Giboyer, of Olympe and the Marquis d’Auberive, there were analogies between the genius of Labiche and the genius of Teniers. ‘C’est au premier abord,’ says he, ‘le même aspect de caricature; c’est, en y regardant de plus près, la même finesse de tons, la même justesse d’expression, la même vivacité de mouvement.’ For myself, I like to think of Labiche as in some sort akin to Honoré Daumier. Earnestness and accomplishment apart, he has much in common with that king of caricaturists. The lusty frankness, the jovial ingenuity, the keen sense of the ridiculous, the insatiable instinct of observation, of the draughtsman are a great part of the equipment of the playwright. Augier notes that truth is everywhere in Labiche’s work, and Augier is right. He is before everything a dramatist: an artist, that is, whose function is to tell a story in action and by the mouths of its personages; and whimsical and absurd as he loves to be, he is never either the one or the other at the expense of nature. He is often careless and futile: he will squander—(as in Vingt-neuf Degrés à l’Ombre and l’Avare en Gants
Jaunes)—an idea that rightly belongs to the domain of pure comedy on the presentation of a most uproarious farce. But he is never any falser to his vocation than this. Now and then, as in Moi and le Voyage de M. Perrichon, he is an excellent comic poet, dealing with comedy seriously as comedy should be dealt with, and incarnating a vice or an affectation in a certain character with impeccable justness and assurance. Now and then, as in les Petits Oiseaux and les Vivacités du Capitaine Tic, he is content to tell a charming story as pleasantly as possible. Sometimes, as in Célimare le Bien-Aimé (held by M. Sarcey to be the high-water mark of the modern vaudeville), le Plus Heureux des Trois, and le Prix Martin, he fights again from a humouristic point of view that triangular duel between the wife, the husband, and the lover which fills so large a place in the literature of France; and then he shows the reverse of the medal of adultery—with the husband at his ease, the seducer haunted by the ghosts of old sins, the erring wife the slave of her unsuspecting lord. Or again, he takes to turning the world upside down, and—as in the Cagnotte, the Chapeau de Paille, and the Trente Millions—to producing a scheme of morals and society that seems to have been dictated from an Olympus demoralised by champagne and lobster. But at his wildest he never forgets that men and women are themselves. His dialogue is always right and appropriate, however extravagant it be.
His vivid and varied knowledge of life and character supplies him with touches enough of nature and truth to make the fortune of a dozen ordinary dramatists; and withal you feel as you read that he is writing, as Augier says of him, to amuse himself merely, and that he could an if he would be solemn and didactic with all the impressiveness that a perfect acquaintance with men and things and an admirable dramatic aptitude can bestow. The fact that he is always in a good temper has done him some wrong in that it has led him to be to all appearances amusing only, where he might well have posed as a severe and serious artist. But he is none the less true for having elected to be funny, and there is certainly more genuine human nature and human feeling in such drolleries as the Chapeau de Paille and le Plus Heureux des Trois than in all the serious dramas of Ponsard (say) and Hugo put together.