o-day
You told at the beginning?
For lo! the same old myths that made
The early stage-successes
Still hold the boards, and still are played
With new effects and dresses.

I have cited _La Cigale_, not because it is a very good play--for it is
not--but because it shows the present carelessness of French
dramatists in regard to dramatic construction. _La Cigale_ is a very
clever bit of work, but it has the slightest of plots, and this made out
of old cloth; and the situations, in so far as there are any, follow
each other as best they may. It is not really a play: it is a mere
sketch touched up with Parisianisms, "local hits" and the wit of the
moment. This substitution of an off-hand sketch for a full-sized picture
can better be borne in a little one-act play than in a more ambitious
work in three or four acts.

And of one-act plays Meilhac and Halevy have written a score or
more--delightful little _genre_ pictures, like the _Ete de
Saint-Martin_, simple pastels, like _Toto chez Tata_, and vigorous
caricatures, like the _Photographe_ or the _Bresilien_. The Frenchman
invented the ruffle, says Emerson: the Englishman added the shirt. These
little dramatic trifles are French ruffles. In the beginning of his
theatrical career M. Meilhac did little comedies like the _Sarabande_
and the _Autographe_, in the Scribe formula--dramatized anecdotes, but
fresher in wit and livelier in fancy than Scribe's. This early work was
far more regular than we find in some of his latest, bright as these
are: the _Petit Hotel_, for instance, and _Lolotte_ are etchings, as it
were, instantaneous photographs of certain aspects of life in the city
by the Seine or stray paragraphs of the latest news from Paris.

It is perhaps not too much to say that Meilhac and Halevy are seen at
their best in these one-act plays. They hit better with a single-barrel
than with a revolver. In their five-act plays, whether serious like
_Fanny Lear_ or comic like _La Vie Parisienne_, the interest is
scattered, and we have a series of episodes rather than a single story.
Just as the egg of the jelly-fish is girt by circles which tighten
slowly until the ovoid form is cut into disks of independent life, so if
the four intermissions of some of Meilhac and Halevy's full-sized plays
were but a little longer and wider and deeper they would divide the
piece into five separate plays, any one of which could fairly hope for
success by itself. I have heard