to the lower
English mind and to the lower English stage. M. Capus is not a moralist,
but it is not needful to be a moralist. He is a skilful writer for the
stage, who takes an amiable, somewhat superficial, quietly humorous view
of things, and he takes people as he finds them in a particular section
of the upper and lower middle classes in Paris, not going further than
the notion which they have of themselves, and presenting that simply,
without comment. We get a foolish young millionaire and a foolish young
person in a flower shop, who take up a collage together in the most
casual way possible, and they are presented as two very ordinary people,
neither better nor worse than a great many other ordinary people, who
do or do not do much the same thing. They at least do not "wink or
giggle"; they take things with the utmost simplicity, and they call upon
us to imitate their bland unconsciousness.

"La Veine" is a study of luck, in the person of a very ordinary man, not
more intelligent or more selfish or more attractive than the average,
but one who knows when to take the luck which comes his way. The few,
quite average, incidents of the play are put together with neatness and
probability, and without sensational effects, or astonishing curtains;
the people are very natural and probable, very amusing in their humours,
and they often say humorous things, not in so many set words, but by a
clever adjustment of natural and probable nothings. Throughout the play
there is an amiable and entertaining common sense which never becomes
stage convention; these people talk like real people, only much more
a-propos.

In "Les Deux Ecoles" the philosophy which could be discerned in "La
Veine," that of taking things as they are and taking them comfortably,
is carried to a still further development. I am prepared to be told that
the whole philosophy is horribly immoral; perhaps it is; but the play,
certainly, is not. It is vastly amusing, its naughtiness is so naive, so
tactfully frank, that even the American daughter might take her mother
to see it, without fear of corrupting the innocence of age. "On peut
tres bien vivre sans etre la plus heureuse des femmes": that is one of
the morals of the piece; and, the more you think over questions of
conduct, the more you realise that you might just as well not have
thought about them at all, might be another. The incidents by which
these excellent morals are driven home are incidents of the