some of the most uninteresting characters of modern comedy. Like Mr. Trollope, the French playwrights of our day have forgotten that to be rendered useful for artistic purposes the human vegetable must have its undecided angles sharply defined, its imperceptible salient points accentuated-it must be caricatured, in a word. The rule is applied in all Molière's comedies; by following it closely Balzac achieved the powerful portrait of "Mercadet"-perhaps the best French comedy of this century, albeit one which no Parisian manager dare to revive. It is not from a mere caprice that the Baron de Nucingin is made to speak the grotesque Alsatian jargon that Balzac phonographs with such patient minuteness. It gives the vulgar German banker the one picturesque characteristic he can be made to present. This law of theatrical optics has produced Henry Monnier's masterpiece the "Grandeur et Décadence de M. Joseph Prudhomme"; and is the origin of an opinion very prevalent among French critics that if remnants of Molière's genius are to be found anywhere, it is in some types and situations of the popular farces and vaudevilles played at minor theatres. None were assuredly to be found in "Monsieur Alphonse," and "Monsieur Alphonse" is already forgotten; while the "Fille de Madame Angot" travelled round the world in three months, and attracted Parisian audiences during four hundred nights. M. Dumas' cold realism touches even fewer human sympathies than Vade's Billingsgate.

But there is, after all, a slight remnant of hereditary romanticism in the author of the "Dame aux Camelias." The mind that conceived a graceful, artistic trifle like "Le Bijou de la Reine" is capable of better work than commentations of the Code and the Seventh Commandment. But that section of the modern school which follows M. Emile Augier professes purely and simply a "common sense" doctrine. M. Augier has put the fripperies of 1830 entirely aside, and bravely adopted the white cravat of respectability as the pennon of his coterie. His creed is formulated in the famous line

O, père de famille, O poëte, je t'aime !

And nearly all his comedies aim at the artistic rehabilitation of this ideal. He has consistently endeavoured to set a halo round the bald head of the respectable householder, to exhibit simple domestic virtues in a lovely light. His works have been received in France as the best type of "improving" literature. From an insular point of view their moral influence is scarcely comprehensible. That of the "Cigue," for instance, consists in persuading the spectator that wild oats may be sown whenever the sinner grows tired and feels the first

symptoms of rheumatism, and that there is always a pure bourgeois angel ready to accept with thanks the ruined remnants left him by dissipation. "Gabrielle," another of M. Augier's successes, advocates Malthusian doctrines with a freedom of speech impossible to describe in English; and one of the most "virtuous scenes of this comédie honnête represents two lovers discussing investments, and calculating their income at their fingers' ends with a view to discover at what date

Nous pourrons nous donner le luxe d'un garçon !

And M. Augier boasts that he has broken the mirror held up to Lucrezia Borgia, to substitute the reflection of this sorry, grovelling side of human nature! His collaborateur, his colleague at the Academy, M. Jules Sandean, attempted a reform of another description. He introduced into the French theatre a mawkish order of literature, of which he had made a profitable speciality. Romantic comedy based on romantic novels is all M. Sandean has contributed to the modern French stage. Morally, his works are uniformly pure; artistically, they are strained and hysterical. He deals with Polish exiles, with old feudal castles, impoverished noblewomen, and aspiring parvenus. His heroines are saved from accidents by flood and field, his heroes soliloquise in solitary contemplation of the ocean. M. Sandean is the faint reflection of Georges Sand in 1840.

MM. Sardou and Barrière are incontestably the most progressive heirs of Eugène Scribe. They mounted no hobby at the outset; they struck no attitude, professed no new philosophy. They set themselves to picture lightly the little sides of modern life, to dramatise its passing intrigues, and satirise its evanescent whims and humours. Their scalpel seldom goes beyond the surface, but it is delicately handled. "Les Faux Bonshommes" is an imitable study of modern Tartuffes— the Tartuffes of good humour and benevolence instead of religion. But neither Victorien Sardou nor Theodore Barrière has been able to modify in any noticeable degree the positivist tendencies of Scribe's school. They have followed the taste of the Second Empire, and replaced the master's sentimentalism by financial essays. There are scenes in "Les Faux Bonshommes," in the "Pommes du Voisin," and in "Nos Intimes" that might have been written by a coulissier of the Bourse. Who does not remember the arithmetic of the "Famille Benoîton"?-the stockbroker's slang placed in the mouths of children? the one basis, the unique soul of the piece-money? The author was at greater pains to state the incomes of his personages than to describe their characters, and not only because the nature of the subject compelled such an exposition. M. Sardou goes to the

Bourse corridors with an obvious liking for that field of observation. He cannot escape from the gold-fever in his most passionate works in the "Pattes de Mouche" for instance. Was not "L'oncle Sam" a study of rash speculators? Was not one act of the spectacular and archæological piece "Les Merveilleuses" devoted to a discussion of the currency question under the Directory? Epigrams and bill-stamps are the residue left by an analysis of nearly all MM. Sardou's and Barrière's comedies. Theirs is a metallic brilliancy that dazzles, but never warms; and if we except "Frou-Frou," once their vogue past, once their repartees known, not one of their many triumphs can be revived. Sardou's new piece attracts all Paris and a considerable section of London and St. Petersburg; but Sardou's first work is flat as champagne dregs, stale as last week's Figare. The two most versatile and gifted dramatic authors in France have chosen to be the amuseurs in chief of their epoch; and an amuseur must never look back; he is de officio condemned to an eternal search for something new. He may have it in him to compose a feast for all time, but his function is to serve the plat du jour. MM. Barrière and Sardou have hitherto met the demand for incessant change with considerable ingenuity and not a little good fortune. They have kept pace with the society they depict, and the result has been the creation of what Edmund Schèrer calls la littérature brutale. La littérature brutale does not seek to move, convince, or engross it startles and astonishes. It calls things by their hardest names. It presents its characters making love with their hats on the back of their heads, their feet pendant over the arm of a sofa. It distorts or reverses the relations of sexes, classes, and families. M. Barrière's mothers not unfrequently enlighten their sons as to the legitimacy of their birth, and the sons respond "Parbleu !" with a shrug of the shoulders.* M. Sardou's characters carry their brutalité even further. A certain indescribable scene of "Les Merveilleuses" reached a point of frankness beyond which it is impossible to go without borrowing a few of the features of Caligula's private entertainments. The flirtation scene in "L'Oncle Sam " was another triumph of literary audacity; but the author never found a more striking novelty than in "Andrea," whereof one act is laid in a private lunatic asylum and the patients contribute the dialogue.

There is necessarily a point at which this breathless quest of startling episodes and crude epigrams must cease in despair. The Morgue, the fever ward, the prison, the pawnbroker's shop have

"Les Faux Bonshommes."

become nearly as commonplace as the headers of stage Irishmen or the breaking bridges of romantic opera. What will come after? M. Sardou's invention may furnish answers to the question during yet a few years. But the field he has made his own is not inexhaustible, and later comers are beginning to contest his monopoly. M. Sardou must one day return empty-handed, repeat the "Famille Benoîton " and the "Vieux Garçons," become as Scribe was in 1852. His successors cannot yet be named; but the type of comedy that will follow his is indicated by the minor successes of the last ten years. Unwittingly perhaps, the modern school of French comedy writers has been constantly tending towards the fusion of comedy and vaudeville. The fusion will perhaps be complete in a few years, but it will be at the expense of comedy. of comedy. Cela tuera ceci. The lesser type will absorb the larger. Already the pochades, vaudevilles, comediettas, and fantaisies of Meilhac, Halévy, Siraudin, Clairville, Noriac, &c., are in a pecuniary sense more successful than the "legitimate" comedies of the Français. They have abandoned the old-fashioned couplets, the singing chambermaids, the coarse allusions and boisterous comic business of the old Palais Royal farces. They are called comedies, and contain very often the germ of a stronger dramatic idea than many of MM. Dumas' and Sardou's ambitious studies, while their poetic element bears no relation to the dry monotonous versification of the common sense bards, Emile Augier, Camille Doucet, &c. In this respect the vaudevillists are the direct heirs of the Romantiques, and were there any hopes of a purely dramatic revival in France, it might be prophesied that rejuvenated romanticism will succeed to the bourgeois school of the present. As it is, the future probably belongs to "Toto chez Tata." MM. Meilhac and Halévy will reform nothing. It is their models and their public that must give the first impulse. When the passion of money-getting absorbs society, when all noble desires and ideas tend to disappear from the classes charged by their situation with the duty of serving as examples to the mass of the nation, the resolute disdain of everything apart from material interest spreads from public to critic, from critic to author. It establishes the suspicious hardness in the relations of social life that M. Sardou has photographed, the quiet, calculating, hypocritical licentiousness that Dumas fils has described. These supreme social vices of the Imperial era correspond in literature to a clever bitterness, concentrated and crude, sometimes a bowelless painting of humanity, sometimes a sour misanthropy carried by excess of suffering to a paroxysm of insensibility. For the present, French society is turning in a vicious circle. Its influence corrupted literature, and the development of that literature keeps it corrupt.

WATERSIDE SKETCHES.

III. THE THAMES.

AN or will the queenly Thames be ever made a salmon river? That is the question asked year after year, to remain year after year unanswered. At times we are startled by reports from Thames-side of a salmon seen and nearly captured. During a whole season two or three years ago artful and exciting rumours reached town respecting a veritable salmo salar said to be creating a sensation at a certain station on the river. He was seen feeding every morning; Jack Rowlocks had obtained a full view of him as he leaped a yard out of the water in the summer twilight. So ran the story, and in various ways that fish has ever since been employed to point fishing morals and adorn waterside tales. He was evidently made to rise again in the following paragraph which “went the rounds" at the beginning of the trout season of 1874 :

"SALMON TROUT IN THE THAMES.-Yesterday morning a salmon trout was observed by a ferryman, leaping about in the Thames off Gordon House, Isleworth, the residence of Earl Kilmorey. It was supposed to weigh 10lb. or 11lb. A few days ago a salmon trout weighing 7lb. 4oz. was captured by a bargeman off the island near the same place."

This narrative, however, unlike many other paragraphs worded in the same vague penny-a-lining style, had some real foundation. Reduced into truth the facts were that a bargeman on the Surrey side of the river, opposite the Church Ferry, saw-"had his attention directed. to," I believe is the correct expression-a prodigious splashing in a hole which the retreating tide had converted into a small lake cut off from all communication with the stream. The bargeman proceeded to the spot, and forthwith interviewed the splasher, who turned out to be a slightly sickly but undoubted Thames trout of seven pounds weight. That it was not one of our old phantom friends we know from well-attested evidence, for the captor took his troutship to Gordon House, and Lady Kilmorey sent it to Mr. Brougham for inspection and verification. Isleworth, I need scarcely add, is not precisely the region where you would look for these