eme which Rabelais, Boccaccio, George Moore, and
Moliere in collaboration would have found difficult to handle. It is
as successful an experiment in bravado and bravura as Mr. Henry
James's "The Turn of the Screw." And he has accomplished this feat
with nimbleness, variety, authority, even (granting the subject)
delicacy. Seeing it for the first time you will be so submerged in
gales of uncontrollable laughter that you will perhaps not recognize
at once how every line reveals character, how every situation springs
from the foibles of human nature. Indeed in this one-act farce
Feydeau, with about as much trouble as Zeus took in transforming his
godship into the semblance of a swan, has given you a well-rounded
picture of middle-class life in France with its external and internal
implications.... And how he understands the buoyant French _grue_,
unselfconscious and undismayed in any situation. I sometimes think
that _Occupe-toi d'Amelie_ is the most satisfactory play I have ever
seen; it is certainly the most delightful. I do not think you can see
it in Paris again. The Nouveautes, where it was presented for over a
year, has been torn down; an English translation would be an insult
to Feydeau; nor will you find essays about it in the yellow volumes in
which the French critics tenderly embalm their _feuilletons_; nor do I
think Arthur Symons or George Moore, those indefatigable diggers in
Parisian graveyards, have discovered it for their English readers.
Reading the play is to miss half its pleasure; so you must take my
word in the matter unless you have been lucky enough to see it
yourself, in which case ten to one you will agree with me that one
such play is worth a kettleful of boiled-over drama like _Le Voleur_,
_Le Secret_, _Samson_, _La Vierge Folle_, _et cetera_, _et cetera_. In
the pieces I have mentioned Feydeau, in representation, had the
priceless assistance of a great comic artist, Armande Cassive. If we
are to take Mr. Symons's assurance in regard to de Pachmann that he is
the world's greatest pianist because he does one thing more perfectly
than any one else, by a train of similar reasoning we might
confidently assert that Mlle. Cassive is the world's greatest actress.

When you ask a Frenchman to explain why he does not like Mirbeau (and
you will find that Frenchmen invariably do not like him) he will shrug
his shoulders and begin to tell you that Mirbeau was not good to his
mother, or that he drank to exces