ok is to the composer of
the score. These earlier librettos were admirably made: they are models
of what a comic opera-book should be. I cannot well imagine a better bit
of work of its kind than the _Belle Helene_ or the _Grande Duchesse_.
Tried by the triple test of plot, characters and dialogue, they are
nowhere wanting. Since MM. Meilhac and Halevy have ceased writing for M.
Offenbach they have done two books for M. Charles Lecoq--the _Petit Duc_
and the _Grande Demoiselle_. These are rather light comic operas than
true _operas-bouffes_, but if there is an elevation in the style of the
music, there is an emphatic falling off in the quality of the words.
From the _Grande Duchesse_ to the _Petit Duc_ is a great descent: the
former was a genuine play, complete and self-contained--the latter is a
careless trifle, a mere outline sketch for the composer to fill up. The
story--akin in subject to Mr. Tom Taylor's fine historical drama
_Clancarty_--is pretty, but there is no trace of the true poetry which
made the farewell letter of Perichole so touching, or of the true comic
force which projected General Bourn. _Carmen_, which, like _Perichole_,
owes the suggestion of its plot and characters to Prosper Merimee, is
little more than the task-work of the two well-trained play-makers: it
was sufficient for its purpose, no more and no less.

Of all the opera-books of MM. Meilhac and Halevy, that one is easily
first and foremost which has for its heroine the Helen of Troy whom
Marlowe's Faustus declared

Fairer than the evening air,
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.

In the _Belle Helene_ we see the higher wit of M. Meilhac. M. Halevy had
been at the same college with him, and they had pored together over the
same legends of old time, but working without M. Meilhac on _Orphee aux
Enfers_, M. Halevy showed his inferiority, for _Orphee_ is the
old-fashioned anachronistic skit on antiquity--funny if you will, but
with a fun often labored, not to say forced--the fun of physical
incongruity and exaggeration. But in the _Belle Helene_ the fun, easy
and flowing, is of a very high quality, and it has root in mental, not
physical, incongruity. Here indeed is the humorous touchstone of a whole
system of government and of theology. And, allowing for the variations
made with comic intent, it is altogether Greek in spirit--so Greek, in
fact, that I doubt whether any one who has not given his days and nights
to the study