kind of French Arthur Roberts, but without any of that extravagant energy which carries the English comedian triumphantly through all his absurdities.  M. Brasseur is preposterously natural, full of aplomb and impertinence.  He never flags, never hesitates; it is impossible to take him seriously, as we say of delightful, mischievous people in real life.  I have been amused to see a discussion in the papers as to whether “La Veine” is a fit play to be presented to the English public.  “Max” has defended it in his own way in the Saturday Review, and I hasten to say that I quite agree with his defence.  Above all, I agree with him when he says:  “Let our dramatic critics reserve their indignation for those other plays in which the characters are self-conscious, winkers and gigglers over their own misconduct, taking us into their confidence, and inviting us to wink and giggle with them.”  There, certainly, is the offence; there is a kind of vulgarity which seems native 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