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 of Homer and of the tragedians, and who has not thus taken in by the pores the subtle essence of Hellenic life and literature, can truly appreciate this French farce.  Planche’s Golden Fleece is in the same vein, but the ore is not as rich.  Frere’s Loves of the Triangles and some of his Anti-Jacobin writing are perhaps as good in quality, but the subjects are inferior and temporary.  Scarron’s vulgar burlesques and the cheap parodies of many contemporary English play-makers are not to be mentioned in the same breath with this scholarly fooling.  There is something in the French genius akin to the Greek, and here was a Gallic wit who could turn a Hellenic love-tale inside out, and wring the uttermost drop of fun from it without recourse to the devices of the booth at the fair, the false nose and the simulation of needless ugliness.  The French play, comic as it was, did not suggest hysteria or epilepsy, and it was not so lacking in grace that we could not recall the original story without a shudder.  There is no shattering of an ideal, and one cannot reproach the authors of the Belle Helene with what Theophrastus Such calls “debasing the moral currency, lowering the value of every inspiring fact and tradition.”

Surpassed only by the Belle Helene is the Grande Duchesse de Gerolstein.  It is nearly fifteen years since all the world went to Paris to see an Exposition Universelle and to gaze at the “sabre de mon pere,” and since a Russian emperor, going to hear the operetta, said to have been suggested by the freak of a Russian empress, sat incognito in one stage-box of the little Varietes Theatre, and glancing up saw a Russian grand duke in the other.  It is nearly fifteen years since the tiny army of Her Grand-ducal Highness took New York by storm, and since