--are amusing toys, like those social or military
tableaux, the figures of which you can set in motion by dropping a penny
in the slot. But the trick of this sort of "preparation" has long been
found out, and even unsophisticated audiences are scarcely to be
thrilled by it. We may accept it as a sound principle, based on common
sense and justified by experience, that an audience should never be
tempted to exclaim, "What a marvellously clever fellow is this
playwright! How infinitely cleverer than the dramatist who constructs
the tragi-comedy of life."
This is what we inevitably exclaim as we watch Victorien Sardou, in whom
French ingenuity culminated and caricatured itself, laying the
foundations of one of his labyrinthine intrigues. The absurdities of
"preparation" in this sense could scarcely be better satirized than in
the following page from Francisque Sarcey's criticism of _Nos Intimes_
(known in English as _Peril_)--a page which is intended, not as satire,
but as eulogy--
At the sixth performance, I met, during the first interact, a man of
infinite taste who .
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