In the line of operatic trades to cushion the budget, the Dallas Civic Opera will use San Francisco's new Leni Bauer-Ecsy production of ``Lucia di Lammermoor'' this season, returning the favor next season when San Francisco uses the Dallas ``Don Giovanni,'' designed by Franco Zeffirelli.

H. E. Bates has scribbled a farce called ``Hark, Hark, the Lark!'' It is one of the most entertaining and irresponsible novels of the season.

If there is a moral lurking among the shenanigans, it is hard to find. Perhaps the lesson we should take from these pages is that the welfare state in England still allows wild scope for all kinds of rugged eccentrics.

Anyway, a number of them meet here in devastating collisions. One is an imperial London stockbroker called Jerebohm. Another is a wily countryman called Larkin, whose blandly boisterous progress has been chronicled, I believe, in earlier volumes of Mr. Bates' comedie humaine.

What's up now? Well, Jerebohm and his wife Pinkie have reached the stage of affluence that stirs a longing for the more atrociously expensive rustic simplicities.

They want to own a junior-grade castle, or a manor house, or some modest little place where Shakespeare might once have staged a pageant for Great Elizabeth and all her bearded courtiers.

They are willing to settle, however, in anything that offers pheasants to shoot at and peasants to work at. And of course Larkin has just the thing they want.