The Plays of Eugène Brieux

A DOZEN years ago, when M. Eugene Brieux was plying the managers of Paris theatres of all grades with his plays, most of them were not even read. In 1879, Bernard Palissy, a one-act play in verse written in collaboration with M. Gaston Salandri, had had a hearing at one of the experimental performances then and now so common at certain small theatres of Paris, but between that first night and the acceptance of Ménages d’Artistes by M. Antoine of the Théâtre Libre lay eleven years. In 1892, two years later, M. Antoine produced Blanchette, a genuine success that has become one of the stock pieces of the Théâtre Antoine, the successor of the Theatre Libre. After the favorable reception of this comedy, plays of M. Brieux appeared in rapid succession : L’Engrenage, La Rose Bleue, L’Evasion, Les Bienfaiteurs, Le Berceau, Les Trois Filles de M. Dupont, L’Ecole des Belles - Mères, Le Rdsultat des Courses, La Robe Rouge, Les Remplaçantes, and Les Avariés. To these should be added Monsieur de Réboval, which has not been printed. These plays have had their first nights at the Vaudeville, the Gymnase, the Porte St. Martin, the Antoine, and the Français, that is, at the leading Paris theatres ; several, when published, have gone into a number of editions and are still selling; and two, L’Evasion and La Robe Rouge, have been crowned by the Academy. Surely, plays which could produce within a decade so marked a change toward their author must have unusual merit.

Two of them, La Rose Bleue and L’Ecole des Belles-Mères, are one-act ingenious trifles, but all the others are for one reason or another of decided interest, and three or four are masterly studies of French life to-day. Ménages d’Artistes treats, with much amusing satire on the affectations of would be literary people, the selfishness of the type of artist whose ambition much exceeds his powers. Blanchette paints the misery that may result from giving a peasant girl an education which, even if not elaborate, puts her completely out of sympathy with the home to which she must return when her studies are finished and her chance to teach does not come promptly. L’Engrenage satirizes the wheels within wheels of modern French political life. Of course, the subject is not new even to the stage, and, as a whole, L’Engrenage cannot be classed among the best plays of M. Brieux. Les Bienfaiteurs mocks at modern systematized charity and the pretended interest in it of the fashionable world. The conflicts in authority, the petty jealousies, the blindness to facts in absorption in theories, the frequent cruelty of this systematized charity, are treated with indignant irony. L’Evasion has a double purpose : to gird with almost Molièresque intensity at the self-sufficiency of fashionable physicians and modern medical science ; and to represent the tragedy sure to result if young men and women come into maturity believing themselves as unalterably doomed by the acts of their forbears as, in the Greek tragedy, were the heroes whom the gods had banned. Le Berceau treats the powerlessness of human theoretical law when it conflicts with human natural law. Raymond and Laurence, estranged by the folly of Raymond, have been divorced. Laurence, thinking herself perfectly free, has yielded to her father’s entreaties and married again. But when Raymond and Laurence meet over the cradle of the dangerously ill boy whom they both love passionately, they come to realize that, whatever the laws of man may say, nature provides a bond in their common love for the child which makes it impossible for their lives to be wholly separate. Les Trois Filles de M. Dupont shows the tragedies of three lives caused by the absolute control of French parents over their daughters. Le Résultat des Courses is a very varied study of the life of the men employed in the large workshop of a caster in bronze, and finds its tragedy in the evil effects on this class of the betting mania. Two of the best of M. Brieux’s plays follow : La Robe Rouge and Les Remplaçantes. The first, with a breadth of human sympathy, a keenness of insight, and a mercilessness of satire which again remind one of Molière, exposes the way in which personal ambition, and politics interfering with law, may blind and deprave French justice. Les Remplaçantes, probably M. Brieux’s masterpiece thus far, paints, with evident complete knowledge of the conditions used, the gradual depraving of certain French districts because their chief support has come to be supplying wet nurses for the babies of Parisian women of fashion. Just before the last play, Les Avariés, was to have its first night at the Antoine last autumn, the Censure refused to allow it to be given. The logic of the Censor is a little hard to follow : apparently a French dramatist may treat what he likes so long as he is suggestively nasty or wrings from his material every bit of impropriety there is in it; but when he treats a subject, undoubtedly scabrous, with intention to make his public cry out against the conditions shown, modesty forbids— in the Censor’s office. However, though one must be grateful to M. Brieux for the insight with which he has discerned the exact causes of the evils he treats, and for the courage with which he says what should be more generally understood, one cannot say much for the play as a play. In the first place the subject — the tragedy of the introduction of disease into the family by the husband — is not fit for the stage. Secondly, so completely has the indignant student of French manners swamped the dramatist, that Les Avariés is a twentieth-century morality : for, though Act II. does contain action and characterization, Act I. is but a dialogue, and Act III. is little more than a long lecture. It cannot be denied that in the plays preceding Les Avariés M. Brieux broadened the choice of topics for the modern drama, but here he has gone too far. It is to be hoped that in the play now in rehearsal at the Théâtre Français, Petite Amie, the dramatist will once more guide and control the social reformer.

From this summary it must be clear that there is no more up to date dramatist than M. Brieux : his plays of the last twelve years treat French life in those years. Nor does he seek particularly what is permanently comic or tragic : he is quite as much interested in dramatic crises which can occur only as long as conventions and habits at present deep rooted have not yielded in their hopeless struggle against more enlightened ideals and customs. The changing present is his field. Do not suppose, however, that you will find in the list only thirteen theses on social questions thinly disguised as plays. With the exception of Les A variés, these plays are full of interesting dramatic situations developed by admirable characterization. Nor is the chief quality of the work brutal realism. The plays show tenderness, remarkable range of sympathy with human nature, and a strong underlying belief in the good in man when he is not blinded by convention or driven astray by the insistent theories of self-constituted leaders of society. The humor of M. Brieux, usually quiet, appears most often in swift, final touches of characterization such as mark the domino game in Blanchette (Act I., Sc. 13) between the suspicious, wily, and obstinate peasants, Morillon and Rousset. The portrait, in Les Bienfaiteurs, of Clara, the maid whom the charitable Landrecys endure because they know she will not be able, if dismissed, to get another place, must thoroughly amuse any one who has suffered from impudent stupidity in servants. Often this humor of M. Brieux has an admixture of irony or satire, for naturally both are among his principal weapons. The following from Scene 1, Act I., of L’Evasion shows his gayer irony : Dr. La Belleuse asks the advice of his famous chief, Dr. Bertry, as to cases which are worrying him.

La Belleuse. There is one case that I can’t succeed in relieving.

The Doctor. That will happen.

La Bell. Of course, but — he wants to go to Lourdes.

The Doc. Let him go.

La Bell. (dismayed). You don’t mean that ? What if he should be cured ?

The Doc. You can always find a scientific explanation.

La Bell. Suggestion ?

The Doc. Certainly, — it answers for everything. Anything else ?

La Bell. There is Probard, the patient of whom I spoke to you. He can’t last more than a week.

The Doc. Call a colleague in consultation. That will divide the responsibility.

La Bell. But Probard is almost a celebrity.

The Doc. Call in two.

La Bell. Yes. At the hospital, Number Four in the St. Theresa room is still in the same condition.

The Doc. Have you tried everything ?

La Bell. Everything.

The Doc. Even doing nothing ?

La Bell. Even doing nothing. Not one of us can tell what is the matter with her.

The Doc. (after a sigh). We shan’t know till the autopsy. Let us wait.

La Bell. Stopping all treatment ?

The Doc. No. One must never seem to lose interest in a case. That would be a mistake — a regrettable mistake. Do —no matter what, but do something. That is all ?

La Bell, (consulting his memoranda). I don’t see anything more.

The biting quality of the following, from Les Bienfaiteurs, results from its close, indignant observations of methods not confined to France. Escaudin calls on Pauline Landrecy at the office of one of the charities she has founded through the bounty of her brother, Valentin Salviat.

Pauline. We were talking, my brother and I, — this is M. Escaudin, of whom I spoke to you, — we were talking of the difficulty there is in dispensing charity. I have been robbed, M. Escaudin, I have been robbed by pretended poor.

Escaudin. Ah, that’s it! You, you want to mix charity and sentiment : you will always be deceived. Now I, you see, have been for ten years the head of a charitable committee ; that toughens a man, that does. I scent a fraud two miles and a half away. The time is past when they could trick me.

Pau. How do you manage ?

Esc. I don’t know. It’s a matter of instinct. You women let yourselves feel pity. In practicing charity you must use the same common sense and the same coolness as in business. I who made my fortune in business — Look here, you have still some clients, — I call them my clients, — you have still some clients in the waiting-room. Would you like to have me receive them in your presence ? Then you will see.

Pau. Most willingly.

Esc. I must place myself there (designating the table at the left).

Pau. Why?

Esc. You must always have a desk, — a table between you and your client, — that keeps you from contact with him and insures respect. (Laughing.) Ah, ah, ah ! That’s one of my tricks ! (He establishes himself.) Now you can let them come in. (Enter Rosa Magloire.) Come forward. Your name — Christian name — your address ?

Rosa. Magloire, Rosa, 14 Ménard Square.

Esc. (after writing). Married ?

Rosa. Yes, sir.

Esc. What do you want ?

Rosa. A little aid; I have a sick child.

Esc. Send him to the hospital. The hospitals are n’t built for dogs, you know. What more ?

Rosa. I am very unhappy.

Esc. Yes (insinuatingly). You have a very hard time bringing up your children ?

Rosa. Yes, sir.

Esc. {False good-fellowship.) You work hard, and your husband, when he comes home drunk, beats you ?

Rosa. Yes, sir.

Esc. Exactly : you can go, my good woman. We can’t do anything for you. If we should give you aid, it would be the liquor dealer who would get the benefit of it. We don’t foster intemperance. When your husband stops getting drunk, you can come back. The next. (Rosa goes out.) {Laughing.) Ah, ah ! That didn’t take long, eh? You saw how I sent her packing. Now for a look at this one. (Enter Michel Moutier, neatly dressed.)

Michel. Good-day, sir.

Esc. Come forward. Name — Christian name — address ?

Mic. Moutier, Michel, 22 rue Basse.

Esc. What do you want?

Mic. Some aid.

Esc. You are a beginner, are n’t you ?

Mic. Sir ?

Esc. You are not a professional, eh ? This is the first time you have begged ?

Mic. Almost.

Esc. (to Pauline and Salviat). You see ; I am not to be fooled. (To Michel.) If you were a professional, you would not come in an overcoat on which you could get sixty cents from the pawnbroker, nor with a wedding-ring on which you could easily raise a dollar. We cannot aid any except the genuinely poor. Extremely sorry, sir.

Mic. But sir — that ring —

Esc. I beg your pardon, there are others waiting. Good-day, sir. The next. (Michel goes out. Léon Chenu enters.) Come forward. Name — Christian name — address ?,

Leon. Léon Chenu.

Esc. Address ?

Leon. I have n’t one. They can write to me at 4 Benoit Alley. My former landlord, who kept my furniture for the rent, is willing to pass on my letters.

Esc. You want aid ?

Leon. No, sir, I want work.

Esc. (laugh). Ah, ah! You want work ; very well, some shall be given you, my friend. Kindly take the trouble to go to this address. Good-day. (Leon goes out.) The next.

Pau. There is no one else.

Esc. (laugh). Ha, ha ! That did n’t take long, did it ?

Salviat (restraining himself). My compliments ! And what are you going to make that one do to whom you promised work ?

Esc. Ah that, that is one of my fine little tricks. It is assistance through work — in my manner. I have sent him to my house with a special card which my man will recognize. There is a pump in my garden. The man who wants work will be invited to pump for an hour.

Sal. But what are you going to do with all that water?

Esc. Nothing; it will run off in the gutter. When the man has pumped an hour, he will be given ten cents. Will you believe it, sir, there was one of them who in return — Do you know what he did ? When he had pumped his hour and had pocketed his money, he took a bucket he found there, filled it, and flung it hit or miss into the kitchen, upon the range on which the dishes for my dinner were cooking, saying to the cook, “ Take that; the water I have pumped shall at least be of that use.” Yes, sir, there was one who insulted me.

Sal. (from a distance). Pauline !

Pau. (going to him). What is it ?

Sal. Will you politely tell that gentleman to clear out, for if I listen to him for another ten minutes, I won’t answer for myself, or for him. (Act III., Sc. 6-10.)

This is severe, but it is by no means M. Brieux at his sternest. Yet his love for even erring human nature keeps him, on the one hand, from the caricature which deprived Ben Jonson’s satire of moral significance, and, on the other, guards him, even when his satire is most mordant, from the savageness of Swift.

Nor is the work sordid. In the first place, M. Brieux does not, to use a phrase of Mr. Meredith, " fiddle harmonics on the strings of sensualism.” His plays are far removed from the comedy of the Restoration and from the modern drama of intrigue. Sex as sex has no fascination for him: he treats it only when it must be faced in order to make clear the central idea which binds together the parts of his play. Even then there is no lingering on the scene for its own sake : he moves with the swift frankness, even with the daring of the scientific demonstrator, and for the same reason, — because the facts and their exact significance must be grasped if the truth is not to be missed. When he does treat sex, he pleads for what must win him hearty sympathy, —for less sentimentality and more honesty in initiating youth into the responsibilities of its maturing powers; foremancipation of French girls from parental absolutism in the matter of marriage, that is, for love as the best basis of selection ; for a fuller recognition by the fashionable world of the beauty of fatherhood and motherhood, and of the duties of parents to their children. It is even one of M. Brieux’s chief rights to consideration that, when the sex question is absorbing the attention of serious dramatists everywhere, he has made it central in few of his plays, and, while recognizing with exactness its importance as a cause of tragedy, has found in French life many other absorbingly dramatic and genuinely tragic subjects.

The plays are not depressing. One leaves them surer that the virtues belong to no one class, and with fresh evidence that there are abidingly in life self-sacrifice, devoted love, honest men, and gentle, good women. M. Brieux is very fond of the hard-working and ill-paid country doctors who devote their lives to their patients. He may almost be called the dramatist of passionate mother love, for both Le Berceau and Les Remplaçantes are full of it. He has a genius for discerning and presenting convincingly the good even in his vicious characters. He is no pessimist: he paints existing evils, not for themselves, not despairing of solution, but that he may hasten the solution. What could be more optimistic than his defiance in L’Evasion of the present cult of Heredity ? In the story of Jean and Lucienne he insists that the greatest force in so-called heredity is the self-mesmerism of those who give themselves up as doomed. Struggle and you can break free, — if indeed you really were ever bound. Compare that attitude with Ibsen’s in A Doll’s House, or in Ghosts.

This, then, is no ordinary drame à thèse, which treats sex as the most interesting factor in life, revels in sordid realism, and argues a case to a solution or ends with a pistol shot. M. Brieux is a realist because he deals with the life about him, but he does not select realistic details for their own sake. In reading his work, one should never forget that the central idea of his play is his lodestone. Approach La Robe Rouge as a character study, or as a plot in the usual sense, and the interest seems to shift from the Vagret family toMouzon, and again to Yanetta, the peasant. Consequently the play, read in either of these ways, is confusing. Read it, however, as an exemplification of the ways in which politics and personal ambition may corrupt French justice, and each part will be seen to be in its proper place. His plays find their unity, then, not in a central character or group of characters, but in an idea. Yet M. Brieux does not first find a theory of life, and then mould his characters by it in order to exploit his theory cleverly. Instead, cleareyed, broadly sympathetic, he watches the life about him. Complications, tragedies rivet his attention. He does not rest till he thinks he has found the causes. Then he studies minutely the people in whom these causes and results manifest themselves. By careful selection of the moments in their lives which best show these causes and results, by remarkably accurate and interpretative characterization, he puts the story before us. In reading Le Résultat des Courses, Les Trois Filles de M. Dupont, and Les Avariés, it is easy to conclude that M. Brieux finds a solution for all existing evils in forgiveness, pardon. For instance, Dr. Mossiac, in Le Berceau cries : “ Forgive, always forgive. Not a single one of us is perfect. Therefore, each of us does some wrong. Consequently, marriage is possible only by dint of constant forgiveness on one side or the other.” But M. Brieux cannot believe in either the advisability or the adequacy of a solution which exacts most from those who have already suffered most and provides no guarantee that the sinner will not fall again. M. Brieux offers a sedative, not a cure. He must intend that readers, seeing that the only present way out of the evils he portrays is so unjust and has so little finality, shall cry that the conditions making such a sedative inevitable must and shall be changed. Indeed, his work as a whole shows his conviction that not one but two plays are needed to present the solution of a problem in life : one to state the problem, the other to show the working of the solution. Therefore, he is content to arouse active sympathetic thought.

His right to serious consideration comes from four sources: his swift, accurate characterization ; his remarkably judicial attitude toward his dramatis personnæ ; his power of discerning in the life of the day its own distinctive tragedy ; and his skill in writing plays interesting not only as drama, but as suggestion and comment. The people of M. Brieux, whether they come from the fashionable world or elsewhere in the social scale, are always real. His keen sympathy for poverty is the result of his own bitter experience, for until recently he was very poor. In earlier days he has often read beneath the lamp-post outside his door because he could not afford the necessary light. A Parisian by birth, he knows the bourgeois intimately, and, as editor for some years of a Rouen newspaper, he has had a chance to study the peasant class closely. Indeed, he is at his best in painting peasants.

What, in large part, makes M. Brieux’s portraiture of permanent value is his judicial fairness, his refusal to idealize. Think over the plays of the day and note that it is an axiom of the current playwright that, in order to keep an audience in sympathy with the hero or heroine, he must be to his or her faults so very kind as to put a blinder on the mind — and pretend he or she has none. One finds the fullest exemplification of this in the heroes and heroines of melodrama. In even so early a play as Blanchette, the heroine, though attractive, is so in spite of her petty vanity, selfishness, and sentimentality, which are plainly shown, and the obstinate, hot-tempered Rousset, father of Blanchette, is so painted that you cannot dismiss him with execration and centre your affections on the heroine. The finest thing in the play, indeed, is the way in which you are made to recognize sympathetically what natural developments from their different educations are Rousset and Blanchette, and how impossible it is that either should understand the other. Read Le Berceau and see how completely you are made to understand and sympathize with M. de Girieu, the second husband, as well as with Laurence, and with Raymond the divorced husband. Most dramatists would not only be content with our sympathy for the last two, but would even fear that sympathy for M. de Girieu might lessen our esteem for the other two. Read the tremendous scene of Julie and Antonin in Act III. of Les Trois Filles de M. Dupont, and be swept on in sympathetic understanding and approval of Julie, only to realize, as Antonin answers, that he too has genuine grievances, that, as is always the case in life, but rarely in fiction, there are two sides to any wrong. How much nearer life the drama comes here, in making it difficult to take sides.

M. Brieux sees clearly that in the life of the day tragedy results, not simply from sex, but from the maladjustment of human laws and standards to the unalterable sweep of nature’s laws. The century just closed has been a time of incompleted readjusting of our ideals, even of our common habitudes, to the multifold discoveries of the period. It is because men and women, instead of studying their own characters, play at being what nature never meant them to be, because they blindly follow laws and standards which are the results of theorizing, not of fearless study of nature’s workings, that there is tragedy all about us. In Blanchette, Le Berceau, Les Trois Filles de M. Dupont, La Robe Rouge, and Les Remplaçantes, recognition of these facts has carried M. Brieux to tragedies specially characteristic of the period just closed. Mark the restraint, the simplicity, of this representation of the powerlessness of human law when in conflict with everlasting laws of human emotion. Laurence and Raymond, her first husband, meet by chance by the sick bed of their little boy. M. de Girieu, the second husband, who is madly jealous of Raymond, and of Laurence’s love for her boy, has just refused Raymond’s request to be allowed to watch by the child till he is out of danger. Resting confidently on the control over Laurence and the boy which the laws give him, M. de Girieu is sure he can keep his wife and her former husband apart.

(Long silent scene. The door of little Julien’s room opens softly. Laurence appears with a paper in her hand. The two men separate, watching her intently. She looks out for a long time, then shuts the door, taking every precaution not to make a noise. After a gesture of profound grief, she comes forward, deeply moved, but tearless. She makes no more gestures. Her face is grave. Very simply, she goes straight to Raymond.)

Raymond (very simply to Laurence). Well ?

Laurence (in the same manner). He has just dropped asleep.

Ray. The fever ?

Lau. Constant.

Ray. Has the temperature been taken ?

Lau. Yes.

Ray. How much ?

Lau. Thirty-nine.

Ray. The cough ?

Lau. Incessant. He breathes with difficulty.

Ray. His face is flushed ?

Lau. Yes.

Ray. The doctor gave you a prescription ?

Lau. I came to show it to you. I don’t thoroughly understand this.

(They are close to each other, examining the prescription which Raymond holds.)

Ray. (reading). “ Keep an even temperature in the sick room.”

Lau. Yes.

Ray. “Wrap the limbs in cotton wool, and cover that with oiled silk.” I am going to do that myself as soon as he wakes. Tell them to warn me.

Lau. What ought he to have to drink ? I forgot to ask that, and he is thirsty.

Ray. Mallow.

Lau. I’m sure he does n’t like it.

Ray. Yes, yes. You remember when he had the measles.

Lau. Yes, yes. How anxious we were then, too !

Ray. He drank it willingly. You remember perfectly ?

Lau. Yes, of course I remember. Some mallow then. Let us read the prescription again. I have n’t forgotten anything ? Mustard plasters. The cotton wool, you will attend to that. And I will go have the drink made. “ In addition — every hour — a coffeespoonful of the following medicine.”

(The curtain falls slowly as she continues to read. M. de Girieu has gone out slowly during the last words.)

Though it must be clear from what has been said that the work of M. Brieux is less varied than that of some other dramatists of the day, it is, when at its best in its chosen field, masterly. Perhaps more than any other he may be called the scientific dramatist, for he finds his tragedies mainly in the crises resulting from the shifting in social ideals which scientific discovery has caused, and his approach to his work is that of the gentle-minded scientist. With the same broad sympathy for his fellows, he has the same passion for truth, the same judiciality, the same fearlessness in the face of facts, and the same daring in stating them, no matter what their effect on ill-based conventions or habits. With him, when the social reformer does not prove too much for the dramatist, — and there is only one marked instance of this, Les Avariés, — we have a drama of ideas that is really drama.

Are there any results of all his dramatic demonstration ? It is extremely difficult, of course, to trace the influence of a play so complicated as it is with other influences, but I am credibly informed that Les Remplaçantes has decidedly decreased the evil which it scourged. I suspect, however, that before M. Brieux wins the general recognition — especially outside France — which he deserves, he must feel the full force of Philistia in its enthusiastic acceptance of the words of his fellow dramatist, M. Paul Hervieu : “ He who is not like his fellows is necessarily wrong.” But M. Brieux evidently accepts, and wisely, the old French proverb, “ Tout vient à point à qui sait attendre,” for he could persevere through ten years of indifference to his work, and he quotes approvingly before Les Bienfaiteurs the words of his philosopher friend, Jean-Marie Guyot: “I am very sure that what is best in me will survive. Even, it may be, not one of my dreams will be lost; others will take them up and dream them after me until one day they shall come true. By the dying waves the sea succeeds in fashioning its shore, in shaping the vast bed in which it dies.”

George P. Baker.