FOOTNOTES:
[2] Translated into English under the title: The Shadow of Love.
MLLE. MARIE LENÉRU
A line from one of the essays of Suarès might serve as a motto for all the plays of Mlle Lenéru: ‘La conscience malade, voilà le théâtre de la fatalité moderne.’ A sick conscience, a soul diseased—in other words, the problem of evil; or, in more modern phrase, the war between an over-developed personality and the rights of others; such is the theme which her genius, at once lucid and sombre, ardent and logical, treats with a penetrating passion, with almost, as it were, a sort of introspection, as though, in face of some grave derogation from current morality, she had said: How did a nature, apparently excellent, arrive at such a pass? How should I, in his place, have fallen and yet have remained consequent with all that I was up to the moment of failure? So that the dramas of Mlle Lenéru have the gravity and the spiritual ardour of an examination of conscience. They seem to radiate from an inner self full of revolt, passion, and implacable reason.
Not that Mlle Lenéru is religious. In writing this little book, it is borne in upon me very clearly that man, not woman, is really the religious animal. But Mlle Lenéru is not the usual free-thinker; she is, so to speak, a theologian turned inside out. There is about her something of the unfrocked priest who, whatever his present opinions, feels himself always a priest, entrusted with the souls of others and responsible for their eternal fate. She no longer accepts the promises and the commandments of revealed religion; but nothing else appears to her of really great importance.
In all she writes we recognise the conflict of a proud and ardent character, a passionate and avid sensibility, with a soul enamoured of honour, order, discipline, self-immolation; so that we never know which is the real Marie Lenéru: the impassioned anarchist convinced that the one important thing in life is for each individual to become the most perfect example possible of his own peculiar type; or the ascetic, eager to sacrifice the visible and natural life to a life invisible and supernatural.
It is this double nature, doubtless, which gives so much substance to the plays of this young writer. She conceals in her heart a romantic who died young—or rather he is not dead, only buried in a perpetual in pace, whence his voice sometimes issues in revolt or appeal; but her mind is given over to the rule of a bitter and splendid reason which assures her that neither the State, nor the family, nor any constituted form of society, based on a firm tradition, needs genius so much as order, passion so much as discipline, grandeur so much as happiness; and indeed in all her plays she sacrifices (as Brutus sacrificed his sons) the first of these categories to the second.
Her sensibility remains imbued with those ideals of individualism and ambition which reigned in France throughout the nineties: she was born under the Consulate of Nietzsche and of Ibsen; but experience and reflection have shown her the disasters of a moral anarchy which still engages her sympathy though she augurs no happy issue for it. On the frontispiece of her first book, Les Affranchis, she has written a couplet from Racine’s Titus et Bérénice, expressing this antagonism between the individual and his environment: two lines in which the Jewish Queen, sacrificed by her royal lover to reasons of state (invitus invitam), reminds him of his duty to himself—and to her:—
‘Rome a ses droits, Seigneur, n’avez-vous pas les vôtres?
Ses intérêts sont-ils plus sacrés que les nôtres?’
And this question resumes a theme which never ceases to occupy her tragic sense of passion and her strong intellectual curiosity.