These performances have been supplemented by revivals of De Maupassant’s Boule de Suif, which portrays the sacrifice made by a prostitute for the bourgeois and her ostracism by them when they have no further need of her assistance; of the stage version of Zola’s Germinal in the theatres of the working faubourgs; and of certain precursors, such as Henri Becque’s Les Corbeaux (probably the most terrible arraignment of law and lawyers ever written) and L’Evasion and La Révolte of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam; and by the importation of the principal works of the Russian, Belgian, Scandinavian, German, Italian, and Spanish innovators.
Alfred Capus, the principal rival of Maurice Donnay in his peculiar genre, holds in completest but most amiable detestation whatever has to do with regular living. Less sardonic than M. Donnay, lighter, brighter, and more spirituel, if that is possible, he is equally nihilistic, though not, so far as I am aware, by personal avowal. In Rosine he ventures to depict a union libre receiving a father’s benediction; and in Qui Perd Gagne, Années d’Aventures, Les Petites Folles, Mariage Bourgeois, La Veine, La Bourse ou la Vie, and Beau Jeune Homme he holds up to ridicule, one after another, all the traditional bourgeois ideals.
Reformers being notoriously deficient in the sense of humour, it is a curious and piquant circumstance that not only a majority of the brilliant school of stage humourists, currently known as the “Auteurs Gais,” but the four most admired of the group,—Georges Courtéline, Pierre Veber, Jules Renard, and Tristan Bernard,—are frankly revolutionary, either in their personal opinions or in their writings, or in both.
Pierre Veber and Tristan Bernard were charter members of the revolutionary band L’Endehors, and have been affiliated latterly with that of L’Idée Nouvelle. Jules Renard is the bitterest of social philosophers, under the thin disguise of a charming, impeccable style.
Courtéline, whose comic genius is so strong, so pure, and so fine that he is called, without too gross exaggeration, “le petit-fils de Molière”; Courtéline, who will be read and played, in the opinion of many, long after every other contemporary French dramatist has been forgotten; Courtéline, who makes you laugh till you weep over what you ought to weep over without laughing, who promotes reflection and rouses the conscience while dispelling melancholy,—this prodigious Courtéline, truth-loving joker and humane mountebank as he is, has probably done more than any single individual in any sphere to bring into disrepute the brutality of the army, and to expose the perpetual contradiction between essential justice and the texts of the law.
Eugène Brieux is the most prolific producer of the “pièce à thèse sociale” and the most indefatigable corrector of abuses connected with the Paris stage. He has attacked the race-course and the police station in Le Résultat des Courses, public and private charity in Les Bienfaiteurs, physicians in L’Evasion, current methods of instruction in Blanchette, popular ignorance of and prejudice against venereal diseases in Les Avariés,[122] the law and the administrators of the law in La Robe Rouge (”C’est donc la loi qui rend criminel?”), and the Chamber of Deputies in L’Engrenage; and he has defended the rights of children against parents in Le Berceau, the rights of the artistic temperament in Ménages d’Artistes, the rights of the poor against the rich in Les Remplaçantes, and the rights of the fille-mère in Maternité.
M. Brieux is not easy to locate doctrinally or otherwise. He is not an “auteur gai,” far from it, and is not, in the strict sense of the term, perhaps, a revolutionist. But his mania for the correction of abuses has surely beguiled him more than once into an attitude towards society that is, to all intents and purposes, revolutionary.
The rugged, poetic, weird, and philosophical François de Curel is as difficult to locate doctrinally as M. Brieux. There are times when he seems to be as irreverent a nihilist as M. France, M. Donnay, or M. Richepin, and times when he seems to be as reverently ecclesiastical and reactionary as M. Paul Bourget or M. le Comte de Mun. All his plays—Les Fossiles, in which he pictures the pathetic impotence of the exhausted nobility; La Nouvelle Idole, in which he alternately exalts and belittles science; La Fille Sauvage, in which he studies the demoralising effect of civilisation upon the mind of the savage; and Le Repas du Lion, in which he confronts orthodox economy with the socialist’s dream—admit of different and absolutely contradictory interpretations.
But Le Repas du Lion is claimed, with at least a show of reason, by the socialists, because of its dénouement. One of its wealthy characters elucidates the conflict between labour and capital by means of a parable, “The Lion and the Jackal.” The lion hunts for himself. The jackal, too feeble to hunt for himself, follows the lion. The lion gorges himself with his prey. The jackal eats what the lion leaves. If there were no lion to hunt for him, the jackal would starve. Ergo, the lion is the benefactor of the jackal.
A labourer objects: “In that case, Monsieur, there is a lion; and we are the jackals. Since you choose to have the business settled between wild beasts, we will follow you on to your own ground. When the jackals find that the remnants left by the lion do not garnish their paunches sufficiently, they get together in great numbers, surprise the king, and devour him alive.”