“Charming Capus, delightful Donnay, amazing de Flers and Caillavet,” exclaimed my companion. “Listen; we are free for an hour. Let us run over the names of our leading playwrights—a formidable list. Garçon, another glass”—and away went the waiter in quest of more syrup and champagne.
Of course, no mere “running over” of the great name of Rostand. Both of us soon found ourselves reciting passages from Cyrano, Chantecler, La Princesse Lointaine—my friend eloquently and emotionally, myself alas! with the natural embarrassment and self-consciousness of the foreigner. “Au trot, au galop,” said my companion, glancing at the clock. And rapidly we proceeded to review the “formidable list” of France’s leading dramatists:—Paul Hervieu, the cultured, polished author of Le Dédale and La Course au Flambeau. Violent, destructive Henri Bernstein—La Griffe, La Rafale, Samson. Henri Lavedan, brilliantly audacious in Le Nouveau Jeu, delightfully ironical in the Marquis de Priola, but serious, profound (a veritable tour de force) in Le Duel. Then Capus, the tolerant, the sympathetic: Nôtre Jeunesse, Les Passagères, Monsieur Piégois. Émile Fabre, wonderful manipulator of stage “crowds,” Les Ventres Dorés. Lively, brilliant de Flers and Caillavet, Le Roi, L’Ane de Buridan, L’Amour Veille. Worldly, cynical Abel Hermant, Les Transatlantiques, Monsieur de Courpière. Jules Lemaître, tender in La Massière, tragical in Bertrad. Brieux: the amusing Hannetons, sombre, harrowing Maternité. Georges Porto-Riche, L’Amoureuse, perhaps the finest modern comedy in the repertoire of the French National Theatre. Sound admirable Donnay, Amants, Le Retour de Jérusalem. Anatole France, the incomparable Crainquebille. MM. Arquillière and Bernède, with their masterly pictures of military life, La Grande Famille, Sous l’Epaulette. Romantic, vigorous Jean Richepin, Le Chemineau. Sardonic, anarchical Octave Mirbeau, Les Affaires sont les Affaires, Le Foyer. Humane, chivalrous Pierre Wolff, L’Age d’Aimer and Le Ruisseau. Georges Ancey, earnest investigator into the hidden crafty practices of the Catholic Church, Ces Messieurs. Gentle, elegant Romain Coolus, L’Enfant chérie and Une Femme Passa. Grim, lurid André de Lorde of the Grand Guignol. Ardent, passionate Henri Bataille, Un Scandale, La Vierge Folle, La Femme Nue.
“Formidable, formidable!” exclaimed our Paris journalist, wiping his brow.
“There remains M. Paul Bourget,” I said.
“M. Paul Bourget is ponderous, prejudiced, pedantic,” objected my companion. “I have just seen his latest photograph, which shows him seated at his writing-desk in a frock coat. Novels of life in the Faubourg St Germain, such as M. Bourget has produced, may possibly be written in a frock coat—not plays.”
“No doubt the coat was only put on for the visit of the photographer,” I charitably suggested.
“M. Paul Bourget’s plays convey the impression—no, the conviction—that they were written in the conventional, cramped armour of a frock coat,” was the solemn, categorical retort.
Now for M. Bourget, on his side it would be permissible to object that a gentleman who takes thick strawberry syrup in his champagne commits no less of an enormity than the dramatist who writes his plays in a frock coat; and that therefore, he, M. Bourget, considers himself untouched by the allegations directed against him from that hostile and eccentric quarter. Nevertheless, an examination of M. Bourget’s dramatic work—Un Divorce, L’Emigré, La Barricade—compels the comparison that whereas his fellow-playwrights adopt the theatre exclusively as a sphere in which to hold up a vivid, faithful, scrupulously impartial picture of scenes from actual life—la vie vivante—M. Bourget uses the stage, ponderously, as a platform or a pulpit. His views on social questions—the dominant ideas, the passions of the hour—are well known. They are autocratic, severe: in the French sense of the word, “correct.” But it unfortunately happens that l’homme correct possesses none of those indispensable attributes required of the playwright—an open mind, imagination, a sense of humour. A firm clerical and the irreconcilable antagonist of divorce, M. Bourget naturally maintains that in a spiritual emergency, women, as well as men, are more efficaciously helped to right conduct by priestly government than by habits of self-reliance. Then his sympathies have ever rested undisguisedly with the classes he has portrayed in his novels—the languid worldling of the Faubourg St Germain, the haute bourgeoisie, the despotic châtelain.
“M. Bourget is not interested in humble people. The vicissitudes, the amours, the miseries of the lower classes, he deems beneath his notice. He concerns himself only with the emotions of the elegant and the rich,” bitter, sardonic M. Octave Mirbeau makes one of his characters remark. And, truly enough, it has to be affirmed that however hard he may have tried to repress his aristocratic proclivities and prejudices when writing for the stage, the author of Un Divorce and La Barricade has remained, despite his endeavours, l’homme autoritaire, l’homme correct.