Three Plays by Brieux

Member of the French Academy

From a photograph by Monsieur Ghéri Rousseau, Paris

Three Plays by Brieux.

With a Preface by Bernard Shaw. The English Versions by Mrs. Bernard Shaw, St. John Hankin and John Pollock.
London: A. C. Fifield, 13 Clifford’s Inn, E.C. 1911.

[Copyright 1911 by Charlotte Frances Shaw. Entered at Stationers’ Hall and at the Library of Congress, Washington, U.S.A. All rights reserved.]

Printed by G. Standring, Finsbury St., London, E.C.

Contents

Preface
By Bernard Shaw.

From Molière to Brieux.

After the death of Ibsen, Brieux confronted Europe as the most important dramatist west of Russia. In that kind of comedy which is so true to life that we have to call it tragi-comedy, and which is not only an entertainment but a history and a criticism of contemporary morals, he is incomparably the greatest writer France has produced since Molière. The French critics who take it for granted that no contemporary of theirs could possibly be greater than Beaumarchais are really too modest. They have never read Beaumarchais, and therefore do not know how very little of him there is to read, and how, out of the two variations he wrote on his once famous theme, the second is only a petition in artistic and intellectual bankruptcy. Had the French theatre been capable of offering a field to Balzac, my proposition might have to be modified. But as it was no more able to do that than the English theatre was to enlist the genius of Dickens, I may say confidently that in that great comedy which Balzac called ‘the comedy of humanity,’ to be played for the amusement of the gods rather than for that of the French public, there is no summit in the barren plain that stretches from Mount Molière to our own times until we reach Brieux.

How the XIX century found itself out.

It is reserved for some great critic to give us a study of the psychology of the XIX century. Those of us who as adults saw it face to face in that last moiety of its days when one fierce hand after another—Marx’s, Zola’s, Ibsen’s, Strindberg’s, Turgenief’s, Tolstoy’s—stripped its masks off and revealed it as, on the whole, perhaps the most villainous page of recorded human history, can also recall the strange confidence with which it regarded itself as the very summit of civilization, and talked of the past as a cruel gloom that had been dispelled for ever by the railway and the electric telegraph. But centuries, like men, begin to find themselves out in middle age. The youthful conceit of the nineteenth had a splendid exponent in Macaulay, and, for a time, a gloriously jolly one during the nonage of Dickens. There was certainly nothing morbid in the air then: Dickens and Macaulay are as free from morbidity as Dumas père and Guizot. Even Stendhal and Prosper Merimée, though by no means burgess optimists, are quite sane. When you come to Zola and Maupassant, Flaubert and the Goncourts, to Ibsen and Strindberg, to Aubrey Beardsley and George Moore, to D’Annunzio and Echegaray, you are in a new and morbid atmosphere. French literature up to the middle of the XIX century was still all of one piece with Rabelais, Montaigne and Molière. Zola breaks that tradition completely: he is as different as Karl Marx from Turgot or Darwin from Cuvier.

In this new phase we see the bourgeoisie, after a century and a half of complacent vaunting of its own probity and modest happiness (begun by Daniel Defoe in Robinson Crusoe’s praises of ‘the middle station of life’), suddenly turning bitterly on itself with accusations of hideous sexual and commercial corruption. Thackeray’s campaign against snobbery and Dickens’s against hypocrisy were directed against the vices of respectable men; but now even the respectability was passionately denied: the bourgeois was depicted as a thief, a tyrant, a sweater, a selfish voluptuary whose marriages were simple legalizations of unbridled licentiousness. Sexual irregularities began to be attributed to the sympathetic characters in fiction not as the blackest spots in their portraits, but positively as redeeming humanities in them.

Jack the Ripper.

I am by no means going here either to revive the old outcry against this school of iconoclasts and disillusioners, or to join the new reaction against it. It told the world many truths: it brought romance back to its senses. Its very repudiation of the graces and enchantments of fine art was necessary; for the artistic morbidezza of Byron and Victor Hugo was too imaginative to allow the Victorian bourgeoisie to accept them as chroniclers of real facts and real people. The justification of Zola’s comparative coarseness is that his work could not have been done in any other way. If Zola had had a sense of humor, or a great artist’s delight in playing with his ideas, his materials, and his readers, he would have become either as unreadable to the very people he came to wake up as Anatole France is, or as incredible as Victor Hugo was. He would also have incurred the mistrust and hatred of the majority of Frenchmen, who, like the majority of men of all nations, are not merely incapable of fine art, but resent it furiously. A wit is to them a man who is laughing at them: an artist is a man of loose character who lives by telling lying stories and pandering to the voluptuous passions. What they like to read is the police intelligence, especially the murder cases and divorce cases. The invented murders and divorces of the novelists and playwrights do not satisfy them, because they cannot believe in them; and belief that the horror or scandal actually occurred, that real people are shedding real blood and real tears, is indispensable to their enjoyment. To produce this belief by works of fiction, the writer must disguise and even discard the arts of the man of letters and assume the style of the descriptive reporter of the criminal courts. As an example of how to cater for such readers, we may take Zola’s Bête Humaine. It is in all its essentials a simple and touching story, like Prévost’s Manon Lescaut. But into it Zola has violently thrust the greatest police sensation of the XIX century: the episode of Jack the Ripper. Jack’s hideous neurosis is no more a part of human nature than Cæsar’s epilepsy or Gladstone’s missing finger. One is tempted to accuse Zola of having borrowed it from the newspapers to please his customers just as Shakespear used to borrow stories of murder and jealousy from the tales and chronicles of his time, and heap them on the head of convivial humorists like Iago and Richard III, or gentle poets like Macbeth and Hamlet. Without such allurements, Shakespear could not have lived by his plays. And if he had been rich enough to disregard this consideration, he would still have had to provide sensation enough to induce people to listen to what he was inspired to say. It is only the man who has no message who is too fastidious to beat the drum at the door of his booth.

Rise of the Scientific Spirit.

Still, the Shakesperean murders were romantic murders: the Zolaesque ones were police reports. The old mad heroines, the Ophelias and Lucies of Lammermoor, were rhapsodists with flowers in their hands: the new ones were clinical studies of mental disease. The new note was as conspicuous in the sensational chapters as in the dull chapters, of which there were many. This was the punishment of the middle class for hypocrisy. It had carried the conspiracy of silence which we call decorum to such lengths that when young men discovered the suppressed truths, they felt bound to shout them in the streets. I well remember how when I was a youth in my teens I happened to obtain access to the papers of an Irish crown solicitor through a colleague who had some clerical work to do upon them. The county concerned was not one of the crimeless counties: there was a large camp in it; and the soldier of that day was not the respectable, rather pious, and very low-spirited youth who now makes the King’s uniform what the curate’s black coat was then. There were not only cases which were tried and not reported: there were cases which could not even be tried, the offenders having secured impunity by pushing their follies to lengths too grotesque to be bearable even in a criminal court—also because of the silly ferocity of the law, which punished the negligible indecencies of drunken young soldiers as atrocious crimes. The effect produced by these revelations on my raw youth was a sense of heavy responsibility for conniving at their concealment. I felt that if camp and barrack life involved these things, they ought to be known. I had been caught by the great wave of scientific enthusiasm which was then passing over Europe as a result of the discovery of Natural Selection by Darwin, and of the blow it dealt to the vulgar Bible worship and redemption mongering which had hitherto passed among us for religion. I wanted to get at the facts. I was prepared for the facts being unflattering: had I not already faced the fact that instead of being a fallen angel I was first cousin to a monkey? Long afterwards, when I was a well-known writer, I said that what we wanted as the basis of our plays and novels was not romance, but a really scientific natural history. Scientific natural history is not compatible with taboo; and as everything connected with sex was tabooed, I felt the need for mentioning the forbidden subjects, not only because of their own importance, but for the sake of destroying taboo by giving it the most violent possible shocks. The same impulse is unmistakeably active in Zola and his contemporaries. He also wanted, not works of literary art, but stories he could believe in as records of things that really happen. He imposed Jack the Ripper on his idyll of the railwayman’s wife to make it scientific. To all artists and Platonists he made it thereby very unreal; for to the Platonist all accidents are unreal and negligible; but to the people he wanted to get at—the anti-artistic people—he made it readable.

The scientific spirit was unintelligible to the Philistines and repulsive to the dilettanti, who said to Zola: ‘If you must tell us stories about agricultural laborers, why tell us dirty ones?’ But Zola did not want, like the old romancers, to tell a story. He wanted to tell the world the scientific truth about itself. His view was that if you were going to legislate for agricultural laborers, or deal with them or their business in any way, you had better know what they are really like; and in supplying you with the necessary information he did not tell you what you already knew, which included pretty nearly all that could be decorously mentioned, but what you did not know, which was that part of the truth that was tabooed. For the same reason, when he found a generation whose literary notions of Parisian cocotterie were founded on Marguerite Gauthier, he felt it to be a duty to shew them Nana. And it was a very necessary thing to do. If some Irish writer of the seventies had got himself banished from all decent society, and perhaps convicted of obscene libel, by writing a novel shewing the side of camp life that was never mentioned except in the papers of the Crown Solicitor, we should be nearer to a rational military system than we are today.

Zolaism as a Superstition.

It is, unfortunately, much easier to throw the forces of art into a reaction than to recall them when the reaction has gone far enough. A case which came under my own notice years ago illustrates the difficulty. The wife of an eminent surgeon had some talent for drawing. Her husband wrote a treatise on cancer; and she drew the illustrations. It was the first time she had used her gift for a serious purpose; and she worked hard enough at it to acquire considerable skill in depicting cancerous proliferation. The book being finished and published, she resumed her ordinary practice of sketching for pleasure. But all her work now had an uncanny look. When she drew a landscape, it was like a cancer that accidentally looked like a landscape. She had acquired a cancerous technique; and she could not get rid of it.

This happens as easily in literature as in the other arts. The men who trained themselves as writers by dragging the unmentionable to light, presently found that they could do that so much better than anything else that they gave up dealing with the other subjects. Even their quite mentionable episodes had an unmentionable air. Their imitators assumed that unmentionability was an end in itself—that to be decent was to be out of the movement. Zola and Ibsen could not, of course, be confined to mere reaction against taboo. Ibsen was to the last fascinating and full of a strange moving beauty; and Zola often broke into sentimental romance. But neither Ibsen nor Zola, after they once took in hand the work of unmasking the idols of the bourgeoisie, ever again wrote a happy or pleasant play or novel. Ibsen’s suicides and catastrophes at last produced the cry of ‘People don’t do such things,’ which he ridiculed through Judge Brack in Hedda Gabler. This was easy enough: Brack was so far wrong that people do do such things occasionally. But on the whole Brack was right. The tragedy of Hedda in real life is not that she commits suicide but that she continues to live. If such acts of violent rebellion as those of Hedda and Nora and Rebecca and the rest were the inevitable or even the probable consequences of their unfitness to be wives and mothers, or of their contracting repugnant marriages to avoid being left on the shelf, social reform would be very rapid; and we should hear less nonsense as to women like Nora and Hedda being mere figments of Ibsen’s imagination. Our real difficulty is the almost boundless docility and submission to social convention which is characteristic of the human race. What baulks the social reformer everywhere is that the victims of social evils do not complain, and even strongly resent being treated as victims. The more a dog suffers from being chained the more dangerous it is to release him: he bites savagely at the hand that dares touch his collar. Our Rougon-Macquart families are usually enormously proud of themselves; and though they have to put up with their share of drunkards and madmen, they do not proliferate into Jack-the-Rippers. Nothing that is admittedly and unmistakeably horrible matters very much, because it frightens people into seeking a remedy: the serious horrors are those which seem entirely respectable and normal to respectable and normal men. Now the formula of tragedy had come down to the nineteenth century from days in which this was not recognized, and when life was so thoroughly accepted as a divine institution that in order to make it seem tragic, something dreadful had to happen and somebody had to die. But the tragedy of modern life is that nothing happens, and that the resultant dulness does not kill. Maupassant’s Une Vie is infinitely more tragic than the death of Juliet.

In Ibsen’s works we find the old traditions and the new conditions struggling in the same play, like a gudgeon half swallowed by a pike. Almost all the sorrow and the weariness which makes his plays so poignant are the sorrow and weariness of the mean dull life in which nothing happens; but none the less he provides a final catastrophe of the approved fifth-act-blank-verse type. Hedwig and Hedda shoot themselves: Rosmer and Rebecca throw themselves into the mill-race: Solness and Rubeck are dashed to pieces: Borkman dies of acute stage tragedy without discoverable lesions. I will not again say, as I have said before, that these catastrophes are forced, because a fortunate performance often makes them seem inevitable; but I do submit that the omission of them would leave the play sadder and more convincing.

The Passing of the Tragic Catastrophe and the Happy Ending.

Not only is the tradition of the catastrophe unsuitable to modern studies of life: the tradition of an ending, happy or the reverse, is equally unworkable. The moment the dramatist gives up accidents and catastrophes, and takes ‘slices of life’ as his material, he finds himself committed to plays that have no endings. The curtain no longer comes down on a hero slain or married: it comes down when the audience has seen enough of the life presented to it to draw the moral, and must either leave the theatre or miss its last train.

The man who faced France with a drama fulfilling all these conditions was Brieux. He was as scientific, as conscientious, as unflinching as Zola without being in the least morbid. He was no more dependent on horrors than Molière, and as sane in his temper. He threw over the traditional forced catastrophe uncompromisingly. You do not go away from a Brieux play with the feeling that the affair is finished or the problem solved for you by the dramatist. Still less do you go away in ‘that happy, easy, ironically indulgent frame of mind that is the true test of comedy’, as Mr. Walkley put it in The Times of the 1st October 1909. You come away with a very disquieting sense that you are involved in the affair, and must find the way out of it for yourself and everybody else if civilization is to be tolerable to your sense of honor.

The Difference between Brieux and Molière or Shakespear.

Brieux’s task is thus larger than Molière’s. Molière destroyed the prestige of those conspiracies against society which we call the professions, and which thrive by the exploitation of idolatry. He unmasked the doctor, the philosopher, the fencing master, the priest. He ridiculed their dupes: the hypochondriac, the academician, the devotee, the gentleman in search of accomplishments. He exposed the snob: he shewed the gentleman as the butt and creature of his valet, emphasizing thus the inevitable relation between the man who lives by unearned money and the man who lives by weight of service. Beyond bringing this latter point up to a later date Beaumarchais did nothing. But Molière never indicted society. Burke said that you cannot bring an indictment against a nation; yet within a generation from that utterance men began to draw indictments against whole epochs, especially against the capitalistic epoch. It is true that Molière, like Shakespear, indicted human nature, which would seem to be a broader attack; but such attacks only make thoughtful men melancholy and hopeless, and practical men cynical or murderous. Le Misanthrope, which seems to me, as a foreigner perhaps, to be Molière’s dullest and worst play, is like Hamlet in two respects. The first, which is that it would have been much better if it had been written in prose, is merely technical and need not detain us. The second is that the author does not clearly know what he is driving at. Le Festin de Pierre, Molière’s best philosophic play, is as brilliant and arresting as Le Misanthrope is neither the one nor the other; but here again there is no positive side: the statue is a hollow creature with nothing to say for himself; and Don Juan makes no attempt to take advantage of his weakness. The reason why Shakespear and Molière are always well spoken of and recommended to the young is that their quarrel is really a quarrel with God for not making men better. If they had quarrelled with a specified class of persons with incomes of four figures for not doing their work better, or for doing no work at all, they would be denounced as seditious, impious, and profligate corruptors of morality.

Brieux wastes neither ink nor indignation on Providence. The idle despair that shakes its fist impotently at the skies, uttering sublime blasphemies, such as

‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods:

They kill us for their sport,’

does not amuse Brieux. His fisticuffs are not aimed heavenward: they fall on human noses for the good of human souls. When he sees human nature in conflict with a political abuse he does not blame human nature, knowing that such blame is the favorite trick of those who wish to perpetuate the abuse without being able to defend it. He does not even blame the abuse: he exposes it, and then leaves human nature to tackle it with its eyes open. And his method of exposure is the dramatic method. He is a born dramatist, differing from the ordinary dramatists only in that he has a large mind and a scientific habit of using it. As a dramatist he must take for his theme a conflict of some sort. As a dramatist of large mind he cannot be satisfied with the trumpery conflicts of the Divorce Court and the Criminal Court: of the husband with the seducer, of the policeman with the murderer. Having the scientific conscience in a higher degree than Zola (he has a better head), he cannot be interested in imaginary conflicts which he himself would have to invent like a child at play. The conflict which inspires his dramatic genius must be a big one and a real one. To ask an audience to spend three hours hanging on the question of which particular man some particular woman shall mate with does not strike him as a reasonable proceeding; and if the audience does not agree with him, why, it can go to some fashionable dramatist of the boulevard who does agree with it.

Brieux and the Boulevard.

This involves Brieux in furious conflict with the boulevard. Up to quite recent times it was impossible for an Englishman to mention Brieux to a Parisian as the only French playwright who really counted in Europe without being met with astonished assurances that Brieux is not a playwright at all; that his plays are not plays; that he is not (in Sarcey’s sense of the phrase) ‘du théâtre’; that he is a mere pamphleteer without even literary style. And when you expressed your natural gratification at learning that the general body of Parisian dramatists were so highly gifted that Brieux counted for nothing in Paris—when you respectfully asked for the names of a few of the most prominent of the geniuses who had eclipsed him, you were given three or four of which you had never heard, and one or two known to you as those of cynically commercial manipulators of the menage à trois, the innocent wife discovered at the villain’s rooms at midnight (to beg him to spare the virtue of a sister, the character of a son, or the life of a father), the compromising letter, the duel, and all the rest of the claptraps out of which dramatic playthings can be manufactured for the amusement of grown-up children. Not until the Academie Française elected Brieux did it occur to the boulevardiers that the enormous difference between him and their pet authors was a difference in which the superiority lay with Brieux.

The Pedantry of Paris.

Indeed it is difficult for the Englishman to understand how bigotedly the Parisians cling to the claptrap theatre. The English do not care enough about the theatre to cling to its traditions or persecute anyone for their sake; but the French do. Besides, in fine art, France is a nation of born pedants. The vulgar English painter paints vulgar pictures, and generally sells them. But the vulgar French painter paints classical ones, though whether he sells them or not I do not know: I hope not. The corresponding infatuation in the theatre is for dramas in alexandrines; and alexandrines are far worse than English blank verse, which is saying a good deal. Racine and Corneille, who established the alexandrine tradition, deliberately aimed at classicism, taking the Greek drama as their model. Even a foreigner can hear the music of their verse. Corneille wrote alexandrines as Dryden wrote heroic couplets, in a virile, stately, handsome and withal human way; and Racine had tenderness and beauty as well. This drama of Racine and Corneille, with the music of Gluck, gave the French in the XVII and XVIII centuries a body of art which was very beautiful, very refined, very delightful for cultivated people, and very tedious for the ignorant. When, through the spread of elementary education, the ignorant invaded the theatre in overwhelming numbers, this exquisite body of art became a dead body, and was practised by nobody except the amateurs—the people who love what has been already done in art and loathe the real life out of which living art must continually grow afresh. In their hands it passed from being a commercial failure to being an obsolete nuisance.

Commercially, the classic play was supplanted by a nuisance which was not a failure: to wit, the ‘well made play’ of Scribe and his school. The manufacture of well made plays is not an art: it is an industry. It is not at all hard for a literary mechanic to acquire it: the only difficulty is to find a literary mechanic who is not by nature too much of an artist for the job; for nothing spoils a well made play more infallibly than the least alloy of high art or the least qualm of conscience on the part of the writer. ‘Art for art’s sake’ is the formula of the well made play, meaning in practice ‘Success for money’s sake.’ Now great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort. All the great artists enter into a terrible struggle with the public, often involving bitter poverty and personal humiliation, and always involving calumny and persecution, because they believe they are apostles doing what used to be called the Will of God, and is now called by many prosaic names, of which ‘public work’ is the least controversial. And when these artists have travailed and brought forth, and at last forced the public to associate keen pleasure and deep interest with their methods and morals, a crowd of smaller men—art confectioners, we may call them—hasten to make pretty entertainments out of scraps and crumbs from the masterpieces. Offenbach laid hands on Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony and produced J’aime les militaires, to the disgust of Schumann, who was nevertheless doing precisely the same thing in a more pretentious way. And these confectioners are by no means mere plagiarists. They bring all sorts of engaging qualities to their work: love of beauty, desire to give pleasure, tenderness, humor, everything except the high republican conscience, the identification of the artist’s purpose with the purpose of the universe, which alone makes an artist great.

But the well made play was not confectionery: it had not even the derived virtue of being borrowed from the great playwrights. Its formula grew up in the days when the spread of elementary schooling produced a huge mass of playgoers sufficiently educated to want plays instead of dog-fights, but not educated enough to enjoy or understand the masterpieces of dramatic art. Besides, education or no education, one cannot live on masterpieces alone, not only because there are not enough of them, but because new plays as well as great plays are needed, and there are not enough Molières and Shakespears in the world to keep the demand for novelty satisfied. Hence it has always been necessary to have some formula by which men of mediocre talent and no conscience can turn out plays for the theatrical market. Such men have written melodramas since the theatre existed. It was in the XIX century that the demand for manufactured plays was extended to drawing room plays in which the Forest of Bondy and the Auberge des Adrets, the Red Barn and the Cave at Midnight, had to be replaced by Lord Blank’s flat in Whitehall Court and the Great Hall, Chevy Chace. Playgoers, being by that time mostly poor playgoers, wanted to see how the rich live; wanted to see them actually drinking champagne and wearing real fashionable dresses and trousers with a neatly ironed crease down the knee.

How to Write a Popular Play.

The formula for the well made play is so easy that I give it for the benefit of any reader who feels tempted to try his hand at making the fortune that awaits all successful manufacturers in this line. First, you ‘have an idea’ for a dramatic situation. If it strikes you as a splendidly original idea whilst it is in fact as old as the hills, so much the better. For instance, the situation of an innocent person convicted by circumstances of a crime may always be depended on. If the person is a woman, she must be convicted of adultery. If a young officer, he must be convicted of selling information to the enemy, though it is really a fascinating female spy who has ensnared him and stolen the incriminating document. If the innocent wife, banished from her home, suffers agonies through her separation from her children, and, when one of them is dying (of any disease the dramatist chooses to inflict), disguises herself as a nurse and attends it through its dying convulsion until the doctor, who should be a serio-comic character, and if possible a faithful old admirer of the lady’s, simultaneously announces the recovery of the child and the discovery of the wife’s innocence, the success of the play may be regarded as assured if the writer has any sort of knack for his work. Comedy is more difficult, because it requires a sense of humor and a good deal of vivacity; but the process is essentially the same: it is the manufacture of a misunderstanding. Having manufactured it, you place its culmination at the end of the last act but one, which is the point at which the manufacture of the play begins. Then you make your first act out of the necessary introduction of the characters to the audience, after elaborate explanations, mostly conducted by servants, solicitors, and other low life personages (the principals must all be dukes and colonels and millionaires), of how the misunderstanding is going to come about. Your last act consists, of course, of clearing up the misunderstanding, and generally getting the audience out of the theatre as best you can.

Now please do not misunderstand me as pretending that this process is so mechanical that it offers no opportunity for the exercise of talent. On the contrary, it is so mechanical that without very conspicuous talent nobody can make much reputation by doing it, though some can and do make a living at it. And this often leads the cultivated classes to suppose that all plays are written by authors of talent. As a matter of fact the majority of those who in France and England make a living by writing plays are unknown and, as to education, all but illiterate. Their names are not worth putting on the playbill, because their audiences neither know nor care who the author is, and often believe that the actors improvise the whole piece, just as they in fact do sometimes improvise the dialogue. To rise out of this obscurity you must be a Scribe or a Sardou, doing essentially the same thing, it is true, but doing it wittily and ingeniously, at moments almost poetically, and giving the persons of the drama some touches of real observed character.

Why the Critics are always Wrong.

Now it is these strokes of talent that set the critics wrong. For the talent, being all expended on the formula, at last consecrates the formula in the the eyes of the critics. Nay, they become so accustomed to the formula that at last they cannot relish or understand a play that has grown naturally, just as they cannot admire the Venus of Milo because she has neither a corset nor high heeled shoes. They are like the peasants who are so accustomed to food reeking with garlic that when food is served to them without it they declare that it has no taste and is not food at all.

This is the explanation of the refusal of the critics of all nations to accept great original dramatists like Ibsen and Brieux as real dramatists, or their plays as real plays. No writer of the first order needs the formula any more than a sound man needs a crutch. In his simplest mood, when he is only seeking to amuse, he does not manufacture a plot: he tells a story. He finds no difficulty in setting people on the stage to talk and act in an amusing, exciting or touching way. His characters have adventures and ideas which are interesting in themselves, and need not be fitted into the Chinese puzzle of a plot.

The Interpreter of Life.

But the great dramatist has something better to do than to amuse either himself or his audience. He has to interpret life. This sounds a mere pious phrase of literary criticism; but a moment’s consideration will discover its meaning and its exactitude. Life as it appears to us in our daily experience is an unintelligible chaos of happenings. You pass Othello in the bazaar in Aleppo, Iago on the jetty in Cyprus, and Desdemona in the nave of St. Mark’s in Venice without the slightest clue to their relations to one another. The man you see stepping into a chemist’s shop to buy the means of committing murder or suicide, may, for all you know, want nothing but a liver pill or a toothbrush. The statesman who has no other object than to make you vote for his party at the next election may be starting you on an incline at the foot of which lies war, or revolution, or a smallpox epidemic, or five years off your lifetime. The horrible murder of a whole family by the father who finishes by killing himself, or the driving of a young girl on to the streets, may be the result of your discharging an employee in a fit of temper a month before. To attempt to understand life from merely looking on at it as it happens in the streets is as hopeless as trying to understand public questions by studying snapshots of public demonstrations. If we possessed a series of cinematographs of all the executions during the Reign of Terror, they might be exhibited a thousand times without enlightening the audiences in the least as to the meaning of the Revolution: Robespierre would perish as ‘un monsieur’ and Marie Antoinette as ‘une femme.’ Life as it occurs is senseless: a policeman may watch it and work in it for thirty years in the streets and courts of Paris without learning as much of it or from it as a child or a nun may learn from a single play by Brieux. For it is the business of Brieux to pick out the significant incidents from the chaos of daily happenings, and arrange them so that their relation to one another becomes significant, thus changing us from bewildered spectators of a monstrous confusion to men intelligently conscious of the world and its destinies. This is the highest function that man can perform—the greatest work he can set his hand to; and this is why the great dramatists of the world, from Euripides and Aristophanes to Shakespear and Molière, and from them to Ibsen and Brieux, take that majestic and pontifical rank which seems so strangely above all the reasonable pretensions of mere strolling actors and theatrical authors.

How the Great Dramatists torture the Public.

Now if the critics are wrong in supposing that the formula of the well made play is not only an indispensable factor in playwriting, but is actually the essence of the play itself—if their delusion is rebuked and confuted by the practice of every great dramatist even when he is only amusing himself by story telling, what must happen to their poor formula when it impertinently offers its services to a playwright who has taken on his supreme function as the Interpreter of Life? Not only has he no use for it; but he must attack and destroy it; for one of the very first lessons he has to teach to a play-ridden public is that the romantic conventions on which the formula proceeds are all false, and are doing incalculable harm in these days when everybody reads romances and goes to the theatre. Just as the historian can teach no real history until he has cured his readers of the romantic delusion that the greatness of a queen consists in her being a pretty woman and having her head cut off; so the playwright of the first order can do nothing with his audiences until he has cured them of looking at the stage through the keyhole and sniffing round the theatre as prurient people sniff round the divorce court. The cure is not a popular one. The public suffers from it exactly as a drunkard or a snuff taker suffers from an attempt to conquer the habit. The critics especially, who are forced by their profession to indulge immoderately in plays adulterated with falsehood and vice, suffer so acutely when deprived of them for a whole evening that they hurl disparagements and even abuse and insult at the merciless dramatist who is torturing them. To a bad play of the kind they are accustomed to they can be cruel through superciliousness, irony, impatience, contempt, or even a Rochefoucauldian pleasure in a friend’s misfortune. But the hatred provoked by deliberately inflicted pain, the frantic denials as of a prisoner at the bar accused of a disgraceful crime, the clamor for vengeance thinly disguised as artistic justice, the suspicion that the dramatist is using private information and making a personal attack: all these are to be found only when the playwright is no mere marchand de plaisir, but, like Brieux, a ruthless revealer of hidden truth and a mighty destroyer of idols.

Brieux’s Conquest of London.

So well does Brieux know this that he has written a play, La Foi, showing how truth is terrible to men, and how false religions (theatrical romance, by the way, is the falsest and most fantastically held of all the false religions) are a necessity to them. With this play he achieved, for the first time on record, the feat of winning a success in a fashionable London theatre with a cold-blooded thesis play. Those who witnessed the performance of False Gods at His Majesty’s Theatre this year were astonished to see that exceptionally large theatre filled with strangely attentive ordinary playgoers, to whose customary requirements and weaknesses no concession was made for a moment by the playwright. They were getting a lesson and nothing else. The same famous acting, the same sumptuous mise en scène, had not always saved other plays from failure. There was no enthusiasm: one might almost say there was no enjoyment. The audience for once had something better to do than to amuse themselves. The old playgoers and the critics, who, on the first night, had politely regretted an inevitable failure after waiting, like the maturer ladies at the sack of Ismail in Byron’s poem, for the adultery to begin, asked one another incredulously whether there could really be money in this sort of thing. Such feats had been performed before at coterie theatres where the expenses were low and where the plays were seasoned with a good deal of ordinary amusing comedy; but in this play there was not a jest from beginning to end; and the size of the theatre and the expenses of production were on a princely scale. Yet La Foi held its own. The feat was quite unprecedented; and that it should have been achieved for the first time by a Frenchman is about a million times more remarkable than that the first man to fly across the channel (the two events were almost simultaneous) should also have been a Frenchman.

Parisian Stupidity.

And here I must digress for a moment to remark that though Paris is easily the most prejudiced, old-fashioned, obsolete-minded city in the west of Europe, yet when she produces great men she certainly does not do it by halves. Unfortunately, there is nothing she hates more than a Frenchman of genius. When an Englishman says that you have to go back to Michael Angelo to find a sculptor who can be mentioned in the same breath as Rodin without manifest absurdity, the Parisians indignantly exclaim that only an ignorant foreigner could imagine that a man who was not a pupil at the Beaux Arts could possibly be a sculptor at all. And I have already described how they talk about Brieux, the only French dramatist whose fame crosses frontiers and channels, and fills the continent. To be quite frank, I cannot to this day understand why they made him an Academician instead of starving him to death and then giving him a statue. Can it be that in his early days, before he could gain his living by the theatre, he wrote a spelling book, or delivered a course of lectures on the use of pure line in Greek design? To suppose that they did it because he is a great man is to imply that they know a great Frenchman when they see him, which is contrary to all experience. They never know until the English tell them.

Brieux and the English Theatre.

In England our knowledge of Brieux has been delayed by the childishness of our theatre. This childishness is by no means to be deplored: it means that the theatre is occupied with the elementary education of the masses instead of with the higher education of the classes. Those who desire dramatic performances of the higher sort have procured them only by forming clubs, hiring theatres, engaging performers, and selecting plays for themselves. After 1889, when Ibsen first became known in London through A Doll’s House, a succession of these clubs kept what may be called the serious adult drama fitfully alive until 1904, when Messrs. Vedrenne and Barker took the field with a regular theatrical enterprise devoted to this class of work, and maintained it until the National Theatre project was set on foot, and provisional repertory schemes were announced by established commercial managements. It was through one of these clubs, the Stage Society, that Brieux reached the English stage with his Bienfaiteurs. Then the first two plays in this volume were performed, and, later on, Les Hannetons. These performances settled for English connoisseurs the question of Brieux’s rank among modern playwrights. Later on his Robe Rouge introduced the ordinary playgoers to him; and he is now no longer one of the curiosities of the coterie theatre, as even Ibsen to some extent still is, but one of the conquerors of the general British public.

The Censorship in France and England.

Unfortunately, he has not yet been able to conquer our detestable, discredited, but still all-powerful censorship. In France he was attacked by the censorship just as in England; but in France the censorship broke itself against him and perished. The same thing would probably have occurred here but for the fact that our Censor, by a grotesque accident of history—to be precise, because Henry VIII. began the censorship of the theatre by appointing an officer of his own household to do the work—remains part of the King’s retinue; and his abolition involves the curtailment of that retinue and therefore the reduction of the King’s State, always a very difficult and delicate matter in a monarchical country. In France the censorship was exercised by the Minister of Fine Arts (a portfolio that does not exist in our Cabinet) and was in the hands of two or three examiners of plays, who necessarily behaved exactly like our Mr. Redford; for, as I have so often pointed out, the evils of censorship are made compulsory by the nature of the office, and are not really the fault of the individual censor. These gentlemen, then, prohibited the performance of Brieux’s best and most useful plays just as Mr. Redford did here. But as the French Parliament, having nobody to consider but themselves and the interests of the nation, presently refused to vote the salaries of the Censors, the institution died a natural death. We have no such summary remedy here. Our Censor’s salary is part of the King’s civil list, and is therefore sacred. Years ago, our Playgoers’ Club asked me how the censorship could be abolished. I replied, to the great scandal of that loyal body: You must begin by abolishing the monarchy.

Brieux and the English Censorship.

Nevertheless, Brieux has left his mark even on the English censorship. This year (1909) the prohibition of his plays was one of the strongest items in the long list of grievances by which the English playwrights compelled the Government to appoint a Select Committee of both houses of Parliament to enquire into the working of the censorship. The report of that Committee admits the charge brought against the Censor of systematically suppressing plays dealing seriously with social problems whilst allowing frivolous and even pornographic plays to pass unchallenged. It advises that the submission of plays to the Censor shall in future be optional, though it does not dare to omit the customary sycophantic recommendation that the Lord Chamberlain shall still retain his privilege of licensing plays; and it proposes that the authors and managers of plays so licensed, though not exempt from prosecution, shall enjoy certain immunities denied in the case of unlicensed plays. There are many other conditions which need not be gone into here; but to a Frenchman the main fact that stands out is that the accident which has made the Censor an officer of the King’s Household has prevented a parliamentary committee from recommending the abolition of his control over the theatre in a report which not only has not a word to say in his defence, but expressly declares that his license affords the public no guarantee that the plays he approves are decent, and that authors of serious plays need protection against his unenlightened despotism.

Taboo.

We may therefore take it on the authority of the Select Committee that the prohibition by the English censorship of the public performances of the three plays in this book does not afford the smallest reasonable ground for condemning them as improper—rather the contrary. As a matter of fact, most men, if asked to guess the passages to which the Censor took exception, would guess wrongly. Certainly a Frenchman would. The reason is that though in England as in France what is called decency is not a reasoned discrimination between what needs to be said and what ought not to be said, but simply the observance of a set of taboos, these taboos are not the same in England as in France. A Frenchman of scrupulously correct behavior will sometimes quite innocently make an English lady blush by mentioning something that is unmentionable in polite society in England though quite mentionable in France. To take a simple illustration, an Englishman, when he first visits France, is always embarrassed, and sometimes shocked, on finding that the person in charge of a public lavatory for men is a woman. I cannot give reciprocal instances of the ways in which Englishmen shock the French nation, because I am happily unconscious of all the cochonneries of which I am no doubt guilty when I am in France. But that I do occasionally shock the brave French bourgeois to the very marrow of his bones by my indelicacy, I have not the smallest doubt. There is only one epithet in universal use for foreigners. That epithet is ‘dirty.’

The Attitude of the People to the Literary Arts.

These differences between nation and nation also exist between class and class and between town and country. I will not here go into the vexed question of whether the peasant’s way of blowing his nose or the squire’s is the more cleanly and hygienic, though my experience as a municipal councillor of the way in which epidemics are spread by laundries makes me incline to the side of the peasant. What is beyond all question is that each seems disgusting to the other. And when we come from physical facts to moral views and ethical opinions we find the same antagonisms. To a great section—perhaps the largest section—of the people of England and France, all novels, plays, and songs are licentious; and the habit of enjoying them is a mark of a worthless character. To these people the distinctions made by the literary classes between books fit for young girls to read and improper books—between Paul and Virginia and Mademoiselle de Maupin or Une Vie, between Mrs. Humphry Ward and Ouida—have no meaning: all writers of love stories and all readers of them are alike shameless. Cultivated Paris, cultivated London, are apt to overlook people who, as they seldom read and never write, have no means of making themselves heard. But such simple people heavily outnumber the cultivated; and if they could also outwit them, literature would perish. Yet their intolerance of fiction is as nothing to their intolerance of fact. I lately heard an English gentleman state a very simple fact in these terms: ‘I never could get on with my mother: she did not like me; and I did not like her: my brother was her pet.’ To an immense number of living English and French people this speech would suggest that its utterer ought to be burned alive, though the substitution of stepmother for mother and of half-brother for brother would suffice to make it seem quite probable and natural. And this, observe, not in the least because all these horrified people adore and are adored by their mothers, but simply because they have a fixed convention that the proper name of the relation between mother and son is love. However bitter and hostile it may in fact be in some cases, to call it by any other name is a breach of convention; and by the instinctive logic of timidity they infer that a man to whom convention is not sacred is a dangerous man. To them the ten commandments are nothing but arbitrary conventions; and the man who says today that he does not love his mother may, they conclude, tomorrow steal, rob, murder, commit adultery, and bear false witness against his neighbor.

The Dread of the Original Thinker.

This is the real secret of the terror inspired by an original thinker. In repudiating convention he is repudiating that on which his neighbors are relying for their sense of security. But he is usually also doing something even more unpopular. He is proposing new obligations to add to the already heavy burden of duty. When the boy Shelley elaborately and solemnly cursed his father for the entertainment of his friends, he only shocked us. But when the man Shelley told us that we should feed, clothe and educate all the children in the country as carefully as if they were our immediate own, we lost our tempers with him and deprived him of the custody of his own children.

It is useless to complain that the conventional masses are unintelligent. To begin with, they are not unintelligent except in the sense in which all men are unintelligent in matters in which they are not experts. I object to be called unintelligent merely because I do not know enough about mechanical construction to be able to judge whether a motor car of new design is an improvement or not, and therefore prefer to buy one of the old type to which I am accustomed. The brave bourgeois whom Brieux scandalizes must not be dismissed with ridicule by the man of letters because, not being an expert in morals, he prefers the old ways and mistrusts the new. His position is a very reasonable one. He says, in effect, ‘If I am to enjoy any sense of security, I must be able to reckon on other people behaving in a certain ascertained way. Never mind whether it is the ideally right way or the ideally wrong way: it will suit me well enough if only it is convenient and, above all, unmistakeable. Lay it down if you like that people are not to pay debts and are to murder one another whenever they get a chance. In that case I can refuse to give credit and can carry weapons and learn to use them to defend myself. On the other hand, if you settle that debts are to be enforced and the peace kept by the police, I will give credit and renounce the practice of arms. But the one thing that I cannot stand is not knowing what the social contract is.’

The Justification of Conventionality.

It is a cherished tradition in English politics that at a meeting of Lord Melbourne’s Cabinet in the early days of Queen Victoria, the Prime Minister, when the meeting threatened to break up in confusion, put his back to the door and said, in the cynically profane manner then fashionable: ‘Gentlemen: we can tell the House the truth or we can tell it a lie: I do not care a damn which. All I insist on is that we shall all tell the same lie; and you shall not leave the room until you have settled what it is to be.’ Just so does the bourgeois perceive that the essential thing is not whether a convention is right or wrong, but that everybody shall know what it is and observe it. His cry is always: ‘I want to know where I stand.’ Tell him what he may do and what he may not do; and make him feel that he may depend on other people doing or not doing the same; and he feels secure, knowing where he stands and where other people stand. His dread and hatred of revolutions and heresies and men with original ideas is his dread of disorientation and insecurity. Those who have felt earthquakes assure us that there is no terror like the terror of the earth swaying under the feet that have always depended on it as the one immovable thing in the world. That is just how the ordinary respectable man feels when some man of genius rocks the moral ground beneath him by denying the validity of a convention. The popular phrases by which such innovators are described are always of the same kind. The early Christians were called men who wished to turn the world upside down. The modern critics of morals are reproached for ‘standing on their heads.’ There is no pretence of argument, or of any understanding of the proposals of the reformers: there is simply panic and a demand for suppression at all costs. The reformer is not forbidden to advance this or that definite opinion, because his assailants are too frightened to know or care what his opinions are: he is forbidden simply to speak in an unusual way about morals and religion, or to mention any subject that is not usually mentioned in public.

This is the terror which the English censorship, like all other censorships, gives effect to. It explains what puzzles most observers of the censorship so much: namely, its scandalous laxity towards and positive encouragement of the familiar and customary pornographic side of theatrical art simultaneously with its intolerance of the higher drama, which is always unconventional and super-bourgeois in its ethics. To illustrate, let me cite the point on which the English censorship came into conflict with Brieux, when Les Hannetons was first performed by the Stage Society.

Why Les Hannetons was Censored.

Les Hannetons is a very powerful and convincing demonstration of the delusiveness of that sort of freedom which men try to secure by refusing to marry, and living with a mistress instead. The play is a comedy: the audience laughs throughout; but the most dissolute man present leaves the theatre convinced that the unfortunate hero had better have been married ten times over than fallen into such bondage as his liaison has landed him in. To witness a performance might very wisely be made part of the curriculum of every university college and polytechnic in the country.

Now those who do not know the ways of the censorship may jump to the conclusion that the objection of the Censor was to the exhibition on the stage of two persons living together in immoral relations. They would be greatly mistaken. The censor made no difficulty whatever about that. Even the funny but ruthless scene where the woman cajoles the man by kissing him on a certain susceptible spot on his neck—a scene from which our shamed conscience shrinks as from a branding iron—was licensed without a word of remonstrance. But there is a searching passage in the play where the woman confesses to a girl friend that one of the lies by which she induced the man to enter into relations with her was that he was not her first lover. The friend is simple enough to express surprise, thinking that this, far from being an inducement, would have roused jealousy and disgust. The woman replies that, on the contrary, no man likes to face the responsibility of tempting a girl to her first step from the beaten path, and that girls take care accordingly not to let them know it.

This is one of those terrible stripping strokes by which a master of realism suddenly exposes a social sore which has been plastered over with sentimental nonsense about erring Magdalens, vicious nonsense about gaiety, or simply prudish silence. No young man or young woman hearing it, however anarchical their opinions may be as to sexual conduct, can possibly imagine afterwards that the relation between ‘les hannetons’ is honest, charming, sentimentally interesting, or pardonable by the self-respect of either. It is felt instinctively to have something fundamentally dishonorable in it, in spite of the innocence of the natural affection of the pair for one another. Yet this is precisely the passage that the Censor refused to pass. All the rest was duly licensed. The exhibition of the pretty, scheming, lying, sensual girl fixing herself with triumphant success on the meanly prudent sensual man, and having what many women would consider rather a good time of it, was allowed and encouraged by the court certificate of propriety. But the deadly touch that made it impossible for even the most thoughtless pair in the audience to go and do likewise without loathing themselves, was forbidden.

Misadventure of a Frenchman in Westminster Abbey.

In short, the censorship did what it always does: it left the poison on the table and carefully locked up the antidote. And it did this, not from a fiendish design to destroy the souls of the people, but solely because the passage involved a reference by a girl to her virginity, which is unusual and therefore tabooed. The Censor never troubled himself as to the meaning or effect of the passage. It represented the woman as doing an unusual thing: therefore a dangerous, possibly subversive thing. In England, when we are scandalized and can give no direct reason why, we exclaim ‘What next?’ That is the continual cry of the Censor’s soul. If a girl may refer to her virginity on the stage, what may she not refer to? This instinctive regard to consequences was once impressed painfully on a pious Frenchman who, in Westminster Abbey, knelt down to pray. The verger, who had never seen such a thing happen before, promptly handed him over to the police and charged him with ‘brawling.’ Fortunately, the magistrate had compassion on the foreigner’s ignorance; and even went the length of asking why he should not be allowed to pray in church. The reply of the verger was simple and obvious. ‘If we allowed that,’ he said, ‘we should have people praying all over the place.’ And to this day the rule in Westminster Abbey is that you may stroll about and look at the monuments; but you must not on any account pray. Similarly, on the stage you may represent murder, gluttony, sexual vice, and all the crimes in the calendar and out of it; but you must not say anything unusual about them.

Marriage and Malthus.

If Brieux found himself blocked by the censorship when he was exposing the vice of illicit unions, it will surprise no one to learn that his far more urgently needed exposures of the intemperance and corruption of marriage itself was fiercely banned. The vulgar, and consequently the official, view of marriage is that it hallows all the sexual relations of the parties to it. That it may mask all the vices of the coarsest libertinage with added elements of slavery and cruelty has always been true to some extent; but during the last forty years it has become so serious a matter that conscientious dramatists have to vivisect legal unions as ruthlessly as illegal ones. For it happens that just about forty years ago the propaganda of Neo-Malthusianism changed the bearing of children from an involuntary condition of marriage to a voluntary one. From the moment this momentous discovery was made, childless marriage became available to male voluptuaries as the cheapest way of keeping a mistress, and to female ones as the most convenient and respectable way of being kept in idle luxury by a man. The effects of this have already been startling, and will yet be revolutionary as far as marriage is concerned, both in law and custom. The work of keeping the populations of Europe replenished received a sudden check, amounting in France and England to a threat of actual retrogression. The appointment of a Royal Commission to enquire into the decline of the birth-rate in the very sections of the population which most need to be maintained, is probably not very far off: the more far-seeing of those who know the facts have prophesied such a step for a long time past. The expectation of the Neo-Malthusians that the regulation of births in our families would give the fewer children born a better chance of survival in greater numbers and in fuller health and efficiency than the children of the old unrestricted families and of the mother exhausted by excessive childbearing has no doubt been fulfilled in some cases; but, on the whole, artificial sterility seems to be beating natural fertility; for as far as can be judged by certain sectional but typical private censuses, the average number of children produced is being dragged down to one and a half per family by the large proportion of intentionally childless marriages, and the heavy pressure of the cost of private childbearing on the scanty incomes of the masses.

That this will force us to a liberal State endowment of parentage, direct or indirect, is not now doubted by people who understand the problem: in fact, as I write, the first open step has already been taken by the Government’s proposal to exempt parents from the full burden of taxation borne by the childless. There has also begun a change in public opinion as to the open abuse of marriage as a mere means by which any pair can procure a certificate of respectability by paying for it, which may quite possibly end in the disuse of the ceremony for all except fertile unions. From the point of view of the Church, it is a manifest profanation that couples whose only aim is a comfortable domesticity should obtain for it the sacrament of religious marriage on pretence of unselfish and publicly important purposes which they have not the smallest intention of carrying out. From the secular point of view there is no reason why couples who do not intend to have children should be allowed to enslave one another by all the complicated legal restrictions of their liberty and property which are attached to marriage solely to secure the responsibility of parents to the State for their children.

Brieux and the Respectable Married Man.

All these by no means remote prospects, familiar though they are to the statesman and sociologist, are amazing to the bourgeois even when he is personally implicated in the change of practice that is creating the necessity for a change in law and in opinion. He has changed his practice privately, without talking about it except in secret, or in passages of unprintable Rabelaisian jocosity with his friends; and he is not only unable to see why anyone else should talk publicly about the change, but terrified lest what he is doing furtively and hypocritically should be suddenly dragged into the light, and his own case recorded, perhaps, in public statistics in support of innovations which vaguely suggest to him the destruction of morals and the break-up of the family. But both his pruderies and his terrors must give way before the absolute necessity for re-examining the foundations of our social structure after the shock they have received from the discovery of artificial sterilization, and their readjustment to the new strains they have to bear as a consequence of that discovery.

Tolstoy, with his Kreutzer Sonata, was the first to carry the war into the enemy’s country by shewing that marriage intensified instead of eliminating every element of evil in sexual relations; but Brieux was the first dramatist to see not only the hard facts of the situation, but its political importance. He has seen in particular that a new issue has arisen in that eternal conflict of the sexes which is created by the huge difference between the transient pleasure of the man and the prolonged suffering of the woman in maintaining the population. Malthusianism, when it passed from being the speculation of an economist to being the ardent faith of a devoted band of propagandists, touched our feelings mainly as a protest against the burden of excessive childbearing imposed on married women. It was not then foreseen that the triumph of the propaganda might impose a still worse burden on them: the burden of enforced sterility. Before Malthus was born, cases were familiar enough in which wives who had borne two or three children as an inevitable consequence of their conjugal relations had thereupon rebelled against further travail and discontinued the relations by such a resolute assertion of selfishness as is not easy to an amiable woman and practically not possible to a loving or a jealous wife. But the case of a man refusing to fulfil his parental function and thereby denying the right of his wife to motherhood was unknown. Yet it immediately and inevitably arose the moment men became possessed of the means of doing this without self-denial. A wife could thus be put in a position intolerable to a woman of honor as distinguished from a frank voluptuary. She could be condemned to barren bodily slavery without remedy. To keep silence about so monstrous a wrong as this merely because the subject is a tabooed one was not possible to Brieux. Censorship or no censorship, it had to be said, and indeed shouted from the housetops if nothing else would make people attend, that this infamy existed and must be remedied. And Brieux touched the evil at its worst spot in that section of the middle class in which the need for pecuniary prudence has almost swallowed up every more human feeling. In this most wretched of all classes there is no employment for women except the employment of wife and mother, and no provision for women without employment. The fathers are too poor to provide. The daughter must marry whom she can get: if the first chance, which she dares not refuse, is not that of a man whom she positively dislikes, she may consider herself fortunate. Her real hope of affection and self-respect lies in her children. And yet she above all women is subject to the danger that the dread of poverty which is the ruling factor in her husband’s world may induce him to deny her right and frustrate her function of motherhood, using her simply as a housekeeper and a mistress without paying her the market price of such luxuries or forfeiting his respectability. To make us understand what this horror means, Brieux wrote Les Trois Filles de Monsieur Dupont, or, in equivalent English, The Three Daughters of Mr. Smith. Mr. Smith, in the person of the Censor, immediately shrieked ‘You must not mention such things.’ Mr. Smith was wrong: they are just the things that must be mentioned, and mentioned again and yet again, until they are set right. Surely, of all the anomalies of our marriage law, there is none more mischievously absurd than that a woman can have her marriage annulled for her husband’s involuntary, but not for his voluntary sterility. And the man is in the same predicament, though his wife now has the same power as he of frustrating the public purpose of all marriages.

Brieux shews the Other Side.

But Brieux is not, as the ordinary man mostly is, a mere reactionist against the latest oversights and mistakes, becoming an atheist at every flaw discovered in popular theology, and recoiling into the grossest superstition when some Jesuit who happens by exception to be a clever and subtle man (about the last thing, by the way, that a real live Jesuit ever is) shews him that popular atheism is only theology without mind or purpose. The ordinary man, when Brieux makes him aware of the fact that Malthusianism has produced an unexpected and revolting situation, instantly conceives a violent prejudice against it, pointing to the declining population as evidence that it is bringing ruin on the human race, and clamoring for the return of the conjugal morality of his grandmother, as Theodore Roosevelt did when he was President of the United States of America. It therefore became necessary for Brieux to head him off in his frantic flight by writing another play, Maternity, to remind him of the case for Malthusianism, and to warn him—if he is capable of the warning—that progress is not achieved by panic-stricken rushes back and forward between one folly and another, but by sifting all movements and adding what survives the sifting to the fabric of our morality. For the fact that Malthusianism has made new crimes possible should not discredit it, and cannot stop it, because every step gained by man in his continuous effort to control Nature necessarily does the same. Flying, for instance, which has become practical as a general human art for the first time this year, is capable of such alarming abuse that we are on the eve of a clamor for its restriction, and even for its prohibition, that will speedily make the present clamor against motor cars as completely forgotten as the clamor against bicycles was when motor cars appeared. But the motor car cannot be suppressed: it is improving our roads, improving the manners and screwing up the capacity and conduct of all who use them, improving our regulation of traffic, improving both locomotion and character as every victory over Nature finally improves the world and the race. Malthusianism is no exception to the rule: its obvious abuses, and the new need for protecting marriage from being made a mere charter of libertinage and slavery by its means, must be dealt with by improvements in conduct and law, and not by a hopeless attempt to drive us all back to the time of Mrs. Gamp. The tyranny which denies to the wife the right to become a mother has become possible through the discovery of the means of escape from the no less unbearable tyranny which compelled her to set another child at the table round which those she had already borne were starving because there was not enough food for them. When the French Government, like Colonel Roosevelt, could think of no better cure for the new tyranny than a revival of the old, Brieux added a play on the old tyranny to his play on the new tyranny.

This is the explanation of what stupid people call the inconsistencies of those modern dramatists who, like Ibsen and Brieux, are prophets as well as playwrights. Ibsen did not write The Wild Duck to ridicule the lesson he had already taught in Pillars of Society and An Enemy of the People: he did it to head off his disciples when, in their stampede from idealism, they forgot the need of ideals and illusions to men not strong enough to bear the truth. Brieux’s La Foi has virtually the same theme. It is not an ultramontane tract to defend the Church against the sceptic. It is a solemn warning that you have not, as so many modern sceptics assume, disposed of the doctrine when you have proved that it is false. The miracle of St. Januarius is worked, not by men who believe in it, but by men who know it to be a trick, but know also that men cannot be governed by the truth unless they are capable of the truth, and yet must be governed somehow, truth or no truth. Maternity and The Three Daughters of Mr. Smith are not contradictory: they are complementary, like An Enemy of the People and The Wild Duck. I myself have had to introduce into one of my plays a scene in which a young man defends his vices on the ground that he is one of my disciples. I did so because the incident had actually occurred in a criminal court, where a young prisoner gave the same reason and was sentenced to six months imprisonment, less, I fear, for the offence than for the attempt to justify it.

The Most Unmentionable of All Subjects.

Finally, Brieux attacked the most unmentionable subject of all: the subject of the diseases that are supposed to be the punishment of profligate men and worthless women. Here the taboo acquires double force. Not only must not the improper thing be mentioned; but the evil must not be remedied, because it is a just retribution and a wholesome deterrent. The last point may be dismissed by simply inquiring how a disease can possibly act as a deterrent when people are kept in ignorance of its existence. But the punishment theory is a hideous mistake. It might as well be contended that fires should not be put out because they are the just punishment of the incendiary. Most of the victims of these diseases are entirely innocent persons: children who do not know what vice means, and women to whom it is impossible to explain what is the matter with them. Nor are their fathers and husbands necessarily to blame. Even if they were, it would be wicked to leave them unwarned when the consequences can spread so widely beyond themselves; for there are dozens of indirect ways in which this contagion can take place exactly as any other contagion can. The presence of one infected person in a house may lead to the infection of everybody else in it even if they have never seen one another. In fact it is impossible to prove in any given case that the sufferer is in any way culpable: every profligate excuses himself or herself to the doctor on this ground; and though the excuse may not be believed, its truth is generally possible. Add to the chances of contagion the hereditary transmission of the disease, and the fact that an innocent person receiving it from a guilty partner without other grounds for divorce has no legal redress; and it becomes at once apparent that every guilty case may produce several innocent ones. Under such circumstances, even if it were possible in a civilized community to leave misconduct to be checked by its natural or accidental consequences or by private vengeance instead of by carefully considered legal measures, such an anarchical solution must be ruled out in the present case, as the disease strikes blindly at everyone whom it reaches, and there are as many innocent paths for its venom as guilty ones. The taboo actually discriminates heavily against the innocent, because, as taboos are not respected in profligate society, systematic profligates learn the danger in their loose conversations, and take precautions, whereas the innocent expose themselves recklessly in complete ignorance, handling possibly contaminated articles and entering possibly infected places without the least suspicion that any such danger exists. In Brieux’s play the husband alone is culpable; but his misconduct presently involves his wife, his child, and his child’s nurse. It requires very little imagination to see that this by no means exhausts the possibilities. The nurse, wholly guiltless of the original sin, is likely to spread its consequences far more widely than the original sinner. A grotesque result of this is that there is always a demand, especially in France, for infected nurses, because the doctor, when he knows the child to be infected, feels that he is committing a crime in not warning the nurse; and the only way out of the difficulty is to find a nurse who is already infected and has nothing more to fear. How little the conscience of the family is to be depended on when the interests of a beloved child are in the scale against a mere cold duty to a domestic servant, has been well shewn by Brieux in the second Act of his play. But indeed anyone who will take the trouble to read the treatise of Fournier, or the lectures of Duclaux, or, in English, the chapters in which Havelock Ellis has dealt with this subject, will need no further instruction to convince him that no play ever written was more needed than Les Avariés.

It must be added that a startling change in the urgency of the question has been produced by recent advances in pathology. Briefly stated, the facts of the change are as follows. In the boyhood of those of us who are now of middle age, the diseases in question were known as mainly of two kinds. One, admittedly very common, was considered transient, easily curable, harmless to future generations, and, to everyone but the sufferer, dismissible as a ludicrous incident. The other was known to be one of the most formidable scourges of mankind, capable at its worst of hideous disfigurement and ruinous hereditary transmission, but not at all so common as the more trifling ailment, and alleged by some authorities to be dying out like typhus or plague. That is the belief still entertained by the elderly section of the medical profession and those whom it has instructed.

This easy-going estimate of the situation was alarmingly upset in 1879 by Neisser’s investigation of the supposedly trivial disease, which he associated with a malignant micro-organism called the gonococcus. The physicians who still ridicule its gravity are now confronted by an agitation, led by medical women and professional nurses, who cite a formidable array of authorities for their statements that it is the commonest cause of blindness, and that it is transmitted from father to mother, from mother to child, from child to nurse, producing evils from which the individual attacked never gets securely free. If half the scientific evidence be true, a marriage contracted by a person actively affected in either way is perhaps the worst crime that can be committed with legal impunity in a civilized community. The danger of becoming the victim of such a crime is the worst danger that lurks in marriage for men and women, and in domestic service for nurses.

Stupid people who are forced by these facts to admit that the simple taboo which forbids the subject to be mentioned at all is ruinous, still fall back on the plea that though the public ought to be warned, the theatre is not the proper place for the warning. When asked ‘What, then, is the proper place?’ they plead that the proper place is out of hearing of the general public: that is, not in a school, not in a church, not in a newspaper, not in a public meeting, but in medical text-books which are read only by medical students. This, of course, is the taboo over again, only sufficiently ashamed of itself to resort to subterfuge. The commonsense of the matter is that a public danger needs a public warning; and the more public the place the more effective the warning.

Why the Unmentionable Must be Mentioned on the Stage.

But beyond this general consideration there is a special need for the warning in the theatre. The best friends of the theatre cannot deny, and need not seek to deny, that a considerable proportion of our theatrical entertainments stimulate the sexual instincts of the spectators. Indeed this is so commonly the case that a play which contains no sexual appeal is quite openly and commonly written of, even by professional critics of high standing, as being ‘undramatic,’ or ‘not a play at all.’ This is the basis of the prejudice against the theatre shewn by that section of English society in which sex is regarded as original sin, and the theatre, consequently, as the gate of hell. The prejudice is thoughtless: sex is a necessary and healthy instinct; and its nurture and education is one of the most important uses of all art, and, for the present at all events, the chief use of the theatre.

Now it may be an open question whether the theatre has proved itself worthy of being entrusted with so serious a function. I can conceive a community passing a law forbidding dramatic authors to deal with sex as a motive at all. Although such a law would consign the great bulk of existing dramatic literature to the waste paper basket, it would neither destroy it wholly nor paralyze all future playwrights. The bowdlerization of Molière and Shakespear on the basis of such a law would leave a surprising quantity of their work intact. The novels of Dickens and his contemporaries are before us to prove how independent the imaginative writer is of the theme so often assumed to be indispensable in fiction. The works in which it is dragged in by the ears on this false assumption are far more numerous than the tales and plays—Manon Lescaut is an example—of which it forms the entire substance. Just as the European dramatist is able to write plays without introducing an accouchement, which is regarded as indispensable in all sympathetic Chinese plays, he can, if he is put to it, dispense with any theme that law or custom could conceivably forbid, and still find himself rich in dramatic material. Let us grant therefore that love might be ruled out by a written law as effectually as cholera is ruled out by an unwritten one without utterly ruining the theatre.

Still, it is none the less beyond all question by any reasonable and thoughtful person that if we tolerate any subject on the stage we must not tolerate it by halves. It may be questioned whether we should allow war on the stage; but it cannot sanely be questioned that, if we do, we must allow its horrors to be represented as well as its glories. Destruction and murder, pestilence and famine, demoralization and cruelty, robbery and jobbery, must be allowed to contend with patriotism and military heroism on the boards as they do in actual war: otherwise the stage might inflame national hatreds and lead to their gratification with a recklessness that would make a cockpit of Europe. Again, if unscrupulous authors are to be allowed to make the stage a parade of champagne bottles, syphons, and tantaluses, scrupulous ones must be allowed to write such plays as L’Assommoir, which has, as a matter of simple fact, effectively deterred many young men from drunkenness. Nobody disputes the reasonableness of this freedom to present both sides. But when we come to sex, the taboo steps in, with the result that all the allurements of sex may be exhibited on the stage heightened by every artifice that the imagination of the voluptuary can devize, but not one of its dangers and penalties. You may exhibit seduction on the stage; but you must not even mention illegitimate conception and criminal abortion. We may, and do, parade prostitution to the point of intoxicating every young person in the theatre; yet no young person may hear a word as to the diseases that follow prostitution and avenge the prostitute to the third and fourth generation of them that buy her. Our shops and business offices are full of young men living in lonely lodgings, whose only artistic recreation is the theatre. In the theatre we practise upon them every art that can make their loneliness intolerable and heighten the charm of the bait in the snares of the street as they go home. But when a dramatist is enlightened enough to understand the danger, and sympathetic enough to come to the rescue with a play to expose the snare and warn the victim, we forbid the manager to perform it on pain of ruin, and denounce the author as a corrupter of morals. One hardly knows whether to laugh or cry at such perverse stupidity.

Brieux and Voltaire.

It is a noteworthy fact that when Brieux wrote Les Avariés (Damaged Goods) his experience with it recalled in one particular that of Voltaire.

It will be remembered that Voltaire, whose religious opinions were almost exactly those of most English Nonconformists today, took refuge from the Established Church of France near Geneva, the city of Calvin, where he established himself as the first and the greatest of modern Nonconformist philanthropists. The Genevese ministers found his theology so much to their taste that they were prevented from becoming open Voltaireans only by the scandal he gave by his ridicule of the current Genevese idolatry of the Bible, from which he was as free as any of our prominent Baptists and Congregationalists. In the same way, when Brieux, having had his Les Avariés condemned by the now extinct French censorship, paid a visit to Switzerland, he was invited by a Swiss minister to read the play from the pulpit; and though the reading actually took place in a secular building, it was at the invitation and under the auspices of the minister. The minister knew what the censor did not know: that what Brieux says in Les Avariés needs saying. The minister believed that when a thing needs saying, a man is in due course inspired to say it, and that such inspiration gives him a divine right to be heard. And this appears to be the simple truth of the matter in terms of the minister’s divinity. For most certainly Brieux had every worldly inducement to refrain from writing this play, and no motive for disregarding these inducements except the motive that made Luther tear up the Pope’s Bull, and Mahomet tell the idolatrous Arabs of Mecca that they were worshipping stones.

The reader will now understand why these three great plays have forced themselves upon us in England as they forced themselves upon Brieux’s own countrymen. Just as Brieux had to write them, cost what it might, so we have had to translate them and perform them and finally publish them for those to read who are out of reach of the theatre. The evils they deal with are as rampant in England and America as they are in France. The gonococcus is not an exclusively French microbe: the possibility of sterilizing marriage is not bounded by the Channel, the Rhine, or the Alps. The furious revolt of poor women against bringing into the world more mouths to eat the bread that is already insufficient for their firstborn, rages with us exactly as it does in the final scene of Maternity. Therefore these three plays are given to the English speaking peoples first. There are others to follow of like importance to us. And there are some, like La Française, which we may read more lightheartedly when we have learnt the lesson of the rest. In La Française an American (who might just as well be an Englishman) has acquired his ideas of France and French life, not from the plays of Brieux, but from the conventional plays and romances which have only one theme: adultery. Visiting France, he is received as a friend in an ordinary respectable French household, where he conceives himself obliged, as a gallant man of the world, to invite his hostess to commit with him the adultery which he imagines to be a matter of course in every French ménage. The ignominious failure of his enterprise makes it much better comedy than his success would have made it in an ordinary fashionable play.

As Good Fish in the Sea.

The total number of plays produced by Brieux up to the date on which I write these lines is fifteen. The earliest dates as far back as 1890. It is therefore high time for us to begin to read him, as we have already begun to act him. The most pitiful sort of ignorance is ignorance of the few great men who are men of our own time. Most of us die without having heard of those contemporaries of ours for our opportunities of seeing and applauding whom posterity will envy us. Imagine meeting the ghost of an Elizabethan cockney in heaven, and, on asking him eagerly what Shakespear was like, being told either that the cockney had never heard of Shakespear, or knew of him vaguely as an objectionable writer of plays full of regrettable errors of taste. To save our own ghosts from disgracing themselves in this manner when they are asked about Brieux, is one of the secondary uses of this first instalment of his works in English.

G. B. S.

Parknasilla and Ayot St. Lawrence.
1909.

Maternity

[Maternité]
Translated by Mrs. Bernard Shaw

Cast of the original production before the Stage Society at the King’s Hall, London, on April 8, 9 and 10, 1906.

ACT I

Brignac’s drawing-room. Doors right, left, and at the back. Furniture of a government official. When the curtain rises Lucie, a woman of about thirty, is alone. Brignac, a man of thirty-eight, opens a door outside and calls gaily from the anteroom.

BRIGNAC. Here I am. [He takes off his cloak, gives it to a maid-servant, and enters].

LUCIE [gaily] Good morning, sous-préfet.

BRIGNAC [he is in the uniform of a sous-préfet. A tunic or dolman, with simple embroidery and two rows of buttons; a cap with an embroidered band, a sword with a mother o’ pearl handle and a silver-plated sheath. His belt is of silk; his trousers blue with a silver stripe; and he wears a black cravat. He comes forward, taking off his sword and belt during the following conversation. He is finishing a large cigar] Have you been bored all alone?

LUCIE. With three children one hasn’t time to be bored.

BRIGNAC [taking his sword into the anteroom] By Jove, no!

LUCIE. Well, how did the luncheon go off?

BRIGNAC [throwing away his cigar-end] Very well. I’ll tell you all about it in a minute. [Going to the door to the right and calling through] Has M. Mouton come?

A VOICE [from outside] Yes, monsieur le sous-préfet. Shall I tell him he’s wanted?

BRIGNAC. No. Bring me my letters. [He closes the door and comes back] Shall I never catch that fellow out?

LUCIE. Why do you want to?

BRIGNAC. I want to get rid of him, of course, and get a young chap. An unmarried man wouldn’t ask half the salary I give this one.

A clerk enters bringing letters.

CLERK. The letters, monsieur le sous-préfet.

BRIGNAC. All right.

The clerk goes out. Brignac glances at the addresses and sorts the letters into several piles without opening the envelopes.

LUCIE. That little ceremony always amuses me.

BRIGNAC. What ceremony? Sorting my letters?

LUCIE. Without opening them.

BRIGNAC. I know what’s inside by looking at them.

LUCIE. Nonsense!

BRIGNAC. Don’t you believe it? Well, look. Here’s one from the mayor of St. Sauveur. Something he asks me to forward to the préfet. [He opens it and hands the letter to his wife, who does not take it] There!

LUCIE. Why doesn’t he send it direct to the préfet?

BRIGNAC. What would be the use of us then?

LUCIE [laughing] That’s true.

BRIGNAC. Now I suppose you’ll make some more jokes about sous-préfets and their work. It’s easy, and not particularly clever. Perhaps some of us don’t take our jobs very seriously, but I’m not like that. If we are useless, our business is to make ourselves indispensable. Just take to-day for example and see if I’m not busy enough. This morning I signed thirty documents; afterwards I went to the meeting of the Council of Revision.[1] Then came this luncheon of the mayor’s to all these gentlemen. Now I shall have an hour of office-work, and then I shall have to go and meet our guests and bring them here, to our own dinner. [Pause] Oh! and I forgot—after dinner there will be that reception at the Club that they put off to suit me. That’s a fairly full official day, isn’t it?

[1] The Board appointed to inspect conscripts, and see if they are fit for military service.—Note by the Translator.

LUCIE. Yes.

BRIGNAC. We shall only have part of the Committee at dinner. Some of the members have refused. [With interest] Hullo! I didn’t see this. A letter from the Minister of the Interior.

LUCIE. Perhaps it’s your promotion.

BRIGNAC [opening the letter] One never knows—No, it’s a circular [pause] upon the decline of the population. [He runs his eye through the paper] Most important. [He goes to the door on the right] M. Lioret!

A clerk comes in.

CLERK. Yes, monsieur le sous-préfet?

BRIGNAC [giving him papers] Give that to M. Mouton. It must be done by five o’clock, and well done. This for M. Lamblin—M. Rouge—And put this upon my desk. I will see to it myself and give it the attention it requires.

The clerk goes out.

LUCIE. Perhaps it’s not worth attention.

BRIGNAC. It needs an acknowledgment anyway; and the terms used in the original must be most carefully reproduced in the acknowledgment.

LUCIE. Now tell me how the luncheon went off.

BRIGNAC. I have told you. It went off very well. Too well. The mayor wanted to be even with us. All the same, our dinner to-night will be better. [He takes a cigar out of his pocket] I brought away a cigar to show it to you. Are ours as big?

LUCIE. Pretty much the same.

BRIGNAC. He doesn’t give you cigars like that at his big receptions. There’s the menu.

LUCIE [glancing at it] Oh! I say!

BRIGNAC. The champagne was decanted!

LUCIE. Well, we’ll have ours decanted. [Brightly] Only, you know, it’ll cost money. We shouldn’t have much left if we had to give many dinners to Councils of Revision.

BRIGNAC. Don’t worry about that. You know very well that when Balureau gets back into power he’ll have us out of this dead-alive Châteauneuf, and give us a step up.

LUCIE. Yes; but will he get back into power?

BRIGNAC. Why shouldn’t he?

LUCIE. He was in such a short time.

BRIGNAC. Precisely. They hadn’t time to find him out.

LUCIE [laughing] If he heard you!

BRIGNAC. You misunderstand me. I have the greatest respect for—

LUCIE [interrupting] I know, I know. I was only joking.

BRIGNAC. You’re always worrying about the future; now what makes me the man I am is my persistent confidence in the future. If Balureau doesn’t get into office again we’ll stay quietly at Châteauneuf, that’s all. You can’t complain, as you were born here.

LUCIE. But it’s you who complain.

BRIGNAC. I complain of the want of spirit in the people. I complain that I cannot get them to love and respect our political institutions. I complain above all of the society of Châteauneuf: a set of officials entertaining one another.

LUCIE. Society in Châteauneuf doesn’t open its arms to us, certainly.

BRIGNAC. It doesn’t think us important enough.

LUCIE. To have a larger acquaintance we ought to entertain the commercial people. You won’t do that.

BRIGNAC. I have to consider the dignity of my position.

LUCIE. As you often say, we are in the enemy’s camp.

BRIGNAC. That’s true. But the fact that people hate me shows that I am a person of some importance. We must look out for the unexpected. How do you know some great opportunity won’t come in my way to-morrow, or next month, or in six months? An opportunity to distinguish myself and force the people in Paris to pay attention to me.

LUCIE. Yes; you’ve been waiting for that opportunity for eleven years.

BRIGNAC. Obviously then it is so much the nearer.

LUCIE. And what will it be?

BRIGNAC. Some conflict, some incident—trouble.

LUCIE. Trouble at Châteauneuf?

BRIGNAC. I’m quite aware that Châteauneuf is most confoundedly peaceable. One gets no chance. I count more upon Balureau than on anything else. [Pause] Is Annette with her friend Gabrielle?

LUCIE. No.

BRIGNAC. But this is Tuesday.

LUCIE. It’s not time for her to go yet.

BRIGNAC. Yes, but if she puts it off till too late.

LUCIE. I’ve wanted for some time to speak to you about Annette. Don’t you think she goes to the Bernins a little too often?

BRIGNAC. Not at all. They’re very influential people and may be useful to me. Call her. [He goes to the door to the left and calls himself] Annette! [Coming back] Annette goes three times a week to practise with Mademoiselle Bernin, who goes everywhere. That’s an excellent thing for us, and may be of consequence. [Annette comes in] Annette, don’t forget how late it is. It’s time you were with your friend.

ANNETTE [going out] Yes, yes. I’ll go and put on my hat.

LUCIE [to Brignac] They want Annette to spend a few days with them in the country. Ought we to let her?

BRIGNAC. Why not? She wants to go. You know how fond she is of Gabrielle.

LUCIE. Yes; but Gabrielle has a brother.

BRIGNAC. Young Jacques. But he’s going to be married, my dear.

LUCIE. Is he?

BRIGNAC. Yes, yes, of course. [Annette comes in from the left] Make haste, Annette.

LUCIE. What does it matter if she’s five minutes late?

ANNETTE.. No—no—Where is my music?

LUCIE. You look quite upset. Would you rather not go?

ANNETTE. Yes, yes, I’ll go—Good-bye. [She hurries off, forgetting her music].

LUCIE [calling] Your music! [she holds out the music-case].

ANNETTE. Oh, thank you. Good-bye. [She goes out].

LUCIE. Don’t you think Annette has been a little depressed lately?

BRIGNAC. Eh? Yes—no—has she? Have you found a new parlor-maid?

LUCIE. Yes.

BRIGNAC. There, you see! You were worrying about that.

LUCIE. I had good reason to worry. I’ve been without a parlor-maid for a week. I liked a girl who came yesterday very much; but she wouldn’t take the place.

BRIGNAC. Why not?

LUCIE. She said there were too many children here.

BRIGNAC.. Too many children! Three!

LUCIE. Yes: but the eldest is three years old and the youngest two months.

BRIGNAC. There’s a nurse.

LUCIE. I told her that, of course.

BRIGNAC. Well, I declare! And when you consider that it meant coming to the sous-préfet!

LUCIE. I suppose she’s not impressed by titles.

BRIGNAC. And what about the one you have engaged?

LUCIE. She’s elderly. Perhaps she’ll be steady.

BRIGNAC. Yes, and have other vices. Still—

LUCIE. The unhappy woman has two children out at nurse, and two older ones at Bordeaux. Her husband deserted her.

BRIGNAC. Too bad of Céline to force us to turn her out of doors.

LUCIE. Her conduct was bad, certainly. All the same—

BRIGNAC. Oh, it was not her conduct! She might have conducted herself ten times worse if only she had had the sense to keep up appearances. Outside her duty to me her life was her own. But we have to draw the line at a confinement in the house. You admit that, don’t you? [A pause. Lucie does not answer] It was getting quite unmistakable—you know it was. Those wretched grocer’s boys are a perfect scourge to decent houses. [He takes up a paper] This circular is admirable.

LUCIE. Is it?

BRIGNAC. And of the greatest importance. Such style, too. Listen. [He reads] ‘Our race is diminishing! Such a state of affairs demands the instant attention of the authorities. The Legislature must strenuously endeavour to devise remedial measures against the disastrous phenomenon now making itself manifest in our midst.’ The Minister of the Interior has done this very well. The end is really fine—quite touching. Listen. ‘Truth will triumph: reason will prevail: the noble sentiment of nationality and the divine spirit of self-sacrifice will bear us on to victory. We who know the splendid recuperative power of our valiant French race look forward with confidence and security to the magnificent moral regeneration of this great and ancient people.’ [He looks at his wife].

LUCIE. It’s well written, certainly.

BRIGNAC [continuing to read] ‘Let each one, in his own sphere of action and influence, work with word and pen to point out the peril and urge the immediate necessity of a remedy. Committees must be formed all over France to evolve schemes and promote measures by which the birth-rate may be raised.’

LUCIE. Does it suggest any scheme?

BRIGNAC. Yes. The rest of the circular is full of the ways and means. I shall read it aloud this evening.

LUCIE. This evening!

BRIGNAC. Yes. [He goes to the right hand door and calls] Monsieur Lioret!

CLERK [coming in] Monsieur le sous-préfet.

BRIGNAC. Make me two copies of this circular yourself; you will understand its great importance. And bring the original back yourself and place it upon this table.

CLERK. Yes, monsieur le sous-préfet. [He goes out].

BRIGNAC [returning to Lucie] The covering letter from my official superior ends with these words: ‘Have the goodness, M. le sous-préfet, to send me at once a statistical schedule of all committees or associations of this nature at present existing in your district, and let me know what measures you think of taking in response to the desiderata of the Government.’ Well, I shall take advantage of the dinner we give to-night to the members of the Council of Revision to set on foot some associations of the sort, and then I can write up to the authorities, ’There were no associations: I created them’!

LUCIE. But is the dinner a suitable—

BRIGNAC. Listen to me. This morning there was a Council of Revision at Châteauneuf.

LUCIE. Yes.

BRIGNAC. The mayor invited the members to luncheon and we have invited them to dinner.

LUCIE. Well?

BRIGNAC. The Council of Revision is composed of a Councillor to the Prefecture, a general Councillor, a district Councillor—I leave out the doctor—and the mayors of the communes concerned—the mayors of the communes concerned. I shall profit by the chance of having them all together after dinner to-night—after a dinner where the champagne will be decanted, mind you—to impress them with my own enthusiasm and conviction. They shall create local committees, and I shall presently announce the formation of those committees to the authorities. So even if Balureau doesn’t get into power, I shall sooner or later force the Minister to say, ’But why don’t we give a man like Brignac a really active post?’ This is a first-rate opening for us: I saw it at a glance. After dinner I shall shew them my diagram. You must make my office into a cloak-room, and—

LUCIE [interrupting] Why? There’s room in the hall.

BRIGNAC. I can’t put the diagram in the hall, and I want an excuse for bringing them all through the office. Some day the Colonel may meet the Minister of the Interior and say to him: ‘I saw in the sous-préfecture at Châteauneuf’—

LUCIE [interrupting again] All right. As you like.

BRIGNAC. You trust to me. You don’t understand anything about it. You didn’t even know how a Council of Revision was made up,—you, the wife of a sous-préfet. And yet every year we give them a dinner. And we’ve been married four years.

LUCIE [gently and pleasantly] Now think for a minute. We’ve been married four years, that’s true. But this time three years was just after Edmée was born: two years ago I was expecting little Louise; and last year after weaning her I was ill. Remember too that if I had nursed the last one myself I could not be at dinner tonight, as she is only two months old.

BRIGNAC. You complain of that?

LUCIE [laughing] No: but I am glad to be having a holiday.

BRIGNAC [gaily] You know what I said: as long as we haven’t a boy—

LUCIE [brightly] We ought to have a trip to Switzerland first.

BRIGNAC. No, no, no. We have only girls: I want a boy.

LUCIE [laughing] Is it the Minister’s circular that—

BRIGNAC. No, it is not the Minister’s circular.

LUCIE. Then let me have time to breathe.

BRIGNAC. You can breathe afterwards.

LUCIE. Before.

BRIGNAC. After.

LUCIE. Wouldn’t you rather have a holiday?

BRIGNAC. No.

LUCIE [gently] Listen, Julien, since we’re talking about this. I wanted to tell you—I haven’t had much leisure since our marriage. We’ve not been able to take advantage of a single one of your holidays. And if you don’t agree to let—[tenderly] Maurice—wait another year it will be the same thing this time. [Smiling] I really have a right to a little rest. Consider. We’ve not had any time to know one another, or to love one another. Besides, remember that we already have to find dowries for three girls.

BRIGNAC. I tell you this is going to be a boy.

LUCIE. A boy is expensive.

BRIGNAC. We are going to be rich.

LUCIE. How?

BRIGNAC. Luck may come in several ways. I may stay in the Civil Service and get promoted quickly. I may go back to the Bar: I was a fairly successful barrister once. I may have some unexpected stroke of luck. Anyway, I’m certain we shall be rich. [Smiling] After all, it’s not much good you’re saying no, if I say yes.

LUCIE [hurt] Evidently. My consent was asked for before I was given a husband, but my consent is not asked for before I am given a child.

BRIGNAC. Are you going to make a scene?

LUCIE. No. But all the same—this slavery—

BRIGNAC. What?

LUCIE. Yes, slavery. After all you are disposing of my health, my sufferings, my life—of a year of my existence, calmly, without consulting me.

BRIGNAC. Do I do it out of selfishness? Do you suppose I am not a most unhappy husband all the time I have a future mother at my side instead of a loving wife? ’A father is a man all the same.’

LUCIE [ironically] Oh, you are most unhappy, aren’t you?

BRIGNAC. Yes.

LUCIE. Rubbish!

BRIGNAC. Rubbish?

LUCIE. You evidently take me for a fool.

BRIGNAC. I don’t understand.

LUCIE. I know what you do at those times. Now do you understand?

BRIGNAC. No.

LUCIE [irritated] Don’t deny it. You must see that I know all about it. The best thing you can do is to be silent, as I have pretended so far to know nothing.

BRIGNAC [coming off his high-horse] I assure you—

LUCIE. Do you want me to tell you the name of the person you go to see over at Villeneuve, while I am nursing, or a ‘future mother’ as you call it?

BRIGNAC. If you’re going to believe all the gossip you hear—

LUCIE. We had better say no more about it.

BRIGNAC. I beg to observe that it was not I who started the subject. There, there—you’re in a bad temper. I shall go and do some work, and then I must join those gentlemen. Only, you know, you’re mistaken.

LUCIE. Oh, yes, of course.

He goes out to the right, shrugging his shoulders. Lucie rings. Catherine comes in.