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Updated: June 11, 2025
For such is Georges Feydeau. His method is not that of the Seventeenth Century master, nor yet that of Mirbeau; nevertheless, aside from these two figures, Beaumarchais, Marivaux, Becque, Brieux at his best, and Maurice Donnay occasionally, there has not been a single writer in the history of the French theatre so inevitably au courant with human nature.
Of late we have in Ibsen, Shaw, Brieux, and Galsworthy the old expedient applied to the consideration of social perplexities and contradictions. The dialogue is indecisive in its outcome. It does not lend itself to dogmatic conclusions and systematic presentation, but exposes the intricacy of all important questions and the inevitable conflict of views, which may seem altogether irreconcilable.
The psychologists of the modern French stage, I take it, are M. de Curel and M. de Porto-Riche. MM. Brieux and Hervieu are, like Mr. Shaw, too much concerned with ideas to probe very deep into character. In Germany, Hauptmann, and, so far as I understand him, Wedekind, are psychologists, Sudermann, a vigorous character-drawer.
One of the fugitives explained to M. Brieux why after the first hour of their flight she had to carry her elder child as well as her baby. She showed him a pair of boots. "I felt the inside with my fingers," says Brieux. "Nails had come through the soles. I looked at the child's feet. They were dirty with red brown clots. It was blood."
M. Brieux, the noted French dramatist, who witnessed the arrival at Chartres of a train full of fugitives who had fled from their homes before the German advance, described his experience for the Figaro. The fleeing people gathered round him and told him stories and he wrote his impressions as follows: "Children weep or gaze wide-eyed, wondering what is the matter. Old folks sit in gloomy silence.
So far I'm only hoping all people may, some day be friendly." Kitty was signaling frantically with her eyes, and in obedience I again performed as requested, for the third time turned to Mr. Garrott. "I heard a most interesting discussion the other day concerning certain present-day French writers. I wonder if you agree with Bernard Shaw that Brieux is the greatest dramatist since Moliere, or if "
On the other hand, the plays through which Bernard Shaw constantly places the truth before the public in England as Brieux is doing for the public in France, produce in the spectators a disquieting sense that society is involved in commercialized vice and must speedily find a way out. Such writing is like the roll of the drum which announces the approach of the troops ready for action.
The climax of public discussions was reached when America had its season of Brieux' “Damaged Goods.” Its topic is entirely different, as it deals exclusively with the spreading of contagious diseases and the prevention of their destructive influence on the family. Yet the doubt whether such a dramatized medical lesson belongs on the metropolitan stage has here exactly the same justification.
M. Brieux in some of his plays (not in all) is no less logic-ridden than M. Hervieu. Take, for instance, Les Trois Filles de M. Dupont: every character is a term in a syllogism, every scene is dictated by an imperious craving for symmetry. The main theorem may be stated in some such terms as these: "The French marriage system is immoral and abominable; yet the married woman is, on the whole, less pitiable than her unmarried sisters." In order to prove this thesis in due form, we begin at the beginning, and show how the marriage of Antonin Mairaut and Julie Dupont is brought about by the dishonest cupidity of the parents on both sides. The Duponts flatter themselves that they have cheated the Mairauts, the Mairauts that they have swindled the Duponts; while Antonin deliberately simulates artistic tastes to deceive Julie, and Julie as deliberately makes a show of business capacity in order to take in Antonin. Every scene between father and daughter is balanced by a corresponding scene between mother and son. Every touch of hypocrisy on the one side is scrupulously set off against a trait of dishonesty on the other. Julie's passion for children is emphasized, Antonin's aversion from them is underlined. But lest he should be accused of seeing everything in black, M. Brieux will not make the parents altogether detestable. Still holding the balance true, he lets M. Mairaut on the one side, and Madame Dupont on the other, develop amiable impulses, and protest, at a given moment, against the infamies committed and countenanced by their respective spouses. And in the second and third acts, the edifice of deception symmetrically built up in the first act is no less symmetrically demolished. The parents expose and denounce each other's villainies; Julie and Antonin, in a great scene of conjugal recrimination, lay bare the hypocrisies of allurement that have brought them together. Julie then determines to escape from the loathsome prison-house of her marriage; and this brings us to the second part of the theorem. The title shows that Julie has two sisters; but hitherto they have remained in the background. Why do they exist at all? Why has Providence blessed M. Dupont with "three fair daughters and no more"? Because Providence foresaw exactly the number M. Brieux would require for his demonstration. Are there not three courses open to a penniless woman in our social system marriage, wage-earning industry, and wage-earning profligacy? Well, M. Dupont must have one daughter to represent each of these contingencies. Julie has illustrated the miseries of marriage; Caroline and Angèle shall illustrate respectively the still greater miseries of unmarried virtue and unmarried vice. When Julie declares her intention of breaking away from the house of bondage, her sisters rise up symmetrically, one on either hand, and implore her rather to bear the ills she has than to fly to others that she knows not of. "Symmetry of symmetries, all is symmetry" in the poetics of M. Brieux. But life does not fall into such obvious patterns. The obligatory scene which is imposed upon us, not by the logic of life, but by the logic of demonstration, is not a scène
She was meditating upon walnut fudge, the plays of Brieux, the reasons why heels run over, and the fact that the chemistry instructor had stared at the new coiffure which concealed her ears.
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