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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.
M. de Curel is more a thinker than a dramatist, as he has shown lately in the very original, interesting, impossible "Fille Sauvage." He grapples with serious matters seriously, and he argues well, with a closely woven structure of arguments; some of them bringing a kind of hard and naked poetry out of mere closeness of thinking and closeness of seeing.
Monsieur Curel, the jeweller, colonel of the National Guard, his wife, and two daughters. Those are what I call the authorities. Now come the big wigs, Monsieur le Comte and Madame la Comtesse de Fontaine, and their daughter, Mademoiselle Emilie de Fontaine."
But M. de Curel has woven his problem into at least a semblance of action; the play is not a mere discussion of irresistible physical laws; the will enters into the problem, and will fights against will, and against not quite irresistible physical laws.
'One night the Turks brought an engine, called by them la perriere, a terrible engine to do mischief, and placed it opposite the chas-chateils, which Sir Walter Curel and I were guarding. From this engine they flung such quantities of Greek fire, that it was the most horrible sight I ever witnessed.
To use symbol, and not to use it in the surprising and inevitable way of the poet, is to fall into the dry, impotent sin of allegory. It was an interesting experiment on the part of the Stage Society to give a translation of "La Nouvelle Idole," one of those pieces by which M. François de Curel has reached that very actual section of the French public which is interested in ideas.
Therefore M. de Curel is conspicuously right in sparing us the scene of vulgar violence, and giving us the scene of far higher tension in which Robert's father, wife and sister expect his return, their apprehension deepening with every moment that he delays.
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