[In the following essay, Clark discusses Becque's life, career, and the plot of The Vultures.]

Henry Becque, the father of the modern French Naturalistic school, was born at Paris in 1837. His early works were produced in the sixties, but The Parisian Woman and The Vultures, his most important plays, were peddled about for years before they were performed. During the last years of his life, Becque was recognized as the master, the founder of one of the most important movements of modern times. He died in 1899.

The production of The Vultures in 1882 and The Parisian Woman in 1885 marked the beginning of the new school which, in 1887, under the leadership of André Antoine, had a theater of its own, the famous Free Theater.

Becque is termed a Naturalist because his characters were held to be living beings, because they give the illusion of reality, and because his technique is subordinate to and of less importance than his characterization. He writes because he wishes to present to us a “slice of life”; he has no lesson to teach, no sermon to pronounce, no thesis to prove. His plays, in the words of a French critic, “are life” itself. Huneker says, “Becque's major quality is his gift of lifelike characterization. Character with him is of prime importance. He did not tear down the structure of the drama, but merely removed much of the scaffolding which time had allowed to disfigure its façade.”

Through the perspective of years we are now able to realize that the Naturalism of the 80's and 90's was only a phase, one of many methods of interpreting life. Becque, after all, came no closer to “reality” than many so-called Romantics. He was instrumental in bringing about a reaction against the clever artificialities of the facile technicians.

THE VULTURES

Play in 4 acts (1882). Texts: translation, as The Crows, by B. Papot (Drama, Chicago, 1912); by F. Tilden, in The Vultures, The Woman of Paris, The Merry-Go-Round (N. Y. 1913); reprint of the same in Moses' Representative Continental Dramas (Boston, 1924).

The Vultures was one of the numerous attempts made by the Naturalists to do for the drama what Zola and the Goncourts, Maupassant, and Daudet, were doing for the novel. The novelists all wrote plays; it was reserved for Becque to write The Vultures and The Woman of Paris, examples of the best that Naturalism had to offer. “It was Becque,” says Dr. F. W. Chandler, “who in practice pointed the way to stage naturalism, achieving far more for that cause than did Zola.”

1. The first act is given over almost altogether to exposition. With its long speeches, asides and soliloquies, we should to-day call it very old-fashioned. A glance at Pinero's Thunderbolt or Maugham's Circle will show the distance covered in the development of sheer technique since 1882. Yet in this play the French dramatist appears deliberately to avoid the facile expedients of his successful contemporaries: he will have none of the suave prattle of Sardou or Bisson; he prefers to attend to the chief business before him, which is the presentation of character—in huge slices, as it were.

Do you think that he was really unable to conduct his opening scenes as Sardou conducts, say, the opening scenes of Divorçons or Patrie!?

One important thing does happen in the first act: the death of Vigneron, announced just before the curtain falls, was hardly expected. The playwright of the “well-made” play school would call it “unprepared.” So it is. It comes as a shock. But then the dramatist intended that it should shock. “This is life,” he would say. “Don't people die suddenly in the midst of life, despite MM. Sardou and Bisson? Then why not show things in a play as they happen in life, which aims to reproduce, or at least to reflect, life?

This is also exposition, in that it prepares for the important business of the play, which has not yet begun; the play does not actually begin until the early part of the second act. As a matter of fact, the whole first act could be put into a page or two of exposition and placed at the beginning of what is now the second. But Becque, knowing what he was about, wished to prepare his background with all possible care. The home-life of the Vignerons, their ideas and tastes, their physical surroundings, are all elements in the picture.

2. There is one basic difference in treatment between this play and the usual French play of the present time. Such playwrights as Lavedan, Donnay, Capus, and above all Sacha Guitry, are “finished” writers, as to style and construction; Becque is brutal and direct, unpolished, and since the people he usually portrays are not “society,” they are more “lifelike” than if they were.

The transition from scene to scene is abrupt, especially in the first act, too much so to give the illusion even of that rhythm which is so great an asset in all representations of life. Read pages 49 and 50 (The Drama edition); there are parts of three distinct episodes, and yet there are no modulation, no blending, no “bridging sections.” More skilled, though perhaps less inspired dramatists, would have welded these incidents together, blended them into a harmonious whole.

3. The second act is typical of Becque's manner at its best; although it shows the influence of Molière, it has a savage note of satire, a brusque and peremptory movement. The three “vultures” scene is one of the most bitterly ironical in all modern drama. Here we have none of the suavity of a Capus, the brilliant charm of a Guitry; the dramatist seems almost to have forgotten that he was writing a play—for which we are grateful. His instinct has served him well.

4. It is in the third act that we find a good deal of the sort of material that was to be developed later by Hervieu and Brieux. Becque throws out a suggestion—the injustice of the law, for instance, a thesis which Hervieu was later to develop in The Nippers; or he shows the impossibility of an unmarried woman's making an honest living, which Brieux used in Blanchette and The Independent Woman. François de Curel, Emile Fabre, Léon Hennique and a score of others, following the trail blazed by Becque, were quick to perceive the dramatic possibilities inherent in a play like The Vultures, which came to be regarded as the “Bible of the Naturalists.”

5. The play has what is known as an unemphatic ending. Conventional plays of the school of Scribe and Sardou end almost invariably with what in America is called a “punch,”—a “big” scene. This is pointed, but the other method is no less so, often because of its very unobtrusiveness. The unemphatic ending contains a sting, a satirical touch that sums up the act, or, in some instances, illustrates the theme of the entire play. Galsworthy's Strife, for instance. Tench says to Harness, “D'you know, sir—these terms, they're the very same we drew up together, you and I, and put to both sides before the fight began? All this—all this—and—what for?” Harness then answers, “That's where the fun comes in!”, and the curtain drops. In Louis N. Parker's Disraeli, the first act “curtain” is another example. This is, as we have already seen (p. 48), a common practice nowadays, and the reason for it is chiefly because it heightens illusion. In life, the exciting is mingled with the commonplace; one of the most interesting and dramatic things in life is the strange contrast between the sublime and the commonplace, the tragic and the comic. Therefore, instead of ending his act or play with a scene of great tension or high emotion, the dramatist seeks to reproduce a still more “lifelike” scene, placing one of these contrasted moments at the most critical point in his act, that is, in the last part of it. One of the quietest endings is in Wedekind's Music. “At the end, when Klara, after undergoing imprisonment, exile, poverty, public disgrace and the loss of her beloved child, finds herself bereft of even Reissner's regard, she is led away in a stupor from the miserable attic. It is then, in reply to a wish of the physician that she will suffer no lasting mental disturbance, that Lindekuh preludes the fall of the curtain by the caustic remark: ‘She'll be able to sing a song.’”¹

On the other hand, need it be said that not all of life is unemphatic? Is there not danger in overemphasizing the unemphatic? Galsworthy has been blamed for his cautious “curtains” on the grounds that life is seldom so tense and undramatic as he shows it.

Take, as an example of the emphatic ending, Echegaray's rather melodramatic play Madman or Saint (also translated as Folly or Saintliness). Is the strong scene with which this drama ends esthetically justifiable?

Note

1. From F. J. Ziegler's preface to his translation of Wedekind's “Awakening of Spring.”