SOURCE: Huneker, James. “Henry Becque.” In Iconoclasts: A Book of Dramatists, pp. 163-81. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1922.

[In the following essay, Huneker examines Becque's style through overviews of The Vultures, The Prodigal Son, and The Woman of Paris.]

Emile Zola once wrote in his sweeping dictatorial manner, “Le théâtre sera naturaliste ou il ne sera pas”; but as Henry Becque said in his mordant style, Zola always convinced one in his pronunciamentos; it was only when he attempted to put his theories into action that they completely broke down. Alas! realism in the theatre after all the gong-sounding of café æstheticians, after the desperate campaigns of the one clairvoyant manager in the movement, Antoine, is as dead as the romanticism of Hernani. After the flamboyant, the drab—and now they are both relegated to the limbo of the tried-and-found-wanting.

When Zola sat down to pen his famous call to arms, Naturalism on the Stage, Antoine was still in the future, Dumas fils and Sardou ruled the Parisian theatre, Uncle Sarcey manufactured his diverting feuilletons, and Augier was become a classic. The author of L'Assommoir had like Alexander sighed for new worlds to subjugate. He had won a victory, thanks to Flaubert and the De Goncourts, in fiction; it remained for the theatre to provoke his ire It still clung obstinately to old-fashioned conventions and refused to be coerced either by Henrietta Maréchal or by the furious onslaught of Zola and his cohort of writing men.

In the essay referred to, Zola said that a piece of work will always be a corner of nature seen through a temperament. He told the truth when he declared that the “romantic movement was but a skirmish; romanticism, which corresponds to nothing durable, was simply a restless regret of the old world.” Stendhal and Balzac had created the modern novel. The stage did not move with the other arts, though Diderot and Mercier “laid down squarely the basis of the naturalistic theatre.” Victor Hugo gave the romantic drama its deathblow. Scribe was an ingenious cabinet-maker. Sardou “has no life—only movement.” Dumas the younger was spoiled by cleverness—“a man of genius is not clever, and a man of genius is necessary to establish the naturalistic formula in a masterly fashion.” Besides, Dumas preaches, always preaches. “Emile Augier is the real master of the French stage, the most sincere”; but he did not know how to disengage himself from conventions, from stereotyped ideas, from made-up ideas.

Who, then, was to be the saviour, according to Zola? And this writer did not underrate the difficulties of the task. He knew that “the dramatic author was enclosed in a rigid frame … that the solitary reader tolerates everything, goes where he is led, even when he is disgusted; while the spectators taken en masse are seized with prudishness, with frights, with sensibilities of which the author must take notice under pain of a certain fall. But everything marches forward! If the theatre will submit to Sardou's juggling, to the theories and witticisms of Dumas, to the sentimental characters of Augier, the theatre will be left in the onward movement of civilization”; and as Becque said in his Souvenirs of a Dramatic Author, the theatre has reached its end many times, yet somehow it continues to flourish despite the gloomy prophecies of the professors and critical malcontents. Every season, avowed Becque, that same cry rises to heaven,—“La fin du théâtre”; and the next season the curtain rises in the same old houses, on the same old plays.

However, Zola trumpeted forth his opinions. According to him the De Goncourt brothers were the first to put into motion realistic ideas. Henriette Maréchal, with its dialogue copied from the spoken conversation of contemporary life, with its various scenes copied boldly from reality, was a path breaker. And Becque again interrupts; Edmond de Goncourt posed for thirty years as a hissed author, “pour cette panade d'Henriette Maréchal.” Away with the mechanism of the polished, dovetailed, machine-made play of Dumas. “I yearn for life with its shiver, its breath, and its strength; I long for life as it is,” passionately declaimed the simple-minded bourgeois Zola, who then, in default of other naturalistic dramatists, turned his Thérèse Raquin into a play—and melodrama it was, not without its moments of power, but romantic and old-fashioned to a degree.

And this was Zola's fate: he contumaciously usurped the throne of realism, never realizing his life long that he was a romanticist of the deepest dye, a follower of Hugo, that melodramatic taleteller. All the while he fancied himself a lineal descendant of Balzac and Flaubert. Searching ceaselessly with his Diogenese lantern for a dramatist, he nevertheless overlooked not only a great one, but the true father of the latter-day movement in French dramatic literature—Henry Becque. What a paradox! Here was the unfortunate Becque walking the boulevards night and day with plays under his arm, plays up his sleeve, plays in his hat, plays at home—and always was he shown the door, only to reappear at the managerial window. Calm in his superiority, his temper untouched by his trials, Becque presented the picture of the true Parisian man of genius,—witty, ironical on the subject of his misfortunes, and absolutely undaunted by refusals. He persisted until he forced his way into the Comédie Française, despite the intriguing, the disappointments, the broken promises, and the open hostility of Sarcey, then the reigning pontiff of French dramatic criticism. Jules Clarétie pretended a sympathy that he did not feel, and it was only when pressure was brought by Edouard Thierry that his masterpiece, Les Corbeaux, was put on the stage after many disheartening delays; after it had been refused at the Vaudeville, the Gymnase, the Odéon, the Porte-Saint-Martin, the Gaîté, the Cluny, and the Ambigu. Such perseverance is positively heroic.

I know of few more diverting books than Becque's Memoirs and the record of his Literary Quarrels. If he was gay, careless, and unspoiled by his failures in his daily existence, he must have saved his bile for his books. They are vitriolic. The lashing he gives Sarcey and Clarétie is deadly. He had evidently put his revengeful feelings carefully away and only revived them when the time came, when his successes, his disciples, his election as the master of a powerful school, warranted his decanting the bitter vintage. How it sparkles, how it bites! He pours upon the head of Sarcey his choicest irony. After snubbing the young Becque, after pompously telling him that he had no talent, that he should take Scribe for a model, Sarcey at the end, when he saw Becque as a possible strong figure in the dramatic world, calmly wrote: “Oh! Becque I have known a long time. He brought me his first piece. He owes it to me that his The Prodigal Son was played.” To cap his attack, Becque prints this statement at the end of the miserable history of his efforts to secure a footing. It is almost too good to be true. Diabolically clever also is his imitation of a Sarcey critique on Molière, for Sarcey was no friend of character dramas.

In his preface to The Ravens, Becque announces that he is not a thinker, not a dreamer, not a psychologist, not a believer in heredity. As Jean Jullien truly said, the Becque plays prove nothing, are not photographic, are not deformations of life, but sincere life itself. The author relates that in composing—he had a large apartment on the rue de Matignon—he spent much time in front of a mirror searching for the exact gesture, for the exact glance of the eye, for the precise intonation. This fidelity to nature recalls a similar procedure of Flaubert, who chanted at the top of his formidable voice his phrases to hear if they would stand the test of breathing. Becque caught the just colour of every speech, and it is this preoccupation with essentials of his art that enabled him to set on their feet most solidly all his characters. They live, they have the breath of life in them; when they walk or talk, we believe in them. The peep he permits us to take into his workshop is of much value to the student.

He admired Antoine, naturally, and his opinion of Zola I have recorded. He rapped Brunetière sharply over the knuckles for assuming that criticism conserves the tradition of literature. Vain words, cries Becque; literature makes itself despite criticism, it is ever in advance of the critics. Only a sterile art is the result of academies. Curiously enough, Becque had a consuming admiration for Sardou. Him he proclaimed the real master, the man of imagination, observation, the masterly manipulator of the character of characters. This is rather disconcerting to those who admire in the Becque plays just those qualities in which Sardou is deficient. Perhaps the fact that Sardou absolutely forced the production of Becque's L'Enfant Prodigue may have accentuated his praise of that prestidigitator of Marly. Becque entertained a qualified opinion of Ibsen and an overwhelming feeling for Tolstoy as dramatist. The Russian's Powers of Darkness greatly affected the Frenchman. (Becque was born in 1837, died in 1900.)

And what is this naturalistic formula of Becque's that escaped the notice of the zealous Zola and set the pace for nearly all the younger men? Is it not the absence of a formula of the tricks of construction religiously handed down by the Scribe-Sardou school? As is generally the case, the disciples have gone their master one better in their disdain of solid workmanship. The taint of the artificial, of the sawdust, is missing in Becque's masterpieces; yet with all their large rhythms, unconventional act-ends, and freedom from the cliché, there is no raggedness in detail; indeed, close study reveals the presence of a delicate, intricate mechanism, so shielded by the art of the dramatist as to illude us into believing that we are in the presence of unreasoned reality. Setting aside his pessimism, his harsh handling of character, his seeming want of sympathy,—a true objectivity, for he never takes sides with his characters,—Becque is as much a man of the theatre as Sardou. He saw the mad futility of the literary men who invaded the theatre full of arrogant belief in their formulas, in their newer conventions that would have supplanted older ones. A practical playwright, our author had no patience with those who attempted to dispense with the frame of the footlights, who would turn the playhouse into a literary farm through which would gambol all sorts of incompetents masquerading as original dramatic thinkers.

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. While Zola and the rest were devising methods for doing away with the formal drama, Becque sat reading Molière. Molière is his real master—Molière and life, as Augustin Filon truthfully says. In his endeavour to put before us his people in a simple, direct way he did smash several conventions. He usually lands his audience in the middle of the action, omitting the old-fashioned exposition act, careful preparation, and sometimes development, as we know it in the well-regulated drama. But search for his reasons and they are not long concealed. Logical he is, though it is not the cruel logic of Paul Hervieu, his most distinguished artistic descendant. The logic of Becque's events must retire before the logic of his characters, that is all. Humanity, then, is his chief concern. He cares little for literary style. He is not a stylist, though he has style—the stark, individual style of Henry Becque.

Complications, catastrophe, dénouement, all these are attenuated in the Becque plays. Atmosphere supplies the exposition, character painting, action. The impersonality of the dramatist is profound. If he had projected himself or his views upon the scene, then we would have been back with Dumas and his preachments. Are we returning to the Molière comedy of character? Movement in the accepted sense there is but little. Treatment and interpretation have been whittled away to a mere profile, so that in the Antoine repertory the anecdote bluntly expressed and dumped on the boards a slice of real life without comment—without skill, one is tempted to add.

Becque was nearer classic form than Hervieu, Donnay, De Curel, Georges Ancey, Leon Hennique, Emile Fabre, Maurice Donnay, Lemaître, Henri Lavedan, and the rest of the younger group that delighted in honouring him with the title of supreme master. After all, Becque's was a modified naturalism. He recognized the limitations of his material, and subdued his hand to them. M. Filon has pointed out that Becque and his followers tried to bring their work “into line with the philosophy of Taine,” as Dumas and Augier's ideas corresponded with those of Victor Cousin, the eclectic philosopher. Positivism, rather than naked realism, is Becque's note. The cold-blooded pessimism that pervades so unpleasantly many of his comedies was the resultant of a temperament sorely tried by experience, and one steeped in the materialism of the Second Empire.

So we get from him the psychology of the crowd, instead of the hero ego of earlier dramatists. He contrives a dense atmosphere, into which he plunges his puppets, and often his people appear cold, heartless, cynical. He is a surgeon, more like Ibsen than he would ever acknowledge, in his calm exposure of social maladies. And what a storehouse have been his studies of character for the generation succeeding him! Becque forged the formula, the others but developed it.

The Becque plays! The last edition is in three volumes published by La Plume of Paris. It begins with an opera—fancy an opera by this antagonist of romance!—entitled Sardanapale, in three acts, “imitated” from Lord Byron. Victorin Joncierès, a composer of respectable ability, furnished the music. The “machine” was represented for the first time at the Théâtre Lyrique, February 8, 1867. It need not detain us. L'Enfant Prodigue, a fouract vaudeville, saw the light, November 6, 1868, at the Théâtre Vaudeville. It is Becque at his wittiest, merriest best. In an unpremeditated manner it displays a mastery of intrigue that is amazing. For a man who despised mere technical display, this piece is a shining exemplar of virtuosity. Let those who would throw stones at Becque's nihilism in the matter of conventional craftsmanship read The Prodigal Son and marvel at its swiftness of action, its stripping the vessel of all unnecessary canvas, and scudding along under bare poles! The comedy is unfailing, the characterization rich in those cunning touches which are like salt applied to a smarting wound. The plot is slight, the adventures of several provincials who visit Paris and there become entangled in the toils of a shrewd adventuress. The underplot is woven skilfully into the main texture. Hypocrisy is scourged. A father and a son discover that they are trapped by the same woman. There is genre painting that is Dutch in its admirable minuteness and truth; a specimen is the scene at the concierge's dinner. Wicked in the quality called l'esprit gaulois, this farce is inimitable—and also a trifle old-fashioned.

In Michel Pauper,—given at the Porte-Saint-Martin, June, 1870,—Becque was feeling his way to simpler methods. The drama is in five acts and seven tableaux; and while it contains in solution all of Becque, it may be confessed that the outcome is rather an indigestible mess. The brutality of the opening scenes is undeniable. Michel is a clumsy fellow, who does not always retain our sympathy or respect. His courtship has all the delicacy of a peasant at pasture. But he is alive, his is a salient character. The suicide of De La Roseraye has been faithfully copied by Donnay in La Douloureuse, and by many others in Paris, London, and America. Hélène, poor girl, who is so rudely treated by Comte de Rivailler, would call forth a smile on the countenance of any one when she announces her misfortune in this stilted phraseology, “He asked of his own will what he could not obtain from mine.” The ending has a suspicion of the “arranged,” even of the violent melodramatic. And how shocking is the fall of Hélène! She is the first of the Becque cerebral female monsters, though she has at least more blood than some of his later creations. She loves the Count—the shadow of an excuse for her destruction of her noble-minded husband. However, one does not read Michel Pauper for amusement.

It is in L'Enlèvement that we find Becque managing with consummate address a genuine problem. It was produced at the Vaudeville, November 18, 1871. The three acts pass at a château in the provinces. Emma de Sainte-Croix, rather than endure the neglect and infidelities of her husband, lives in dignified retirement with her mother-in-law. She is a femme savante, though not of the odious bluestocking variety. She has a daily visitor in the person of a cultivated man who resides in the neighbourhood. At once we are submerged in a situation. De La Rouvre loves Emma. He, too, has been wretchedly mismated. His wife was a despicable voluptuary who cheated him with his domestics. He begs Emma to secure a divorce from her pleasure-loving husband. She refuses. She loathes the divorce courts. She loathes vulgar publicity. He proposes an elopement and is sharply brought to his senses by the woman. She loves the proprieties too much to indulge in romantic adventures, and has she not suffered enough through this love illusion? Her mother-in-law does not approve of the man's presence. Her son is always her son, and she hopes for reconciliation. If only Emma would be a little more lenient!

The prodigal husband returns. He is an admirable blackguard who respects neither his own honour nor that of his family. He flirts with his wife at his mother's instigation, but his heart is not in the game. Descends upon him one of his lady loves. She invades the château and is introduced to his wife as a supposedly casual passer-by. But she is detected as the worthless spouse of De La Rouvre. There is a scene. Later Raoul, the husband, forces his way into his wife's bedchamber and the episode on reading recalls Paul Hervieu's Le Dédale. The outcome, however, is different. Repulsed, the husband curses his wife, and she departs for India, elopes with her lover. Terse in dialogue, compact in construction, L'Enlèvement contains some of the best of Becque. Ibsen and Dumas are writ large in the general plan and dénouement, though the character drawing is wholly Becque's. Despite his economy of action and speech, he seldom gives one the feeling of abruptness in transitional passages. His scenes melt one into the other without a jar, and only after you have read or watched one of his plays do you realize the labour involved to produce such an illusion of life while disguising the controlling mechanism. All the familiar points de repères, the little tricks so dear to the average playmaker, are absent. Becque conceals his technical processes, and in that sense he has great art, though often seeming quite artless. And L'Enlèvement is more than a picture of manners; it is as definitely a problem play as A Doll's House. Only after being driven to it does Emma revolt. She is a revoltée of the cerebral type. The crowning insult is the attempt made upon her right to her person. Hervieu's heroine is passional, and it accounts for her lapse. We feel for her acutely. Emma's departure is logical.

With La Parisienne, Becque is once more on his own ground. Paris and its cynical view of the relations of the sexes is embodied in this diabolically adroit and disconcerting comedy—represented for the first time at the Comédie-Française, September 14, 1882, and reviewed at the Odéon, November 3, 1897. The play is full of a blague now slightly outmoded, but the types remain eternally true—those of the Parisian triangle. Only this three-cornered, even four-cornered, arrangement (for there are two “dear friends”) is played with amazing variations.

Clotilde du Mesnil and Lafont are quarrelling over a letter when the curtain rises. He adjures her to resist temptation. “Resist, Clotilde; that is the only honourable course, and the only course worthy of you.” She must remain dignified, honourable, the pride of her husband. Suddenly, in the midst of this ignoble squabble, she cries, “Prenez garde, voilà, mon mari!” Up to this moment the audience fancies that it has been witnessing a marital row. The shock is tremendous when the truth is learned. Nor are your feelings spared when later you hear Clotilde accuse Lafont of not being fond of her husband. The two wrangle over the accusation. In another speech she exclaims: “Vous êtes un libre penseur! Je crois que vous vous entendriez tres bien avec une maitresse qui n'aurait pas de religion, quelle horreur!” This extremely naïve statement reveals to us the land on the other side of good and evil in which dwell Becque's characters. Are they even cynical? Hardly, for there is no mockery, no parade of immorality, no speeches with equivocal meanings. The calm assumption of external decency is merely a reversion to the baldest paganism. It is the modern over-cynicism. These people are so bad that, paradoxical as it may sound, they are good Certainly they are more refreshing and infinitely more moral than that wretched Camille, with her repentant whimperings and her nauseating speeches about soiled doves and their redemption.

And Lafont, stupid, loving, honest according to his lights, Lafont so marvellously presented by Antoine, is he not a being who lives! Clotilde as incarnated by Réjane is the worldling, neither stupid nor witty. She is simply a good-natured, vain woman, who deceives her husband and lover as naturally as she breathes.

Clotilde takes on a new amant, who treats her as badly as she treated Lafont. Deserted, she picks up the old thread and begins to live as before. As Mrs. Craigie says of this play: “There are critics who mistaking the situation for the philosophy have called this piece immoral. One would as soon call Georges Dandin or Tom Jones immoral. A true book, a true play, cannot be otherwise than moral. It is the false picture—no matter how pretty—which makes for immorality.”

Throughout, these lovers quarrel like married folk. The social balance is upset, domestic virtues topsy-turvied. And yet the merciless stripping of the conventional romance,—the deluded husband, unhappy wife, and charming consoler of the afflicted,—these old properties of Gallic comedy are cast into the dust-bin. It is safe to say that since La Parisienne no French dramatic author has had the courage to revive the sentimental triangle as it was before this comedy was written. If he ventured to, he would be laughed off the stage. And for suppressing the sentimental married harlot let us be thankful to the memory of Becque.

Les Corbeaux is unique in modern comedy. Never played, to my knowledge, in English, its ideas, its characterization, its ground-plan, have been often ruthlessly appropriated. The verb “to steal” is never conjugated in theatreland. Yet this play's simplicity is appealing. A loving father of a family, a good-tempered bourgeois, dies suddenly. His affairs turn out badly. His widow and three daughters fall into the hands of the ravens, the partner of their father, his lawyer, his architect, and a motley crew of tradespeople. Ungrateful matter this for dramatic purposes. Scene by scene Becque exposes the outer and inner life of these defenceless women and their secret and malign persecutors. Every character is an elaborate portrait. Naturally, the family go to the dogs, and the wickedest villain of the lot catches in marriage the flower of the unhappy flock. His final speech is sublime, “My child, since your father's death you were hemmed in by a lot of designing scoundrels.” And by inference he pats himself on the back, he, the worst scoundrel of all. If you tell me that the theme is not a pleasant or suitable one for the drama, I shall recommend you to the spirit of the late Henry Becque for answer. Les Corbeaux is the bible of the dramatic realists.

Remain seven small pieces, principally in one act. La Navette is wicked—and amusing. It aims at nothing else. Les Honnêtes Femmes might have been written by Dumas. It is a sugar-coated sermon extemporized by a young married woman for the benefit of a presumptive lover. She finds him a bride, and the curtain falls. Le Départ is of sterner metal. Here Becque beats Zola at his own game. The scene represents a working girl's atelier in a Parisian store. The various women are clearly outlined, so clearly that Huysmans in Sœurs Vatard is recalled. One girl is honest. She is honourable enough to refuse an offer of marriage made by the foolish young son of the proprietor, and for this wisdom receives insults from the father and is finally discharged for being too virtuous. She then incontinently goes to the devil. The devastating irony of the dramatist illuminates this little piece with sinister effect. And the moral is never far to seek in Becque—perhaps a twisted moral, yet not altogether a negligible one. In Veuve we find our old friend Clotilde of La Parisienne, now a widow. Her behaviour to her faithful admirer is a study of feminine malice, not only seen “through a temperament,” but the outcome of unerring observation. Madeleine is a depressing sketch of a woman with a past who is educating her child at a convent It has poignant moments. The other two little affairs, Le Domino à Quart and Une Exécution, are exercises in pure humour of the volatile Parisian sort.

Becque's touch is light in comedy, rather clumsy in set drama. He is, as a rule, without charm, and he never indulges in mock pathos or cheap poetic flights. He excelled in depicting manners, and his dramatic method, as I have endeavoured to show, was direct and free from antique rhetoric and romantic turgidities. He has been superseded by a more comprehensive synthesis; France is become weary of the cynical sinners—yet that does not invalidate the high ranking of this man of genius. Whatever may be his deficiencies in the purely spiritual, Henry Becque will ever remain a commanding figure in the battalion of brilliant French dramatists.