[In the following essay, Gassner takes a close look at Becque's two “masterpieces,” The Vultures and The Woman of Paris.]

At a time when good writing for the theatre is at a low ebb in most countries, not excluding our own, it may be well to return to the fountain-springs of the modern drama, which are now so muddied by the demands of commerce. And in returning to the sources we could do worse than glance at the struggles of Henry Becque, the one founder of dramatic modernism who is least known in America although James Huneker acclaimed him, Ashley Dukes translated him, and his plays found a place in all the influential theatres of Europe. Today, when showmanly cleverness is still too often a substitute for true penetrativeness in the theatre, there is still more lip-service to his principles than actual observance of them. To remember Becque is to recall how difficult it has been and still is to maintain playwriting on the high level to which it was raised by him and others in the eighteen-eighties.

In remembering Becque, moreover, we are forced to give some thought to the entire question of salvation for the theatre through departures from realism. Blame for the pinchbeck nature of much dramatic writing is often placed on the triumph of the realistic technique, whereas Becque's plays, perhaps even more than Ibsen's and less only than Strindberg's, would expose the absurdity of the charge. It was precisely against meretricious theatricality that modern realism ranged its heaviest batteries, and the vacuity of much that passes for realistic drama here and abroad is the very antithesis of Becque's work as well as that of the pioneers who were his contemporaries. The proposal to discard realism so often voiced by faithhealers of the stage incorporates one fallacy: The imaginative or poetic style of drama with which they intend to displace realism can also play us false, and humbug is humbug no matter whether it wears the trappings of poetry or the sack-suit of prose, the homburg of fancy or the straw hat of suburban realism. When the play is dramaturgically unsound or unconvincing, the deception does not succeed for all the prestidigitation of fanciful and stylized playwriting.

Becque's battle for sound, objective theatre was won at the end of the nineteenth century and then lost in a flood of “Maeterlinckéd” sweetness without light, buried in Reinhardt spectacles, and distorted by expressionistic subjectivism that produced no results comparable in value to the objective workmanship we got in the best plays of Chekhov and O'Casey, for example. The theatre had just rounded out half a century since Becque died, and yet the victory he gained for objective revelation, without tasting more than thin slivers of its fruits himself, had to be won all over again in spite of the recent appearance of a few good plays by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller.

It was Henry Becque's ironic destiny to be neglected while he was laying the foundations of French dramatic realism and then to be unable to complete a single long play when the theatre finally caught up with his art. In the eighteen-seventies, Émile Zola was thundering precepts in prefaces and searching for saviors of the French stage. His eyes lighted readily enough on the de Goncourt brothers, the novelists who shared his credo of “naturalism” and authors of a wretched play, Henriette Maréchal. He even glanced appreciatively at himself, writing some half-dozen plays as exemplars of stage realism. Zola looked in every direction except that of Becque. When the dramatist later came to write his memoirs, he would, remembering Zola's indifference, remark glumly that “the dog barks and the caravan passes.”

Upon graduation from the old Lycée Bonaparte, Henri-François Becque, the son of a lowly government clerk in Paris, first found employment in a railroad office. But influenced by a maternal uncle Martin Labize, who had collaborated with the famous Labiche on a comedy, the young man turned eagerly to the theatre. From clerking at the Chemins de Fer du Nord he moved to a small position in the chancellery of the Legion of Honor and then to the household of the Polish diplomat Count Potocski as tutor and private secretary. Here came his first opportunity to emerge as a writer, the Count having introduced him to a young composer Victorien Jonçieres, for whom Becque wrote the libretto to the forgotten opera Sardanapale in 1885. In the same year, Becque also became the drama critic of the newspaper Le Peuple, and in 1886 he had the additional good fortune of seeing a little farce produced successfully.

Encouraged by this first taste of success, the no longer so very young author resolved to rely solely on his literary labors for a livelihood, and the decision was to cost him nothing less than a lifetime of embittering experience with producers and critics. His zeal for the theatre carried him so far into recklessness that he produced his first full-length play, Michel Pauper, at his own expense in 1870. He was rewarded for his pains with a resounding failure, and his next attempt in 1871, The Elopement, fared no better. Twice defeated, the playwright returned to the chancellery of the Legion of Honor and, from there, graduated to a stockbroker's office, where he remained for several years. Some measure of success came to him in 1878 with the reproduction of a short play The Shuttle, and, in 1880, with The Virtuous Women, which ultimately found its way into the repertory of the Comédie Française. But neither play greatly improved his financial condition, and his temper was sorely tried by failure to obtain a production for his first masterpiece The Vultures (Les Corbeaux), written in 1877. It took him five years to win a hearing for the play, and its acceptance by the Comédie Française was only the prelude to a protracted struggle with the directors. Stubbornly rejecting all demands for changes in the text that would turn it into a “well-made play” of intrigue, Becque finally saw The Vultures on the stage in 1882 exactly as he had written it. But the disparity between his objective picture of middle-class life and the artificial style of stage production then in vogue gave him at best a qualified success. The hisses that greeted the play were as loud as the applause of the progressives in the auditorium, so that the premiere threatened to become another pitched battle like the “battle of ‘Hernani’” half a century earlier, when romanticists had fought classicists on behalf of Hugo's romantic melodrama. Nor did Becque gain enough prestige at the time to be able to place his next play The Parisian Woman (La Parisienne) on the stage without first encountering humiliating rejections. The first production of this notable comedy in 1885 created a sensation without actually giving the author the success he deserved, and the Comédie Française, which condescended to present La Parisienne five years later, nearly turned a masterpiece into a fiasco with its inept staging methods.

When we look at the first of Becque's two masterpieces today, we are apt to find The Vultures almost as unique in our practical theatre as it was in the theatrical world between the years 1877 and 1882 when he tried to get his play produced. Although the theme seems familiar enough because we are accustomed to seeing business ethics criticized on the stage, we shall, if we are sailing in the weather of Broadway or West End theatrical production, consider Becque's dramaturgy altogether too simple, bare, and naïve. An American producer reading the play in innocence of its authorship would consider it the work of a promising young author who still “doesn't know his way around,” for this is what the producer will find: He will read a first act that starts the play altogether too soon with a picture of the homelife of the middle-class Vignerons. The mother flutters about contentedly and the genial father dotes on his three daughters and makes them sing a chanson before he departs to keep an appointment. The pretty daughter Blanche looks forward to marrying a young man of good society; another daughter is absorbed in her study of music, and a third girl Marie is inconspicuously involved with nothing in particular. (When is the action to start, wonders the producer?) The house gradually fills with visitors, including Blanche's young man and the latter's aristocratic mother. They are just starting to celebrate Blanche's engagement, when a physician comes in to announce that Monsieur Vigneron has died of a heart-attack. And now it is really the turn of the producer to shake his head sadly. Why doesn't the inexperienced author manage it so that Vigneron will die on the stage—perhaps overexcite himself at the festivities and collapse in full sight of the audience? This is always good theatre, whereas the offstage death is untheatrical. The author would waste his breath if he explained that the first part of his act is a slice of life, and that he has no reason to turn Vigneron's death into a holiday for the boxoffice customers.

What follows is that Vigneron's business partner Teissier, his lawyer Bourdon, an architect, and a number of petty cheats proceed to pluck the helpless family. It is especially plain that the family's lawyer and the business partner are acting in collusion. Yet once the methods of the scoundrels are revealed, the playwright makes no effort to make a stage plot out of their rapacity, for the kind of plucking the Vignerons get is a routine matter that proceeds in a perfectly untheatrical, legalistic fashion. Instead of making an exciting thing of the business intrigue, then, the play turns to the personal complication of the impulsive Blanche, who gave herself to her fiancé only to learn that his mother refuses to countenance the marriage without a substantial dowry. And here, too, our hypothetical showman is bound to be disappointed. He would expect a pathetic scene between hero and heroine, but it is only the mother, who has gone from place to place to ascertain the Vigneron family's financial condition, who calmly tells Blanche that the marriage cannot take place. Becque, moreover, has no sooner held out the appetizing dish of an illegitimate pregnancy to the public than he austerely removes it from our sight. The girl's condition is quickly absorbed by the over-all dramatic development, which has in the meantime caught up with her sensible sister Marie, who has attracted her father's rascally partner Teissier.

The aged vulture proposes marriage and Marie, aware of her sister's condition and of the helplessness of the family, accepts him. Blanche's problem will no doubt be settled now one way or another, and the playwright does not even tell us this, because he is not interested in untying all the knots of his story simultaneously, as is so often the case in the theatre and so rarely the case in life. Teissier arranges the marriage through his lawyer Bourdon, and strangely enough it is this second swindler who most effectively protects Marie's interests by making her insist on a settlement of one half of Teissier's fortune. Becque has again disappointed the conventional showman by not writing a scene showing the reformation of the advocate. For Bourdon, according to his “realistic” view of life, it was absolutely right—a Darwinist law of nature, so to speak—to rob the Vigneron nest when the father-bird was gone. Now it is equally right for Marie to pluck Teissier, for nature has placed an old man at the mercy of a young woman. The Vultures resolves itself as if Becque had dispassionately observed a law of nature working itself out in the decline and restoration of the Vignerons' fortunes. Yet nothing could be more ironic in tone and more devastatingly satiric than this exposé of how “social Darwinists” act and think. And the more indifferent Becque is to the amorality of his characters the more thoroughly he exposes them as the vultures they are.

Becque's virtuosity in refraining from virtuosity is even more remarkable in his second masterwork La Parisienne. This comedy does not even have a “resolution,” for Clotilde Du Mesnil, who has been betraying her husband at the beginning of the play, simply continues to betray him at the end. Nor does La Parisienne actually possess a “crisis.” There is never any question of Clotilde's being found out; the husband is a complacent individual who misses the lover's company more than the wife does. There is much comic conflict, it is true, in the first act, but it is between the woman and the lover, and it quickly disappears when Clotilde simply drops him, only to take him back toward the end of the play when she has herself been dropped by another lover. The blasé second lover, who has furthered her husband's political ambitions at her request, quietly informs her that he is leaving for the country. Neither for him nor for Clotilde has the breaking up of the relationship assumed any critical proportions. Recriminations are for people who feel intensely, whereas the point of Becque's comedy is precisely that nobody is capable of intense emotion in this Parisian milieu. Nobody, that is, except the first lover Lafont, and he is merely ridiculous, since he claims the proprietary rights of a husband to her fidelity. Without a real crisis and resolution, with hardly any exposition, and without inserting a single bout of wit or a single prurient line Becque managed to write one of the most brilliant—and amoral—comedies of all time.

La Parisienne is full of irony, unconscious in the case of the characters; but the most ironical thing about it is that Becque's aloof observation of life should make the play pass for one of the most cleverly written pieces of the theatre. When the late A. B. Walkley, a critic not given to unconsidered enthusiasms, saw Mme. Réjane play Clotilde in London in 1901, he marveled at “this whiff of sulphur combined with odeur de femme,” and called the comedy “diabolically clever.” “It purports to have been written by the late Mr. Henri Becque single-handed,” he added, “but I suspect Old Nick to have been at his elbow, an unseen collaborator.” Yet this effect was the result of nothing more than the author's pretense of acting as the part of life's amanuensis. The play begins, as Walkley noted, with “one of the most complex hoaxes ever devised by a playwright.” We are led to believe that Clotilde is engaged in a lengthy conjugal brawl with a jealous husband, until she calls out “Prenez garde, voila mon mari” and we know that the man is her lover. But the hoax is life's trick on the characters, for the comic and realistic point of the illicit relationship is that usage has made it indistinguishable from the unromantic state of marriage. As a romance, prolonged adultery is a highly over-rated experience, and the jealousy of her lover proves as boring to Clotilde as would have been the jealousy of her husband. Becque's main achievement, however, was that his tenacious veracity should make Clotilde so monstrously immoral without turning her into a monster (she is patient, reasonable, considerate, and congenial), and so amusing without giving her an ounce of humor to flaunt before the public. Like Joyce's Molly Bloom, she is nature unadulterated by the sense of right and wrong.

Becque needed a theatre capable of giving life to his characters instead of dipping them into greasepaint and thrusting them out into the footlight area in order that they might hurl their lines into the auditorium. The entire point of the dramatic treatment in both The Vultures and La Parisienne was, after all, the revelation of moral turpitude in the society of his time through the natural conduct of his characters. They are drawn as people who consider their questionable morals above reproach, they regard their conduct and sentiments as norms of the social level on which they thrive. Both the humor and the indictment in Becque's two masterpieces arise entirely from the discrepancy between what his characters think of themselves and our judgment of them. The little foxes of The Vultures (and Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes strongly recalls Becque's play) consider themselves merely realistic businessmen when they cheat a widow and three orphaned daughters of their inheritance. Clotilde in La Parisienne believes herself to be a devoted wife to her husband, for she wins him political advancement through her infidelity, and she considers herself so proper a person that she can seriously reprove her lover for his lack of religion. Unconscious irony can go no further than the conclusion of The Vultures when Teissier, the most ravenous of the rascals, proceeds to drive off the other vultures after winning Marie in marriage and remarks: “Since your father's death, my child, you have been surrounded by a pack of scoundrels.”

To let the actor play up to the audience and address his remarks to it instead of to other characters, to push him out of the scenery that frames the room in which the action is supposed to take place, to allow him to declaim his lines with exaggerated gestures—these were the unpardonable sins that the conventional theatre committed against Becque and other realistic dramatists. A major upheaval was needed in theatrical art to make the revolution in playwriting effective. The revolution was started by André Antoine when he founded the Théâtre Libre in 1887, and it is not surprising that Becque rallied to Antoine's support. It was this pioneering actor-manager who gave La Parisienne its first distinguished production in 1897, with Mme. Réjane playing Clotilde to his Lafont at the Théâtre Antoine, founded two years before Becque's death.

With the triumph of the new naturalistic stagecraft, Becque finally came into his own. But by then Becque was depleted of his creative energy. He wrote nothing of significance after 1885 except two short pieces, The Start (Le Depart) and Widowed (Veuve)—the former a sketch of a shopgirl's induction into vice by a respectable employer who discharges her for refusing to yield to his son, the latter a sequel to La Parisienne which shows us Clotilde widowed at last but otherwise unchanged. Three other one-acters written in the year 1877 were trifles, and The Puppets, an exposé of the world of finance started fifteen years earlier, was left unfinished at his death. Admitted to the Legion of Honor in 1886, lionized in society for his acrid wit, invited in 1893 to lecture in Italy where his plays had become popular, he nevertheless remained poor and lonely. His admirers racked their brains for ways of stimulating him to create more masterpieces, and Antoine even lured him to Brittany for a summer's vacation to induce him to write again. A fire that the solitary man started in his bedroom with a lighted cigar caused him a severe shock, and he had to be placed in a sanatorium by friends. He never recovered. His death on May 15, 1899, was a deep blow to the men of the theatre who honored his forthright struggle to modernize the French stage.

Writing in 1905 about Becque, James Huneker declared that The Vultures was “the bible of the dramatic realists.” Yet, unlike Zola, Becque never propounded any formula of Naturalism for playwrights. He did not even evince any marked enthusiasm for Ibsen, and the only realist who affected him was Tolstoy, whose peasant tragedy The Power of Darkness impressed him greatly. With curious inconsistency, probably for personal reasons of gratitude, he maintained a life-long admiration for Victorien Sardou, whose theatrical contrivances Bernard Shaw once dismissed as “Sardoodledom.” In writing a preface to The Vultures, Becque dissociated himself from the Naturalists' fondness for sordid drama and from their pet doctrine of heredity. He wrote: “I have never entertained a great liking for assassins, hysterical and alcoholic characters, or for the martyrs of heredity and victims of evolution.” He distrusted any sort of legislation for dramatists, declaring, “there is no law and there are no rules; there are only plays which are so different that no generalization is applicable. …” Concerning his encounters with conservatism in the theatre, he maintained merely that there were no conventions that originality could not displace, that “the history of art is nothing but the history of struggles between original talents and routine-bound minds.”

All that Becque intended to do was to set down reality without distorting it for the sake of theatrical expediency. In confining himself to a segment of life, he seemed to say, “Make what you will of it, this is how people behave in our time and place, this is how they think, and this is how they speak.” He dispensed with tricks of the trade, such as artificially emotional or scintillating “big” scenes and act-endings that brought the curtain down with a bang at the expense of naturalness. Like Strindberg, when the Scandinavian playwright came to write his remarkably compact one-act dramas, Miss Julie and The Creditors, Becque pruned his plays of all inessentials at a time when witty conversations, ex cathedra preachments, and declamations were considered the indispensable machinery of any theatre that expected to attract an audience; against this kind of dramaturgy, Becque declared that drama was the art of elimination. He endeavored, moreover, to release a natural flow of action which would make it impossible for the parts of a play to be differentiated mechanically as “exposition,” “climax,” and “dénouement.” In a play like The Vultures, which suffers from some prolixity, and in the more brilliantly executed, if more narrowly Parisian, comedy La Parisienne, it is Becque's sharp observation that stands foremost. Unlike Ibsen, he did not quite rid his work of occasional asides or soliloquies, but these do not materially detract from his realism. It is the integrity of the conception and the writing of both plays that has preserved them, and it is integrity, for which there has never been too much regard in the theatre, that explains the influence this dour playwright exerted on the formative modern drama. From the ideal that he set for dramatists, there have been, regrettably, more descents than ascents, and this is as good a reason as any for remembering him half a century after his death.

At this time, especially in the American theatre, there is, however, an equally good reason for giving some attention to his two masterpieces, and that reason must strike us as a paradox if we still adhere to a naïve view of realism as a mere transcription of life. Becque had the gift of making a transcript look like a travesty, or if you will, a travesty look like a transcript. The “naturalness” of his dramaturgy and writing, which made it possible for him to set down reality in such a matter-of-fact manner, was in his case an instrument of satiric comedy. To treat the behavior and thought-processes of his vultures and amoralists as perfectly “natural” was the most powerful method he could have adopted to outrage us and make us consider them monstrous. The result is travesty achieved by naturalness. That is, the logic or consistency of these characters makes them exaggerations or caricatures. Conversely, for Becque to present such monsters of iniquity as perfectly natural specimens of the human species and of society is tantamount to directing his satire at the species and society. What, in other words, are we to think of the human race and of human society if Becque's amoralists are to be regarded as normal people!

It will be seen then that Becque used “realism,” or “naturalism,” far from naïvely. Unlike many later playwrights up to our own time, he was not the slave but the master of the realistic mode of playwriting coming into vogue in his day. He was a creator when he adopted the role of a transcriber, whereas many a playwright who succeeded him was a transcriber while adopting the role of a creator. Becque brought a distinctive, tart, and quizzical temperament and a nimble mind to the modern theatre. His astringent essays in Souvenirs d'un Auteur Dramatique and Études d'Art Dramatique also enforce this opinion. With these qualities he gave a unique comic style to naturalism, a style simultaneously “natural” and grotesque. One might call it a sort of expressionistic naturalism, without expressionistic fantasy and structure.

One can find this style, which is a quality of creativeness and urbane intellect, variously present in the work of European playwrights. It ferments in the plays of Carl Sternheim, barely known in America; in Hauptmann's The Beaver Coat and The Conflagration (Der Rote Hahn); in Wedekind's The Tenor; in Granville-Barker's The Voysey Inheritance; in Pagnol's Topaze, Jules Romains' Dr. Knock, Crommelynck's The Magnificent Cuckold, and other French and Belgian pieces. In America, this kind of writing has not prevailed, unless we can ascribe it to Tobacco Road, where it is more salacious than tart, and to Edwin Justin Mayer's The Children of Darkness, where it is bespangled by romanticism. Other borderline cases may occur to us. But for the total charge of naturalistic irony and the full blast of boreal comedy, which American playgoers don't seem to be able to relish, we must go, first of all, to Henry Becque. We are, of course, under no particular obligation to like what we don't like. But the maturity of Becque's mind and the tempered steel of his spirit will remain a challenge to playwrights and a reminder that naturalistic playwriting can become a thoroughly creative act. Perhaps his denial of interest in Naturalism as propounded in France during his time, along with his favorable opinion of Sardou, will not seem egregious perversity or blindness on his part when we realize that he was not a simple purveyor of “slice of life” dramaturgy even while seeming to be just that. Becque, to conclude, was one of those pioneers of modern drama who, along with Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, and Chekhov, possessed true individuality and a rare power to shape reality while pretending to photograph it.