It is so easy to think of a fine
idea. The next man you meet in an hotel bar will tell you a fine idea
after two whiskys--I mean a really fine idea. Only in art an idea doesn't
exist till it is worked _out_. Brieux never (with the possible exception
above mentioned) works an idea _out_. Because he can't. He doesn't know
enough of his business. He can only do the easy parts of his business.
Last autumn also, the Comedie Francaise revived "La Robe Rouge." The
casting, owing to an effort to make it too good, was very bad; and the
production was very bad, though Brieux himself superintended it. But, all
allowances made for the inevitable turpitudes of this ridiculous national
theatre, the was senile; it was done for! Certainly it exposes the abuses
of the French magistrature, but at what cost of fundamental truth! The
melodramatic close might have been written in the Isle of Man.
* * * * *
Take the most notorious of all his plays, "Les Avaries." It contains an
admirable sermon, a really effective sermon, animated by ideas which I
suppose have been in the minds of exceptionally intelligent men for a
hundred years or so, and which Brieux restated in terms of dramatic
eloquence. But the sentimentality of the end is simply base.
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