BRIEUX AND CONTEMPORARY FRENCH SOCIETY.• Tex words " Contemporary French
Society " appearing on the title- page of any book are likely to attract readers, Especially in America. From the University of Pennsylvania comes to England a sketch of French life which is well worth study. Mr. Scheifley in the book before us judges of modem France by modem French literature, relying chiefly for his picture upon the work of the didactic dramatist Brien:.
It is unfortunate, he writes in his first chapter, that to many Americans the name of Eugene Brieux suggests only the author of Damaged Goods (Les A variEs), this mush-talked-of play ranking, as ha believes, among Brieux's poorest productions. It is upon other work of larger scope, though not less didactic intention, that his French reputation rests. Without a purpos', it seems, ho has written nothing. Incidentally his dramatic tracts reflect the life which he would reform, or rather would perfect, for he is an optimist. " He has faith in mankind. He believes that evil and suffering and misery exist in the world, not as much because people so will it, but rather because they fail to realise their share of responsibility."
The play which made his reputation was Blanchette, which together with L'Engrenage (The Cogwheels) and An Robe Rouge display en attitude towards democracy which is apparently shared by most of the tieing men of letters in France, and which makes discouraging reading for the more advanced Liberals of this country. According to the fiction and drama of to-day, the heart of France palpitates with social ambition. The rich bourgeoisie have been glad to marry the old nobility (now a relatively unimportant class). There are &clam& d'en haut as well as &dames d'en bas.
• Brieor sad Contentyorary French Society. By William H. Scheifley. London: 0. r. Femmes Sena Ger. sd. sel.1
The richer peasants desire to enter by marriage the ranks of the bourgeoisie, and they attempt to climb the social beanstalk with the help of a hard-won education. They attain their ambition in a sense, and find themselves decissefe--strangers in a new atmosphere, dis- contented and embittered. M. Brieux's heroine Blanchette is a type of many heroines of fiction and many real women in modern France. She is one of the peasant children who " owe their rills. fortunes to alluring promises of diplomas." The State facilitates education and does not provide for the educated. Blanchette has a great school success, and finds herself wholly unfitted to share the life of her parents or that of the village blacksmith who makes loud to her. The French novelists and dramatists who weave tragedies from such material do not ask that education should cease, but that it should be changed. Like their critical confreres here, they give no clue which may lead us to find this new education, which shall develop to the utmost the minds of the new generation, without disturbing family harmony or class sympathy or loyalty. Secondary education is found fault with in recent French fiction in the earns manner, and for the same sort of reasons as are advanced against primary education. Girls brought up in boarding-schools with aristocrats' and bankers' children return home unfitted for occupa- tions of their stations and unwilling to accept the only men who offer them marriage. All this seems curiously reactionary. The French dot system no doubt increases the difficulties of the deciaselea who would enter the ranks above them. Roughly speaking, a French girl can only marry within the circle to which her dot offers her the key ; hence the extraordinary amount of misrepresentations to which ambitious parents stoop in their efforts to settle their daughters. As in Lee Troia Filler de M. Dupont, the money prospects of a daughter are constantly falsified in the marriage settlement. The social critics plead that better chances of employment and a more dignified social status should be within the grasp of a single woman. La femme seufc has small place at present in French society. In England she has all that she can desire. None the less the problem of which else forms a part is not solved.
But it is the cradle, and not the man or the woman, which forms the centre of M. Brieux's somewhat sermonizing pictures. In France to-day the child is worshipped and, judging by plays and novels, spoiled. " The present tendency in France is to bestow more and more upon the child, as the symbol of future hope, the worship for- merly consecrated to dogmatic creeds." M. Pierre Baudin calls this "shifting the seat of worship." The literary critics of social life, and Brieux amongst them, consider that this devotion has become enervating. In Les Couch he depicts the unhappiness which follows upon years of idolatry. Not that he questions for a moment the French ideal of the family. It is the love of the parents for the child —not for each other—upon which he would rely for the preservation of a healthy family life. " No less than eight of his ploys have for their prime consideration the interest of the child ; and in at leant five others he devotes more or lees attention to some aspect of this same general theme." The welfare of the next generation should be, he believes, the chief interest of the present one. " Whether the child is threatened at birth with poverty, paternalabandonment. and social ostracism, or deprived of its mother's breast to satisfy the vanity of a Parisian bourgeoiae ; whether this precious incarnation, while still in the cradle, is about to be sacrificed for its parents' happi. ness, or grows up a victim to parental leniency—in eaoh case Brieux en- lists his talent and power of persuasion to safeguard the vital interests of the race." For the sake of the child he deprecates divorce, the right dear to the Latin heart of vengeance upon an unfaithful wife, the right to replace a " deserter "—and even the right, which too many Englishmen cherish, to leave the financial welfare of a daughter to chance. In the education of children he, in common with many other writers of modern France, is a strong advocate for reform. The newest French attitude towards Christianity seems to be that, while it may be untrue, it should be taught. To the present writer this point of view is inexplicable except upon the supposition that the French mind makes more easily than we do the distinction between religious and scientific truth.
Many of the accepted scientific theories of to-day, however, are very passionately called in question in Paris. Brieux, for instance, regards the dogmstio assertion of heredity as possibly untrue and certainly inexpedient. The dangers of preaching it to young people are upheld in L'Evasion, whose theme, Brieux has said, was mg. gested to him by seeing a young artist drink himself to death because his father had done so before him. The doctrine of heredity had become to him an " accursed jail " out of which ho could not escape— his will sacrificed to scientific superstition.
If the scourge of literary endeavour in France leaves no section of private life free from its penal sentence, public life is yet more severely dealt with. Mr. Scheifley quotes name after name to uphold his contention that the thoughtful in France are sink of universal suffrage. The necessity of pleasing an ignorant mass is corrupting, so Brieux, for instance, maintains, political life and the legal system of France. In L'Engrenoge and La Robe Rouge he shows how difficult it is foe oven a man of goodwill to be an honest Deputy or to ad- minister indifferent justice. The intensity of the desire felt by the bourgeoisie to succeed, to attain fortune or distinction or both, the
arrivinne Inedrenf,411 painted- in feitffid colonsu, and it is impossible...to dilly that Dertiociacy. id attadkeil.
Mr. Scheifley's book is, in the nature of things, superficial. He only attempts to give his readers some notion of the workings of the present French social oonsoience ea shown in dramatie fiction. The whole impression left upon the reader is of a corisciencestricken society in the full vigour -of moral advancement.
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