With Thérèse Raquin the great style, the deep probing of the human soul had attracted attention for a while, but no successors seem to venture forth. Still, the attempt has been made, since 1882, of regarding Henry Becque's Les Corbeaux as an epoch-making work. To me this seems to be a misunderstanding. If art is to be, as it has been said, a piece of nature seen through a temperament, then there really is a piece of nature in Becque's Crows, but the temperament is lacking.

A factory owner dies in the first act after, among many other incidents, his son has appeared in the first scene comically got up in his father's dressing gown. This completely superfluous little prank, the significance of which I fail to grasp, was probably included by the dramatist because it happened in real life from which this boring and rather unimportant episode has been taken. After the death of the factory owner, his partner, lawyers, paid and unpaid creditors appear on the scene and seize the inheritance, so that the family becomes insolvent. That is all!

Here we have the ordinary case which is so much in demand these days, the rule, the human norm, which is so banal, so insignificant, so dull that after four hours of suffering you ask yourself the old question: how does this concern me? This is the objective which is so beloved by those devoid of temperament, the soulless as they shall be called!

This is photography which includes everything, even the grain of dust on the lens of the camera. This is realism, a working method elevated to art, or the little art which does not see the forest for the trees. This is the misunderstood naturalism which holds that art merely consists of drawing a piece of nature in a natural way; it is not the great naturalism which seeks out the points where the great battles are fought, which loves to see what you do not see every day, which delights in the struggle between natural forces, whether these forces are called love and hate, rebellious or social instincts, which finds the beautiful or ugly unimportant if only it is great. It is this grandiose art which we found in Germinal and La Terre, and which we expected to see reappear in the theatre, but which did not come with Becque's Corbeaux or Zola's Renée, but which gradually was to come into existence through the opening of a new stage, which, under the name of the Théâtre Libre, is active in the heart of Paris.


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