withstood the strain, but the strain was terrible.  From this incident alone I was almost ready to prophesy a Brieux craze in London.  And now a selection of Brieux’s plays is to be published in English in one volume, with a preface by Bernard Shaw.  Within a fortnight of the appearance of the book the Brieux craze will exist in full magnificence.  Leading articles will contain learned off-hand allusions to Brieux, Brieux and Shaw will be compared and differentiated, and Brieux will be the most serious dramatist in France.  I doubt not that Mr. Shaw’s preface will be a witty and illuminating affair, and that it will show me agreeable aspects of Brieux’s talent which have hitherto escaped me; but if it persuades me that Brieux is an artistically serious dramatist worth twopence, then I will retire from public life and seek a post as third sub-editor on the British Weekly.

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Brieux is a man with moral ideas.  I will admit even that he is dominated by moral ideas, which, if they are sometimes crude, are certainly righteous.  He is a reformer and a passionate reformer.  But a man can be a passionate reformer, with a marked turn for eloquence, and yet not be a serious dramatist.  Dr. Clifford is a reformer; Mr. Henniker Heaton is a passionate reformer; and both are capable of literature when they are excited.  But they are not dramatists.  We still await Mr. Henniker Heaton’s tragic fourth act about the failure of the negotiations for a penny post with France.  Brieux is too violent a reformer ever to be a serious dramatist.  Violent reformers are unprincipled, and the reformer in Brieux forces the dramatist in him to prostitution.  The dramatist in him is not strong enough to resist the odious demands of the reformer:  which fact alone shows how far he is from being a first-rate dramatist.  As a dramatist Brieux is no stronger, no more sincere, no less unscrupulous, no less viciously sentimental, than the fashionable authors of the boulevard, such as Capus, Donnay, and the ineffable Bernstein, so adored in London.  And it is as a dramatist that he must be judged.  Of course, if you wish to judge him as a reformer, you must get some expert opinion about his subjects of reform.  I fancy that you will end by discovering that as a reformer he must be considered just a little crude.

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I have seen most of Brieux’s plays, and I have seen them produced under his own direction, so that I can judge fairly well what he is after on the stage.  And I am bound to say that, with the exception of “Les Trois Filles de Monsieur Dupont” (which pleased me pretty well so far as I comprehended its dramatic intention), I have not seen one which I could refrain from despising.  Brieux’s plays always begin so brilliantly, and they always end so feebly, in such a wishwash of sentimentalism.  Take his last play—­no, his last play was “La Foi,” produced by Mr. Tree, and I have not yet met even