Читать книгу Woman on Her Own, False Gods and The Red Robe - Eugène Brieux - Страница 3

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We are confronted at the present time by the woman who is anxious to lay by means for her own support irrespective of the protection of her husband. In this play I have indicated the tendency of this difficulty and the consequent troubles which the older civilizations will bring upon themselves when the woman's standing as a worker is generally acknowledged. My conclusion, namely, that all these complications and troubles are, at present at any rate, owing to the education of the man, points to the remedy, as far as I can see it.

I must inform my readers that the version of La Femme Seule, a translation of which is now published in this volume, has, so far, not appeared in France and is unknown there; at least as regards the larger part of the third act. I might, did I think it advisable, reproduce in its entirety a text which certain timidities have led me to emasculate.

As between the man and the woman the ideal situation would, no doubt, be a rehabilitation of the old custom—the man at the workshop and the woman in the home; thus reserving for her the holiest and most important of all missions—the one which insures the future of the race by her enlightened care of the moral and physical health of her children.

Unfortunately it happens that the wages of the working-man are insufficient for the support of a family, and the poor woman is therefore compelled to go to the factory. The results are deplorable. The child is either entirely abandoned, or given to the State, and the solidarity of the family suffers in consequence.

Then again a generation of women with new ideas has arisen, who think they should have, if they wish it, the right to live alone and by themselves, without a husband's protection. However much some of us may regret this attitude, it is one which must be accepted, since I cannot believe that the worst tyrants would dare to make marriage obligatory. These women have a right to live, and consequently a right to work. Also there are the widows and the abandoned women.

Women first took places which seemed best fit for them, and which the men turned over to them because the work appeared to be of a character suitable to the feminine sex. But the modern woman has had enough of the meagre salary which is to be obtained by means of needle-work, and she has invaded the shop, the office, the desks of the banks and post office. In industry also she has taken her place by the side of the working-man, who has made room for her first with ironical grace, then with grumbling, and sometimes with anger. I believe that in Europe at least this kind of difficulty will have to be faced in the future.

As to the rich woman (and in La Femme Seule I have treated this subject only slightly because it is one to which I expect to come back), they have been driven from the home where the progress of domestic science has left them very little to do. We have reached a kind of hypocritical form of State Socialism, or perhaps it would be better to say Collectivism, and this will profoundly change the moral outlook. All, or nearly all, of the work of the home seems to be done by people from the outside—from the cleaning of the windows to the education of the children. The modern home is but a fireside around which one hardly sees the family gathered for intimate talk.

It has thus happened that the woman who finds herself without work, and with several children, looks out of the windows of her home away from it for the employment of her activities. The future will tell us whether or no this is good. In my opinion I believe it will be good, and I believe that man will gain, through this new intelligence, in the direction of the larger life which has come to women from this necessity of theirs. Unquestionably there will have to be a new education, and this will certainly come.

La Foi.—This play is, without doubt, of all my plays the one which has cost me the most labor and the one upon which I have expended the most thought and time. The impulse to write it came to me at Lourdes in view of the excited, suffering, and praying crowds of people. When the thought of writing it came to me I hesitated, but during many years I added notes upon notes. And it was while on a trip to Egypt that I saw the possibility for discussing such questions in the theatre without giving offence to various consciences. My true and illustrious friend, Camille Saint-Saëns, has been kind enough to underline my prose with his admirable music. In this way La Foi has been produced on the stage at Monte Carlo for the first time under the auspices of His Royal Highness the Prince of Monaco, whom I now beg to thank.

English readers of La Robe Rouge would, I think, be somewhat misled, if they did not understand the difference between the procedure in criminal cases in France and in Great Britain. My purpose in this preface is to attempt to show that difference in a few words.

With you, a criminal trial is conducted publicly and before a jury; with us in France it is carried on in the Chambers of the Judge with only the lawyer present. There sometimes result from this latter method dramas of the kind of which my play La Robe Rouge is one. The judge, too directly interested and free of the criticism which might fall on him from the general public, is liable to the danger of forming for himself an opinion as to the guilt of the accused. He may do this in perfect good faith, but sometimes runs the risk of falling into grave error. It thus occasionally happens that he is anxious not so much to know the truth as to prove that he was right in his own, often rash, opinion.

La Robe Rouge is a criticism of certain judicial proceedings which obtain in France; but it is also a study of an individual case of professional crookedness. We should be greatly mistaken were we to draw the dangerous conclusion that all French judges resemble Mouzon, and we should be equally wrong were we to condemn too hastily the French code relating to criminal trials.

In the struggle of society with the criminal it is very difficult, perhaps impossible, for the legislator to hold in equal balance the rights of the individual as against the interests of society. The balance sometimes leans one way and sometimes the other; and had I been an English citizen, instead of writing a play against the abuse of justice by a judge, I might have had to illustrate the same abuse by the lawyer.

I wish most sincerely that these three plays may interest the people of England and America. The problems which I have studied I am sure I have not brought to their final solutions. My ambition was to draw and keep the attention of honest people on them by means of the theatre.

BRIEUX.