Henry Becque

• Born: April 18, 1837
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: May 1, 1899
• Place of death: Paris, France

Other Literary Forms

Henry Becque’s literary career began with his writing the libretto for the opera Sardanaple, for which Victorien de Joncières wrote the music. This opera, atypical of Becque’s literary efforts, is something he did not count in his own reckoning of his dramatic work. An imitation of George Gordon, Lord Byron’s play Sardanapalus: A Tragedy (1821), Sardanaple clearly illustrates that Becque’s artistic talent lay outside the realm of poetry, yet it did bring him to the theatrical world in which he would make his reputation as a controversial and innovative playwright. In addition to the controversies that his plays generated, Becque’s dramatic criticism provoked controversy in an age that witnessed the birth of modern literary criticism. Becque’s numerous essays and reviews for several Parisian journals, Le Gaulois, La Revue illustrée, Le Figaro, and Gil Blas among them, brought him recognition as a sometimes formidable and original critic who not only championed the new, when he liked it, but also strove to demonstrate the universality and relevance of the old, particularly of the works of Molière. Many of his critical studies, along with some of his public lectures on drama, are collected in Querelles littéraires (1890) and Souvenirs d’un auteur dramatique (1895). More appear under the heading “Études d’art dramatique” in Œeuvres complètes de Henry Becque (1924; seven volumes), edited by his grandnephew, Jean Robaglia. Robaglia’s edition also contains Notes d’album (1898), a collection of Becque’s maxims, as well as his few poems, some of his letters, and the fragments of his last and incomplete play, Les Polichinelles.

Although his sole operatic venture and his poetry have not exerted any influence on French literary thought, Becque’s criticism still constitutes a significant chapter in the history of French theater. In his Querelles littéraires, for example, he considers the works of such disparate contemporaries as Giuseppe Verdi, Alexandre Dumas, fils, Alphonse Daudet, and Victorien Sardou. In other essays, he assesses the dramatic works and contributions of such writers as Sophocles, William Shakespeare, Molière, and Victor Hugo. Frequently and unabashedly biased, his essays reflect not only his opinions and observations but also the intensity and personal dimensions of dramatic criticism in France at that time.

Achievements

Henry Becque’s unquestionable literary achievement is to have given the theater two extraordinary plays, The Vultures and The Woman of Paris. An accomplished critic and the author of a dozen more plays, Becque is best remembered for the two major plays that set him squarely in the tradition of nineteenth century realism. Some have declared Becque to be the father of naturalistic drama; others, taking quite seriously his professed scorn for the cynicism and squalor of naturalistic drama, have emphasized his realism and have distinguished him from Émile Zola and his circle. Clearly, Becque’s relation to naturalism remains the subject of some debate. On the one hand, he did help to develop the dramatic subgenre comédie rossethat flourished at the Théâtre Libre of André Antoine: His The Woman of Paris served as a model that none of his imitators and self-styled disciples could quite duplicate. On the other hand, he soundly reprimanded the inadequacies of naturalism, and no matter how much he encouraged younger dramatists, they still derogated their tendencies to portray seaminess as such. A writer who took truth rather than beauty as his imperative, Becque remains closer to the art of Molière than to that of Zola. Becque’s singleminded pursuit of optimum dramatic form to serve as a vehicle for intense social criticism was a noteworthy quest; he conscientiously avoided the neat formulas that the well-made play held out to him and, in his two major works, achieved unique forms of dramatic expression.

Becque’s other achievements include his becoming first a chévalier (1886) and then an officier (1897) of the Légion d’Honneur as well as having been a candidate at three different times for the Académie Française. Although the honor of election to the French Academy eluded him, he was honored in various other ways. In 1893, his works were performed and his visits were celebrated in Milan and in Rome. He was also invited to lecture on drama in Liège and Brussels (1894), in Marseilles (1895), and in Holland and Denmark (1896).

Biography

Born in Paris on April 18, 1837, to Alexandre-Louis and Jeanne (Martin) Becque, Henry-François Becque was the second of three children in a family that always remained close. His elder brother, Charles, preceded him by three years, and his sister, Aimée, was born in 1841. As a child, Becque attended the Lycée Bonaparte (later, Lycée Condorcet) from 1848 to 1854, but he left school to seek employment without sitting for the baccalauréat. After a dozen years and a succession of positions with the Northern Railway Company, the Stock Exchange, the chancellery of the Légion d’Honneur, and the Polish count Alfred Potocki, Becque collaborated with Victorien de Joncières on the opera Sardanaple, which played at the Théâtre-Lyrique in 1867. This short-lived production may have prompted Becque to write, as his uncle Pierre Martin (Martin Lubize) had done, for the vaudeville stage and to produce L’Enfant prodigue (the prodigal son).

A month after Becque’s second play, Michel Pauper, opened at the Porte Saint-Martin in June, 1870, the Franco-Prussian War began, and Becque, who enlisted at once in the French army, took part in the siege of Paris. The lack of success of L’Enlèvement (the elopement) drove Becque away from the theater for a time and back to the Stock Exchange for his livelihood. In 1876, he began writing for one of the many journals to which he would contribute and became drama critic for Le Peuple. Over the years, he also wrote for Henri IV, L’Union republicaine, Le Matin, La Revue illustrée, Le Gaulois, Le Figaro, Revue du palais, and La Vie parisienne.

Michel Pauper and some of the elements of vaudeville that he had learned helped prepare Becque to write his first major play, The Vultures, a work he may have begun as early as 1872, completed in 1876, and for which he spent five years seeking a producer. Between completing The Vultures and seeing it produced onstage, Becque had time to write The Merry-Go-Round, which foreshadows The Woman of Paris, and Les Honnêtes Femmes (the respectable women), a paean to feminine virtue and respectability.

In spite of the success of The Vultures, Becque’s solitary life of poverty continued nearly unrelieved. The death of his father and mother in the early 1880’s reinforced the solitude of a man dedicated to family life, a solitude that would deepen with the deaths of his sister in 1890 and of his brother in 1894. When the death of his niece, Jeanne Salva, in 1893, was followed by that of her husband, Georges Robaglia, in 1895, Becque found himself the guardian of two young grandnephews and looked after them as best he could. One of these, Jean Robaglia, would later edit the Crés edition (1924) of Becque’s works and provide the most extensive firsthand biographical account of the dramatist.

With his second great theatrical success, The Woman of Paris, the fashionable world of the Parisian salons, especially the salon of Mme Aubernon, opened to Becque, who, by force of wit and conversational brilliance, soon became the toast of one important segment of Paris. This theatrical success, however, did not free Becque from the poverty that attended him all his life, nor did it spur him on to give other works to the theater for presentation. In fact, The Woman of Paris is the last play Becque offered for production and the last play he published for more than a decade.

The last fourteen years of Becque’s life were spent writing for several Parisian journals, working on the unfinished masterpiece of his dramatic maturity, Les Polichinelles (the puppets), composing several curtain raisers and, in one case, an epilogue, while living the life of a man of the theater and a man of letters. Becque died in a nursing home in Paris on May 12, 1899, just over a month after he suffered from shock and smoke inhalation from having fallen asleep while reading and smoking a cigar.

Analysis

Henry Becque’s early plays, like his last plays, are not the stuff on which a theatrical reputation is made or can rest. However, both L’Enfant prodigue and Michel Pauper brought Becque a small measure of the success he sought in the theater. The former won for him some critical acclaim, and the latter was so well received that Becque felt encouraged to continue his work as a dramatist. Although both the critics and the general public recognized Becque’s merits as a fledgling playwright, they took exception to the bleak, pessimistic, and brutal elements of Michel Pauper.

L’Enfant prodigue

In L’Enfant prodigue, Becque provided the vaudeville theater with a neat comedy that borrows from the traditional comedy of manners and has something in common with the work of Becque’s professed master, Moliére. In his portrayal of three provincials from Montélimar who come under the amorous sway of Clarisse, the daughter of a Parisian concierge, Becque uses stock comic devices such as chance encounters and an anonymous letter and subjects the provincials to the irony and wit that would remain his theatrical trademarks. Character dominates plot in this as in all of Becque’s plays, and the slight intrigue hinges on the standard element of mistaken identities and the characters’ temporary inability to rectify the mistakes out of fear of self-exposure. Although each of the characters is the object of some irony, satire is reserved for the middle-class hypocrisy and manners of Bernardin, the epitome of the bourgeoisie.

Michel Pauper

Becque’s next play, Michel Pauper, far from the sort of airy vaudeville that was then the rage in the Paris of the Second Empire, is a ponderous mélange of melodrama, romantic tragedy, and comédie larmoyante in the vein of Victorien Sardou and Alexandre Dumas, fils. Full of stilted, pompous language, the play chronicles the rise and fall of Pauper as honest workman, master chemist, and gifted inventor whose idealized love for Hélène first leads him to great creative work and then propels him back to alcoholism when she confesses her guilt with the young Count de Rivailles. In some respects, one could characterize the play as being about the power of love to effect change; one could also argue that the thesis at the play’s core has to do with self-hate and self-destruction in the form of alcoholism. The work has considerable potential for presenting several themes relative to the claims and expectations of situation on character; the potential, however, remains largely unrealized. Becque explored for the first time in Michel Pauper the situation he would use in his more important work, The Vultures: the consequences for a woman, and her children, of the death of her husband.

L’Enlèvement

The public was unprepared for the subject of his L’Enlèvement, a thesis play in favor of divorce that anticipated by several years the more popular plays of Émile Augier and Dumas on that topic. The pomposity and stiltedness of the work clearly contributed to its failure, but it failed primarily because it negated bourgeois respectability: It was one thing for Becque to satirize bourgeois values on the vaudeville stage but quite another to preach against them in an unrelievedly didactic vein.

The Merry-Go-Round

During the early 1870’s, up to 1876, Becque occupied himself with writing The Vultures, but when the play was finished, he could find no theater willing to stage it. Having failed, for a time, to get The Vultures before the public, he turned his hand to another play, The Merry-Go-Round, a one-act comedy in which he moved beyond L’Enfant prodigue toward a comedy of manners. Again departing from the conventional, he took as his heroine a courtesan, one of the favorite characters of the day, but treated her in a very different way from the way his theatrical colleagues had treated her. His Antonia is not sentimentalized and does not have the proverbial “heart of gold,” nor, on the other hand, is she condemned for her way of life. The play’s two interchangeable male characters, Alfred and Arthur, who compete for her favors, take on different roles but finally are different manifestations of the same sort of character: Both wish to enjoy Antonia without taking on the burden of financial obligations. The third man, Armand, the audience assumes, is like the other two. Becque’s failure to preach against or at least to comment on the immorality he depicted caused the critics to classify this dramatic work as an example of naturalism at its worst, although even by nineteenth century standards the play is neither overtly objectionable, nor, in any important sense, a naturalist work.

Les Honnêtes Femmes

The public received Becque’s next play, Les Honnêtes Femmes, with great, if undeserved, warmth. The least typical of his works, this celebration of solid middle-class virtue suggests a deliberate attempt on Becque’s part to dissociate himself from the naturalists.

The Vultures

The Vultures, the first of Becque’s masterpieces, was an innovative and controversial work that nevertheless enjoyed a great popular success. Its themes of social injustice are handled in a manner distinguishing it both from the comédie rosse of the naturalists and from the pièce à thèse of Augier and company. It is comparable rather to Henrik Ibsen’s plays in seriousness, pessimism, and a sense of pathos born of deep feeling for the suffering of the innocent. On the death of M. Vigneron, his wife, son, and three daughters find themselves at the mercy of a society formed on the principle of greed. A true product of her century, Mme Vigneron cannot begin to cope with such a drastically changed circumstance; her son is, quite simply, ineffectual; her daughter Blanche, for want of a dowry, cannot marry her lover, Georges, because his mother forbids it; her daughter Judith has no prospects for making her way as an actress. Marie, the daughter destined to sacrifice herself to the chief predator for the sake of her family, marries M. Teissier, her father’s former business associate and her senior by several decades, once he has agreed to give the Vignerons financial support. Teissier, in his new role as family protector, provides the ironic clue to his character and that of each of the predators who close in on the Vignerons; in the play’s penultimate sentence, he tells Marie what has been painfully obvious to her and to the audience from the outset: “You have been surrounded by scoundrels, my child, since your father’s death.”

The Woman of Paris

Three years after the success of The Vultures, Becque presented The Woman of Paris, his last play to be performed in his lifetime and his second major work. Unlike The Vultures, The Woman of Paris uses the comic techniques Becque had developed earlier in his career and is a comic piece of social criticism. Like its predecessor, The Woman of Paris won ready acceptance from the naturalists. A longer and more highly developed version of The Merry-Go-Round, The Woman of Paris is about Clotilde, a woman who drops her lover and finally takes him back once she is abandoned by a new lover and once her husband, through the influence of Clotilde’s friend, Mrs. Simpson, has secured the position he sought. Like his shorter plays, this one is concerned with character development and psychological action rather than with the advance of physical action or plot. Indeed, the action of the play is minimal and serves only to reflect the aspirations and natures of the characters. This is also a highly ironic play that features the clever Clotilde keeping lover and husband off balance and the lover, Lafond, in the odd position of being jealous of Clotilde’s husband while ostensibly remaining his friend. One fine ironic element that most critics note takes place in the play’s first scene, when the audience witnesses a domestic quarrel between a man and a woman over a letter that the woman has received; thus the audience learns of the man’s suspicions that the letter will document her infidelity to him. The scene ends with Clotilde warning the man to be careful—her husband has arrived home.

One major reason that The Woman of Paris was so highly regarded by Zola and his followers is that Becque’s play offers a slice of life without moral commentary, without much dramatic action external to the characters, without rising action, or a crisis, or a denouement. The lack of these very elements also won for Becque the scorn of the more traditionally minded critics, to whom, more than to Zola, he looked for recognition. Still, The Woman of Paris is significant as an innovative work that helped usher modern drama into France and as a prototype of the comédie rosse in the Théâtre Libre of André Antoine and his coterie.

Later Plays

Having given the theater The Vultures and The Woman of Paris, Becque continued to write plays but sought to publish rather than to produce them. Les Polichinelles, a satire on the world of finance, remained unfinished at his death but was to have been his third major effort, one on which he worked intermittently for more than a decade. Becque published five other plays, one a brief segment from Les Polichinelles called Madeleine and another an epilogue to The Woman of Paris called Veuve (widowed), in which the recently widowed Clotilde contemplates her lover and decides she would have missed him less than she misses her husband. With the exception of Le Domino à quatre (dominoes for four), an interesting and relatively lively play, the rest of his late work is not inspired.

Biliography

Hyslop, Lois Boe. Henry Becque. New York: Twayne, 1972. A basic biography of Becque that examines his life and works. Bibliography.