Be that as it may, the amorists hold only a secondary
position in the French drama of to-day. The primacy
belongs to Paul Hervieu and Eugene Brieux. The
one has been called a second Dumas, the other a second
Augier; and not without reason, for they have revived
the vogue of the thesis-play. But they are more austere
men than their prototypes, without a tincture — they
would consider it a taint — of Scribism. With them
the thesis is presented in all its simplicity, naked and
not ashamed. Nothing, for example, could be simpler
than the thesis of M. Hervieu's La Course du Flambeau,
a play which has been presented to Londoners by
Madame R^jane. It is the familiar figure which
Lucretius took from the Greek torch-race : —

"Et quasi cursores vital lampada tradunt."

Each generation has to sacrifice the last to itself and
then itself to the next ; thus is the torch of life carried
on. You have a widowed mother renouncing her chance

3



34 DRAMA AND LIFE

of second marriage because her daughter is not yet
married and settled ; later, becoming a forger to save
her son-in-law from ruin ; ultimately confronted by a
choice between the death of her daughter and that of
her mother, the consumptive daughter needing a high
altitude in the Engadine which is fatal to the grand-
mother's heart-disease. " Pour sauver ma fille j'ai tu6
ma m^re," cries the heroine, or rather the middle term
of the " rule of three " sum, as the curtain descends.
