In "The New Idol" I think this is partly
the case. The other medical play which has lately been disturbing Paris,
"Les Avaries," does not seem to me to fulfil this condition at any
moment: it is a pamphlet from beginning to end, it is not a satisfactory
pamphlet, and it has no other excuse for existence. But M. de Curel has
woven his problem into at least a semblance of action; the play is not a
mere discussion of irresistible physical laws; the will enters into the
problem, and will fights against will, and against not quite
irresistible physical laws. The suggestion of love interests, which come
to nothing, and have no real bearing on the main situation, seems to me
a mistake; it complicates things, things which must appear to us so very
real if we are to accept them at all, with rather a theatrical kind of
complication. M. de Curel is more a thinker than a dramatist, as he has
shown lately in the very original, interesting, impossible "Fille
Sauvage." He grapples with serious matters seriously, and he argues
well, with a closely woven structure of arguments; some of them bringing
a kind of hard and naked poetry out of mere closeness of thinking and
closeness of seeing.
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