Henri Gheon, The Saints' Playwright

Extract

In this generation we still invoke the Saints. But we no longer make friends of them. We hardly know them. We charge them with our commissions without knowing anything about their qualifications. We are satisfied with their good references. Ask that good woman kneeling before the plaster statue of St. Anthony of Padua what she can tell you of the great ascete and miracle worker. All she knows is that he keeps a lost property office.

‘Through the influence of Protestantism an abstract representation of Spiritual things has supplanted the realistic, mystic and living faith of our forefathers. We have lost at the same time both our sense of the supernatural and of the material in the practice of our religion. The faithful of the Middle Ages really felt and realised Our Lord’s presence amongst them. They confided themselves to Mary as to a real Mother, they grasped the hands of their Guardian Angels, believed in the Devil and lived, without self-consciousness, in happy companionship with their patron Saints. Now, though we still commemorate them and invoke them, our Saints do not follow us out of church.’

So says M. Henri Ghéon in his preface to his volume of Jeux et Miracles four le Peuple Fidele, in which he tells us something of his purpose and ideals in his religious dramatic art. M. Ghéon finds the Saints and their lives and doings as vivid and as dramatic as any personalities or situations he could invent, and he has devoted his very charming talent to making them known to us, his contemporaries, as living human characters.