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TWENTIETH CENTURY 
 FRENCH WRITERS 
 
 Cornell University Library 
 PQ 306.D83 1920 
 
 Twentieth <:Sn*ffl,a?|i|S||lllH^^^^^^ 
 
 3 1924 027 218 100 
 
FronlK^pi 
 
 lary Duclaux 
 
TWENTIETH CENTURY 
 FRENCH WRITERS 
 
 (REVIEWS AND REMINISCENCES) 
 
 BY 
 
 MADAME MARY DUCLAUX 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 1920 
 
Printed in Great Britain 
 
PRE-WAR PREFACE 
 
 I MEANT this book to be an image, a reiiection, of 
 the Twentieth Century in France, so far as it is 
 shown in Uterattire during the first fourteen years 
 of its course. But my book is small, the subject is 
 vast : an actual, Hving movement, a growing 
 generation, is a difficult thing to copy — it will not 
 keep still ! And it branches out so wide : there 
 are so many French writers of the younger sort ! 
 I am overcome with remorse when I think of the 
 gifted beings whom I have left out ! 
 
 I remember that child whom Saint Augustine 
 saw, trying to gather the sea into his little shell; 
 like him, I see the waters stretching inimitably : 
 I have only brought away a sample. Yet those who 
 taste it may have some faint idea, if not of the 
 breadth .and the numerousness of the literary move- 
 ment in France, at least of its savour and its quality. 
 
 Given the limits of my little volume, I was 
 compelled to make a choice; and there is always 
 some injustice in a selection. Why should some 
 be taken and others left? Why accept Rostand 
 and reject BataUle? Why give Madame de Noailles 
 and say nothing of Fernand Gregh? Why gather 
 up Boylesve and Andr^ Gide, neglecting Estaunie, 
 and Sageret, and Paul Adam? If I have Marie 
 Leneru, why not Sacha Guitry ? Choosing Madame 
 
PRE-WAR PREFACE 
 
 Colette, what reason have I for eliminating Madame 
 de Regnier or Madame Delarue-Mardrus ? I especially 
 mourn the absence of the Brothers Tharaud, those 
 perfect artists, who preserve the tradition of 
 Flaubert. And there is a great gap in my fabric 
 where I should have put the colonial novel (that 
 flourishing Euphorion, born of the union of Loti 
 and KipUng). Why have I not a line for Henry 
 Daguerches, for Claude Farrfere? All these are 
 names to remember. 
 
 At least I lay this unction to my soul : if I have 
 not always chosen the most perfect, I have faith- 
 fully gone in for the most characteristic. 
 
 Having to choose a remnant, I have taken those 
 who, instead of continuing the traditions of the 
 Nineteenth Century, have said a new thing, boldly 
 differing, starting forth on a fresh career of their 
 own. I have 'plumped' for the daring apostles of 
 Life, those who cultivate movement and liberty 
 rather than Art; freedom of rhj^m rather than 
 classic determinism and classic constraint; all 
 those whose method tends to the condition of 
 music, who say with the Abbess Hildegard (and 
 with Bergson), ' SymphoniaJis est anima.' Such 
 authors as these are emphatically of the youth of 
 the world, and the most difficult for a foreign 
 public to distinguish. 
 
 My readers wDl probably find most of these 
 names new; they may even be disappointed at 
 not meeting with those more illustrious spirits 
 with whom for five-and-twenty years they have 
 
 vi 
 
PRE-WAK l-lUiJ^ACE 
 
 been familiar : Pierre Loti, Paul Bourget, Anatole 
 France. These great writers still shed on the 
 Twentieth Century the lustre its predecessor brought 
 them; but they are the glorious past, and our 
 concern is with the future. These younger men 
 are the French equivalents to our Wells, and 
 Galsworthy, and Hewlett, our Granville, Barker, 
 our Synge, and Yeats, our Masefield and our 
 Joseph Conrad, nay, even our Compton Mackenzie 
 and our Lascelles Abercrombie. And my task is 
 rendered more difficult by the fact that France 
 is a twy-creature, of double nature, a sort of two- 
 headed eagle or Rosa-Josepha among nations. 
 
 There is, I believe, one of the South American 
 republics which possesses a couple of capitals : 
 one to be used when the Liberals are in power, 
 and one for. the Conservatives. France also has 
 a double set of everything, including celebrities : 
 those admired by the bien-pensant, and those peculiar 
 to the intellectuds. You may be illustrious in one 
 group and barely heard of in the other. Those who 
 adore Anatole France and praise Romain RoUand 
 smile sarcastic at the name of Barrds, and have never 
 opened a book by Paul Claudel. And, of course, it 
 is the same the other way round — only more so. 
 
 I have done my best to hold the balance even : 
 to group on the Right my seemly sheep, and on 
 the Left my free-ranging goats, in flocks of approxi- 
 mate number, setting Boylesve over against Jules 
 Renard, and Francis Jammes in front of Charles- 
 Louis Philippe. If my reader discover that which 
 
 vii 
 
PRE-WAR PREFACE 
 
 all have in common, I think he may have a fair 
 idea of the trend and the thrust of the spirit of the 
 age — at least, so far as it is manifest in fiction, in 
 poetry, and in the more literary drama, that 
 'spectacle dans un fauteuU' which may or may 
 not be a spectacle for the stage. 
 
 What I have not shown him — to my real regret, 
 to my recurrent remorse — ^is the world of the 
 critics, the intellectual flower of France. I am 
 not speaking of the reviewers; but of critics in the 
 sense that Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Taine, Renan 
 were critics — the moraUsts, the biographers, the 
 portrait-painters of a soul, an epoch, or a race. 
 In France what branch of literature is more 
 important than such criticism? Who has more 
 charm than Suar^s, with his imaginative and 
 morbid studies of great souls? Who forms the 
 mind of a generation more plastically than the 
 brilliant and perspicacious Andre ChevriUon ? Who 
 interprets human nature more intimately than 
 Andr^ Gide, or the acute and icy Julien Benda, or 
 the romantic and religious Fortunat Strowski, the 
 historian of Pascal; or the humane and sensitive 
 Daniel Hal6vy, with his passionate Nietzsche, his 
 strong and suffering Proudhon? These, perhaps, 
 occupy less space in the booksellers' windows than 
 our novelists and poets, but they are factors as 
 considerable in the education of a race. I salute 
 them, even as, perforce, I pass them by. Perhaps 
 another year I may reserve another book for them. 
 
 Mary Duclaux. 
 
AFTERWORDS-AFTER WARDS 
 
 In August, 1914, this little book was already in 
 the printer's hands, the last revise corrected, the 
 ■ paste-up ' prepared, ready to appear in the autumn, 
 when certain events, which we all remember, 
 happened with the suddenness of a thunderclap. 
 The season was not favourable to the production 
 of books, and for nearly five years neither author 
 nor pubHsher gave the volume a thought. The 
 Twentieth Century writer was elbowed out of the 
 field by the Twentieth Century fighter. Alas, too 
 often the one has been buried in the grave of the 
 other, and the young man of letters whose fame 
 and fortune we were announcing has fallen into 
 nameless dust, or lies hidden under one of these 
 iimumerable sHm gray crosses that spring, like 
 some strange new harvest, on the low hiUs round 
 Verdun, or along the valleys of the Marne and the 
 Somme. 
 
 When, in the Spring of 1919, Messrs Collins 
 returned me my old revise for a last glance ere it 
 finally went to press, I gazed in consternation at 
 the pages which had seemed so reasonable five 
 years ago. Five years ? Let us say ten years ! 
 'Les ann^es de campagne comptent double.' It 
 was like opening an old bundle of photographs 
 after a great lapse of time — the same mixture of 
 
 ix 
 
AFTERWORDS— AFTERWARDS 
 
 melancholy, and a sort of sad amusement. Look 
 at this absurd youth ! Who could have supposed 
 that he would become so famous? And that 
 brilliant creature, dead now, and already half- 
 forgotten. So-and-so, at least, has developed 
 along the hues that we laid down and has turned 
 out just the successful and useful servant of civilisa- 
 tion that we imagined. 
 
 In our case. So-and-so is Barres. He has become 
 all that we thought he might become. Pubhc 
 life and the patriotic duty have absorbed him 
 more and more; he has been to the France of 
 1914-19 something of that which Lamartine was in 
 1848. He, more than any, has preached the need 
 of union — 'L'Union sacr6e,' bringing into pubhc 
 affairs a largeness of outlook and sweetness of 
 temper rare in poUtics, — especially in France. 
 Few of these eloquent pages which day by day he 
 has contributed to the Echo de Paris wiU remain 
 as works of hterature, but, piled up, no longer 
 read, in their accumulation they form a pedestal 
 which certainly heightens the moral importance of 
 the man. Here at least we have the satisfaction 
 of finding our anailysis exact. More and more, in 
 these days of storm and stress, Barres has 'felt the 
 need of merging himself in something larger and 
 more durable than any individual existence'; 
 "no longer the singular, tihe extraordinary attracts 
 him;' he finds something pleasant and satisfying 
 in the alliance of courage and the spirit of adven- 
 ture, "with a certain soldierly mediocrity of mind' 
 
AFTERWORDS— AFTERWARDS 
 
 — and all the more when their conjunction 'promises 
 the conquest of Alsace-Lorraine.' Above all, he 
 has given himself heart and soul to 'the creation 
 of a truly National Party, capable of bringing out 
 of chaos a new organic order.' Shall we not say 
 of him that, Uke his heroine, Colette, 'II se sent 
 charge d'une grande dignite, soulev6 vers quel- 
 quechose de plus vaste, de plus haut, et de plus 
 constant que sa personne'? 
 
 Yes, I can re-read the chapter on Barres with a 
 certain satisfaction. 
 
 But, when we come to Remain RoUand, what a 
 faUing-off was there ! How is it that Remain 
 RoUand, who seemed, if such there was, the very 
 prophet and the teacher of the younger generation, 
 should have proved so much less sure as a guide 
 and a standby than the fantastic and singular 
 Barres? Always an aloof and sohtary spirit, 
 RoUand completely detached himself from his 
 country during the war. In his voluntary exile at 
 Geneva he occupied his hands, and no doubt his 
 heart, with works of mercy, but his mind gave no 
 support to his compatriots. Doubtless the attrac- 
 tion of Germany was too strong : ' Jean Christophe ' 
 continued to subjugate the deUcate 'OUver.' These 
 great international friendships have their perils (and, 
 doubtless, I speak of them in the mood of Bishop 
 Berkeley : ' There, but for the Grace of God, go 
 I ! ') Yet Renan was no less attached to intellectual 
 Germany than RoUand : Renan, who, when his 
 mind crossed the Rhine, 'crut entrer dans un 
 
AFTERWORDS— AFTERWARDS 
 
 temple,' and in 1870-71 France had no firmer 
 patriot than Ernest Renan. 
 
 The fact is that Romain Rolland's genius is not 
 French. The son of the lawyer at Clamecy is 
 French enough by descent and as good a Biorgundian 
 as Lamartine, but he ought to have been Swiss 
 by nature as by choice. There is nothing Latin 
 or classic in him. His intense individualism, his 
 moral earnestness, his lyric love of nature, and 
 something querimonious, a scolding tenderness in 
 his voice, remind us sometimes of Rousseau. And 
 never was his high-minded crankiness more apparent 
 than in that untimely pamphlet — 'Au dessus de 
 la MSl^e,' in which he rubbed it into us so tact- 
 lessly that our preoccupations are not his who 
 dwells, unfriended, melancholy remote, above the 
 fray. 
 
 This little volume made him probably the most 
 unpopular writer in France. There is a radical 
 misunderstanding which separates Romain RoUand 
 from the young Frenchmen of the wax. How has 
 it come about? Hamlet and Harry Hotspur were 
 good friends when we took leave of them in the 
 final chapters of Jean-Christophe. Few men of 
 letters had more vividly appreciated the active, 
 ingenuous, hardy generation that was taking its 
 first flights in the aeroplanes of 1912 and 1913. 
 Arrogant, gay and strong, cheerful in their bright 
 materialism (which allied itself so naturally with 
 the most orthodox acquiescence in the creed 
 of their forefathers), the tall and sturdy race of 
 
ArTERW0RI5S=SFTERWARDS 
 
 the Twentieth Century pleased Jean-Christophe, 
 because they seemed so prosperous and so happy 
 — and that is, after all, what we chiefly ask of 
 those who are to take our place in life. 
 
 M. Rolland liked these young men; still, he 
 expected them to look up to him; he felt himself 
 their moral and intellectual superior, as doubtless 
 he was. But then the war broke out, and what a 
 reversal of values ! Most of us, in France, who 
 sheltered behind the brave broad shoulders of our 
 ■ poilus,' felt our hearts melt with admiration, pity, 
 hope, and love. Not so, M. Rolland. 
 
 His attitude has been one of irritable self- 
 defence. First of all that pamphlet, ' Au dessus de 
 la M^lde' — and now this new book, published 
 to-day (April, 1919), but finished (M. Rolland tells 
 us) in May, 1914. Colas Breugnon is a study in 
 Rabelais' vein. But, if M. RoUand's style is far 
 from perfect when he writes as from the Twentieth 
 Century, what an exasperating gallimaufry it 
 becomes, what a pretentious farrago of lyrism, 
 puns, blank-verse, conceits, and quips, when he 
 assumes the character of one of his ancestors; a 
 certain joiner and cabinet-maker at Clamecy, under 
 the reign of Louis XIII. The rough jokes of the 
 tavern chronicled in the style of Euphues ! Romain 
 Rolland maundering of Women, Wine, and Song ! 
 The worst of it is that his boozing and his babble 
 do not seem genuine : the professor's gown peeps 
 from under the starched blue folds of the carpenter's 
 blouse. It is as though, irritated by the reproach 
 
AFTERWORDS— AFTERWARDS 
 
 of internationalism and cosmopolitanism, M. RoUand 
 had said to himself, 'After aU, I am neither a Jew 
 nor a foreigner ! If P6guy came from Orleans, 
 I come from Clamecy; I have just as good French 
 blood in my veins as he.' And behold him capering 
 unconvincingly as a Burgundian artisan, drowning 
 his troubles in the bowl. 
 
 I wonder if any of my readers remember a 
 French country novel called Le Moulin du Fran, 
 which appeared about 1894, by Eugftne le Roy, 
 the author of Jacquou le Croquant. Here is the 
 novel which M. Rolland hcis tried to write. It is 
 just the life, day by day, of a miller in P^rigord 
 — a man of strong political feeling, a democrat 
 and a philosopher on his way, Uke Colas Breugnon. 
 But the miller of the Frau, though rustic and plain- 
 spoken, is not coarse, for his author hved all his 
 life amid the peasants of Perigord and Quercy. 
 The French peasant has his faults; he loves to 
 excess his money and his land; but as a rule he 
 is not coarse. I have known a great many, in the 
 country, and, since the war, in hospital; but for 
 coarseness commend me to the country folk of 
 Zola, the man of letters; or those of the author 
 of Nono, who is a schoolmaster; or these rowdy 
 village folk of Romain Rolland's. They lay the 
 rustic varnish on too thick. Beneath this vulgar 
 varnish we discern an image sufficiently touching 
 and quite in Romain Rolland's stoical vein : That 
 of an obstinate, obdurate, wine-bibbing, and free- 
 loving old cabinetmaker, besotted with his love of 
 
 xiv 
 
AFTERWORDS— AFTERWARDS 
 
 art and liberty, who in the end, having lost his 
 savings, his home, his wife, his sculptured treasures, 
 finds himself happier than he ever was before 
 (though bedridden, poor, and a pensioner in his 
 children's bounty) because he has conquered the 
 only Hberty that really matters — the freedom of 
 the soul. 
 
 It is impossible to suppose that Colas Breugnon 
 will mark the close of M. Rolland's career. It is 
 evidently a caprice, a houtade, an interlude. In 
 what sense will his talent now develop? His 
 years have just completed their half-century, but 
 he still has some good autumns before him : 
 Cervantes was tiu-ned fifty-seven when he published 
 the First Part of Don Quixote ! 
 
 To return to our Twentieth Century writers, 
 Rostand stands the next upon our list. The war 
 has neither augmented nor diminished Rostand. 
 The few occasional poems that he published during 
 its course are of slight importance; one imagines 
 him following the tragic struggle with an attention 
 so deeply engrossed that he half-forgot to breathe, 
 and could not sing. When Victory promised us 
 Peace, the strain relaxed. The fragile enthusiast 
 could draw a deep breath. It was his last. He 
 died, after a brief illness, a few weeks after the 
 conclusion of the Armistice. 
 
 Let us turn the page again. Paul Claudel has 
 written a few more dithyrambs in prose, but these 
 five years have increased the volume without 
 changing the character of his work. He is still 
 
AFTERWORDS— AFTERWABDS 
 
 predominantly the author of the Cinq Grcmdes 
 Odes, of L'Otage, of La Jeune Fille Violaine, all 
 published some years before the war. He serves 
 his country as Consul in Brazil instead of at 
 Hamburg; stiU in the full strength of his years, 
 with doubtless other laurels to conquer, he stands 
 out, among the ranks of our writers, a creature of 
 passion and combat, active, emotional, mystic, 
 and material at once — adequate to his age. 
 
 Francis Jammes, too, is unchanged, save by the 
 natural process of the years. The Faun turned 
 Friar is now more and more an author for the 
 family circle. He is a candidate to the French 
 Academy, which has just received his successor 
 on our hst, Ren^ Boylesve. This last writer, at 
 least, has been deeply touched by the war. His 
 fine novel, Tu N'es Plus Rien, will remain as 
 evidence of that passionate patriotism — that detach- 
 ment from all individual interests and, I might 
 almost say, that cessation of all individual existence 
 which made the France of the Great War as rapt, 
 as ecstatic an example of the force of a collective 
 sentiment as the France of the Great Revolution. 
 
 And now (after a passing glance at an unchanged, 
 inconspicuous Andr6 Gide) we approach the name 
 of P6guy. Peguy was lolled in September, 1914, 
 as he was leading his men into action at the Battle 
 of the Marne. And as the flash of a fusee lights 
 up the nocturnal battlefield, so that tragic illumina- 
 tion of his death reveals the true meaning of much 
 that was obscure and easy to misunderstand in 
 
AFTERWORDS— AFTERWARDS 
 
 his gift. I own that I have ahnost entirely rewritten 
 
 the chapter I had given to P6guy. I did not do 
 
 not — ^fully Hke or appreciate a genius now generally 
 accepted as such in France, but I had composed 
 my first sketch in a mood of freakish pleasantry, 
 which might be permitted towards a man much 
 younger than myself, with a great future before 
 him, but which is not possible in speaking of a 
 poet, dead, who died a martyr and a hero. It is 
 perhaps the fault of a classical education which, 
 if it was not very extensive at least sank deep, 
 (inclining me especially to grace and measure, 
 to something exquisitely right, exactly true) — ^it 
 is perhaps the fault of a taste nourished on Sopho- 
 cles and Plato that these ultra-l37rical modem 
 geniuses, with their wild reiterations, their violence, 
 their volume, their hoarse abundance, more often 
 shock or dazzle me than please. . . . Peguy, 
 Claudel, carry me off my feet, drown me, drench 
 me in their billows full of sand and pebbles, and 
 leave me gasping : ' Oh, for the well beneath the 
 poplar in the field ! ' Yet P6guy and Claudel are 
 the names which must be most profoundly con- 
 sidered in this httle book, for they represent a 
 generation. I have placed in Peguy's train, as 
 witnesses and mourners, his friend Ernest Psichari, 
 his fellow-officer, fimile NoUy, and the two really 
 considerable writers who have risen into eminence 
 during the war : Henri Barbusse and Georges 
 Duhamel. 
 Three of our four ladies have passed through the 
 
 F.W. xvii B 
 
AFTERWORDS— AFTERWAUDS 
 
 time of stress unscathed nor greatly left their 
 impress on the angry world — not that they have 
 not published in due course their poems or their 
 novels. But these novels and poems are chiefly 
 reflections from a mirror fully occupied by their 
 own image. Madame Colette pubhshes to-day 
 Mitsou; the tender irony and charming grace of 
 her style are the same as of old — Mitsou is an 
 enchanting little savage of the music-haU stage 
 — Madame Tinaj^e has given us a novel which is 
 an agreeable fresco of the day of mobilisation in 
 Paris. Madame de Noailles has scattered a score 
 of l37rics, like a handful of rose leaves and cs^press- 
 buds, over the pages of half a dozen reviews, but 
 the terrible enigma — 'Must I grow old like the 
 others? And, if not, must I die?' is her most 
 intimate preoccupation, and blurs in her eyes the 
 great spectacle of the war. 
 
 Marie Len6ru nourished her soul in anguish on 
 the tragic problem : How can it be that the most 
 obvious social duty, the defence of hearth and 
 home, should come to mean in practice, crime 
 and cruelty let loose in the general reversal of all 
 social law? The daughter of a line of sailors, 
 with half a dozen filleuls in the Fusihers-Marins, 
 she was the most martial of pacifists, but also the 
 most passionate. While embroidering a flag, or 
 tjdng up a packet for the front, she was busy 
 devising some League of Nations which might 
 prevent the recurrence of the infernal storm. 
 Early last spring she brought me to read a strange, 
 xviii 
 
XEtEKWuKuS^aFTERWARDS 
 
 violent, lyrical debate, rather than a play, which 
 she had written. She called it La Paix, and hoped 
 it might one day be performed before the Congress. 
 She had wished, indeed, that the Th6i.tre Fran^ais 
 should produce it instead of La Triomphatrice. 
 But the House of MoHere wisely stuck to its bargain : 
 La Paix was not a piece for war-time. 
 
 La Triomphatrice appeared at the Theatre Fran- 
 9ais in January, 1918. It did not take the town 
 by storm. The play is too exclusively concerned 
 with the manners and morals of a Uterary clique, 
 and the question discussed is after all a very 
 secondary question : Can a woman of genius be 
 really happy and beloved as a woman — be as 
 satisfactory as wife, mistress, or mother, as the 
 more receptive non-creative sort? Marie Len^ru 
 thought not. One feels inclined to answer that it 
 does not really matter : there are so few women 
 of genius. But Marie Leneru debated her theme 
 so passionately that it was impossible to turn 
 an indifferent ear. If the general public remained 
 aloof, the salons and the newspapers were fuU of 
 La Triomphatrice, and recruited every week a 
 wider audience. With Madame Bartet triumphant 
 on the stage, with half the celebrities of Paris in 
 the stalls, Marie Leneru might feel her hour was 
 come, or at least was at last tremblingly, ex- 
 quisitely coming, in all its fullness. . . . She was 
 ambitious. . . . 
 
 And then, on the 23rd of March, 'Grosse Bertha' 
 began to thunder. The German shells fell in the 
 
AFTERWORDS— AFTERWARDS 
 
 centre of Paris; on Good Friday a church was 
 shattered, with all its faithful in it; one night, at 
 the Fran^ais, actors and audience had to take 
 refuge in the cellars, fortunately spacious. The 
 theatre was closed. The play was stopped in mid- 
 career. Mademoiselle Leneru herself retired to 
 Brittany. After a long summer's work and medita- 
 tion, with more than one play filling her portfolio, 
 she was full of plans for her winter in Paris, when 
 she fell a victim to the epidemic of infectious 
 influenza then devastating Lorient, and died there 
 on the 23 rd of September, 1918. Except Peguy, 
 France has lost in the war no writer from whom 
 we hoped a richer harvest. Some day we shall 
 read La Maison sur le Roc, Le Bonheur, La Paix — 
 those plays so full of thought and a sombre passion, 
 which, to my thinking, are meant rather for the 
 student's chair and the fireside lamp than for the 
 glare of the foothghts. A great, active, heroic soul 
 still moves amply through all of them and swells 
 their sails : may they carry down the stream of the 
 century the echo of that voice, ardent and harsh, 
 monotonous, and yet so strangely moving, which 
 was silenced before it had time to deliver its full 
 message. 
 
 No such rich promise was cut short by the death 
 of Andr6 Lafon, who died of his wounds in hospital 
 early in the war. A shepherd — that is how I see 
 Andr6 Lafon — a charming young shepherd strolling 
 down Mount Ol5mipus, to whom the Muse gave, 
 half-smiling, a dew-bespangled branch of laurel; 
 
AFTERWORDS— AFTERWARDS 
 
 but, ere he could twist it into a crown, the wolf 
 came ravening and made an end of him and it ! 
 It is not for his talent that I evoke the memory of 
 Andre Lafon (though I have read and re-read 
 L'Eleve Gilles with singular sjonpathy, and love 
 the too-slender, charming httle book), but few 
 things seem to me more romantic than the destiny 
 of this young man. In the spring of 1912 a sohtary, 
 a sensitive, young usher in a school — before the 
 year was out, his name on every lip, his purse 
 swollen with those blessed ten thousand francs 
 of the French Academy's new Great Prize (which 
 he had wrested from P^guy), and his slim portfolio 
 bursting with letters from publishers. He certainly 
 was not a Byron (it generally is not the genius who 
 ' wakes to find himself famous ') ; but that is always 
 a romantic adventure, especially when, two years 
 later, the young laiueate fiUs a hero's grave. Had 
 he a mother, stiU young, in some old house in the 
 provinces, to glory in her son's miraculous 
 achievement, and to mourn the withering of her 
 hopes? I often sit and think of the fate of Andre 
 Lafon — as dehcate and sad as one of his own 
 stories. 
 
 The name of Edmond Jaloux (nothing seems 
 to have happened to the writers of Pastoral novels), 
 reminds me that all our brUhant writers are not 
 dead. He has certainly increased in value during 
 the last five years. Two novels, pubhshed in 1918, 
 but written on the eve of the war, L'Incertaine and 
 Fumies dans la Campagne, prove him in full 
 
AFTERWORDS— AFTERWARDS 
 
 possession of his gift. His novels are exquisite im- 
 pressions that somehow hauntingly convey the sense 
 of something round the corner that might please 
 us even more were it not just out of sight. Fumdes 
 dans la Campagne, especially, is a fine piece of work, 
 subtle, tender, sad. Since Le Reste est Silence. 
 M. Edmond Jaloux's art, while no less brilliant, 
 has gained in depth and refinement. No writer 
 on our list has in a higher degree the aesthetic sense. 
 His landscapes breathe the very spirit of the South. 
 The figures in them are gracious, cultivated beings, 
 whose psychology is full of delicate sentimental 
 complications. . . . 
 
 But his voice is the voice of yesterday — or at 
 the latest of this morning : what will the morrow 
 bring forth? The violent realism of Barbusse? 
 the dithyrambs of Claudel? the infinitely delicate 
 divagations of Marcel Proust ? or something wholly 
 different and unforeseen ? With the signing of Peace 
 we now enter a new era, and there will be new 
 writers, doubtless, to greet the twentieth year of 
 the Twentieth Century. 
 
 Ultima Cumaei venit jam carminis aetas 
 Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo. 
 
 Now dawns the last age of the Sybil's sooth. 
 And lo ! the world, transformed, renews its 
 youth ! 
 
 Mary Duclaux. 
 
 Paris, April, 191 9. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. piOE 
 
 I. MAURICE BARRES I 
 
 II. ROMAIN ROLLAND 34 
 
 III. EDMOND ROSTAND 51 
 
 IV. PAUL CLAUDEL 68 
 -— ■^. FRANCIS JAMMES 98 
 
 VI. ren6 boylesve 115 
 
 VII. andr:^ gide ^-' 126 
 
 =iTIII. CHARLES PEGUY I35 
 
 IX. ERNEST PSICHARI I55 
 
 X. EMILE NOLLY 164 
 
 XI. HENRI BARBUSSE 1 69 
 
 XII. GEORGES DUHAMEL 1 75 
 
 —XIII. THE COUNTESS DE NOAILLES 1 78 
 
 ■<XIV. MADAME COLETTE 1 93 
 
 XV. MADAME TINAYRE 1 99 
 
 XVI. MADEMOISELLE MARIE LEN^RO 21 4 
 
 XVII. THE PASTORAL NOVEL 223 
 
 XVIII. THE NOVEL OF CHILDHOOD 243 
 
 EPILOGUE 257 
 
 jcxiii 
 
MAURICE BARRfeS 
 
 Maurice Barres is the oldest of all the personages 
 of this Uttle book, which deals emphatically with 
 the young — ^with the writers of the Twentieth 
 Century, and not with those already famous fifteen 
 years ago. StiU, every rule has its exceptions; 
 and it is impossible to imagine the young Mterature 
 of our days without this man of fifty. Time flies, 
 and never did it seem to me to fly more swiftly 
 than in this moment, when I realise that Barres 
 must be ranked among the middle-aged. Only 
 the other day, he was that young Deputy, delight- 
 fully impertinent, impatient of the ways of his 
 elders, who rose from his bench in the Chamber 
 to propose 'that the ashes of Jules Simon be 
 transferred to the Pantheon' — Jiiles Simon being 
 at that moment comfortably seated in the Upper 
 House. May it be long before the ashes of Maurice 
 Barrds are carried to the home of the immortals ! 
 
 Yet Time has already begun his travesties : the 
 Don Juan of letters, the enfant terrible of politics, 
 is already a sort of Conscript Father, almost a 
 Father of the Church. He, too, in the world of 
 letters, dignifies the Upper House, for he is an 
 Academician. Maurice Barrds is the Chateaubriand 
 
 X 
 
a MAURICE BARRES 
 
 of our unfolding age, or, to translate my meaning 
 into English, he is perhaps even more exactly its 
 Disraeli — a Disraeli reversed : an incomparable 
 artist, a brilliant politician, but, in this latter line, 
 something of an amateur. Still we cannot imagine 
 our Barrds stripped of his poKtics, nor even the 
 literature of our time without the poUtics of B^rres. 
 His Nationahsm, his RegionaMsm fill and flood the 
 literature of France as fully as Imperialism occupied 
 the Enghsh horizons of yesterday. Doubtless we 
 are moving out of the sphere of their influence. 
 But they have nourished the imagination of our 
 younger men. 
 
 The Barres of the Nineteenth Century was less 
 poHtical. Like most of the masters of the present 
 hour, he entered letters as a Sjonbolist, almost as 
 a Decadent. Immersed in sohtary introspection, 
 he at first appeared as the Narcissus of the Inner 
 Life, taking his stand somewhere between Bergson 
 and Maeterlinck. In those days, he asked from 
 politics merely an instigation, a fiUip. That strange 
 temperament of his, at once dreamy, lethargic, 
 ironical and intensely passionate, sought in the 
 tumult and the fatigues of Boulangism a spur and 
 a sting, something which should urge and incite 
 him to adventure. 'J'aime Boulanger,' he said, 
 'comme un stimulant.' Pohtics were for this young 
 man an enchanting enterprise, an admirable expense 
 of energy, an inward animation; and, even when 
 he saw the General as he was, the experiment stiU 
 seemed interesting and poignant. 
 
MAURICE BARRES 3 
 
 Barr^s was so weary of his own fastidious refine- 
 ment that his devotion was perhaps enhanced by 
 the discovery that his hero was just an average 
 man. All that excitement and stir which his arid 
 self-culture had not afforded him, he expected from 
 the perpetual agitation of public life; he had 
 exhausted (or thought he had exhausted, for he 
 had not exterminated them from his brain) the 
 philosophers and the mystics; he had done with 
 Plotinus and Loyola and Hegel. Like the hero of 
 L'Ennemi des Lois, he exclaimed : — 
 
 'Toujours les choses de I'inteUigence ! Je les 
 comprends; je n'en suis pas bouleverse. Ah ! 
 des choses qui puissent changer les ames ! ' 
 
 Barres had delved down so deep into his conception 
 of the Ego, that he had (so to speak) come out on 
 the other side — at the Antipodes, and felt the need 
 of merging himself in something larger and more 
 durable than any individual existence. No longer 
 the singular, the extraordinary, attracted him, but 
 the normal type. And so, in General Boulanger, a 
 certain pleasant vulgarity, a soldierly mediocrity 
 of mind, seemed charming to this subtle neophyte : 
 he recognised the quahty — a cheap chromo-litho- 
 graph of Henri Quatre or Lafayette, and he liked 
 his chief none the worse for it. He saved himself 
 from smiling at his own enthusiasm by saying that 
 Botilanger was just the captain to re-conquer 
 Alsace-Lorraine for the French. 
 But, all the same, Boulanger was more to the 
 
4 MAURICE BARRES 
 
 young member for Nancy than just a glass of 
 vermouth quaffed at the tavern door. He soon 
 saw that his adventurer was not adequate to the 
 adventure; an absurd conspiracy ended in smoke. 
 But when the last blue volutes had curled away, 
 and left unchanged the face of the Republic, some- 
 thing important remained deposited in the mind 
 of Maurice Barres : the idea of a party which 
 should embrace aU opinions in its scheme for 
 reform, a truly National party, bringing out of 
 chaos a new organic order. Then he opened his 
 Sophocles and pondered the magnificent line which 
 no party leader has ever put in practice : — 
 
 I live to share your loves and not your hates. 
 
 And through a maze of errors (for, in my opinion, 
 the pohtical adventures of Barres were chiefly 
 errors), this noble conception broadened and ripened, 
 dignifying a patriotic traditionaUsm with such 
 beauties as may spring from the hope of continuity 
 and the sense of order. 
 
 A great gulf divides, as we shall see, the Barres 
 of the Nineteenth Century from the Barres of the 
 Twentieth. We will not consider in this place that 
 earUer author, the gifted egoist of Birinice, the 
 anarchist of L'Ennemi des Lois, the lonely mystic 
 of U Homme litre, the dilettante, the self-worshipper. 
 Let us merely say (in order to explain him) that 
 our author was born in 1862 at Charmes in Lorraine, 
 
MAURICE BARRES 5 
 
 a man of a mingled race, with a strain of Teuton 
 in him warring with the Celt, and a Rhenish sensi- 
 bility hampered by a Latin love of rule and law. 
 On his father's side, he traces his descent to 
 Auvergne, and his relations still live in the httle 
 town of Mur-en-Barrez; but his mother's people 
 aU come from the neighbourhood of Nancy in 
 Lorraine. 
 
 If we gave a free rein to our imagination, and 
 let ourselves argue from type and talent to a strain 
 of race, we might suppose that, like Montaigne, 
 Barrfe had in his stock some Jewish or Marrana 
 grandmother, who gave him his taste for specula- 
 tion, with something curious, double, and ironical 
 in his outlook; but here, I believe, the genealogists 
 protest. 
 
 His first impressions of conscious and public 
 life were of a kind fit to aggravate the inherent 
 melancholy of a sensitive and impassioned nature. 
 He remembers a crowd, all surging towards one 
 point under a hot summer sun, and that point 
 the station; trains passing endlessly, fiUed with 
 soldiers, thousands of soldiers, drunk, some with 
 wine, some with sheer excitement, and all singing 
 at the top of their voices. And the inhabitants 
 of the little town of Charmes, men, women, and 
 especially the little boys like himself, are striving 
 towards, pressing against, hanging over the barriers 
 and railings of the station, handing across bottles 
 of wine, brandy, coffee, and cr5dng : 'A Berlin!' 
 as loudly as the soldiers. And then a few weeks 
 
6 MAURICE BARRES 
 
 later, the retreat : that day of stupefied astonish- 
 ment in the soaking rain, while horsemen and 
 infantry in wild confusion troop by in a very rage 
 of shamed withdrawal; the soldiers insulting their 
 officers, a General in tears, the linen-clad Turcos 
 shivering in the dreary damp. And then five 
 Uhlans, their pistols in their hands, who ride 
 across the bridge and take possession. 
 
 The men of the Barrfes family, notable citizens 
 of Charmes, were taken in hostage by the Prussians. 
 The trains that ran the Prussian troops towards 
 the front had a BarrSs or so, as hostages, beside 
 the engine-driver. Their lives hung by a thread. 
 And so a proud, timid, melancholy little boy learned 
 early in life what it is to expect the worst, to go 
 in fear, and, out of pride, to dissimulate that fear. 
 The NationaUsm of BarrSs may be traced to these 
 first impressions. It is as invaders that he hates 
 the Germans : intellectually, he has no quarrel 
 with them. 
 
 In a discourse pronounced on the frontier during 
 the war-threatened summer of 1911, he asserted 
 anew aU that he owes to the romantic fancy of 
 the Rhine, his real and fervent admiration for the 
 noble genius of Goethe, his tenderness for the 
 sentimental Schiller, his sense of a deep interior 
 affinity between his own mind and that of Nietzsche. 
 But those terrible memories of childhood have 
 graven in his spirit a certainty of the preciousness 
 (but also of the precariousness, the fragihty) of 
 civilisation ; a hate and a contempt for the 
 
MAURICE BARRES 7 
 
 'Barbarians' whose hordes are a perpetual menace; 
 and a feeling that, though every nation has plenty 
 of Barbarians at home, the worst of all Barbarians 
 are the Prussian Uhlans and the Bavarian troopers 
 of a German invasion. 
 
 Barr^ was the most precocious, I think, of a 
 generation that began to pierce the soil (so to 
 speak) between 1886 and 1890, a generation idealist 
 and sceptical at once, which counts among its 
 glories Bergson, Maurras, Maeterlinck, and (their 
 Benjamin) Rene Boylesve. At nineteen years of 
 age, Barrds left Nancy and came up to Paris in 
 order to study law : his deluded family hoped to 
 make a magistrate of the 'Ennemi des Lois.' 
 
 But the dreamy youth, silent, timid, yet brilliant, 
 had other aims in view. He had a volume of 
 Schopenhauer in his pocket and a certain number 
 of ideas in his head. He began to write in the 
 young reviews and to show these first essays to 
 his pastors and masters, the two rival hbrarians 
 of the Senate, Leconte de Lisle and Anatole France. 
 They were extraordinary essays which reflected 
 in nothing the physiological naturalism of the 
 hour — ^the hour of Zola ! They were entirely, 
 exaggeratedly spiritual and interior, and yet full 
 of the dreariest nihilism. They were the essays 
 of a man with a soul, who says in his heart : ' There 
 is no God.' 
 
 Those early essays, those first novels, have nothing 
 to do with the Barres of the Twentieth Century, 
 save inasmuch as the child is the father of the 
 
8 MAURICE BARRES 
 
 man. I have dealt with them elsewhere (in the 
 Quarterly Review), but some day it will be interesting 
 to take them up again and examine their develop- 
 ment parallel to the philosophy of Bergson. It 
 is often surprising, and makes one wonder if the 
 two writers have not, in their philosophy, some 
 common ancestor. But who was he? Was he 
 Burdeau? Was he Ravaisson? Was he Lach^lier? 
 Was he Renouvier? 
 
 For my present purpose — ^which is to examine 
 the progress of Barrte, and especially his influence 
 on recent Hterature, it is enough to say that these 
 first volumes were the work of a man for whom 
 the inner world alone exists. He, who was to 
 become the voice of his province and his race, 
 makes his first appearance as a being released from 
 all ties and all traditions. The hero of Sous I'oeil 
 des Barbares has no country, no profession, no 
 family, no local habitation, and no name. The 
 one existence and the one reality are, in his eyes, 
 the Ego, — ^in other words, his own mind. His sole 
 adventure is the lonely courage of a descent into 
 that Inner Abyss. He might have exclaimed with 
 Leopardi : ' E dolce, il naufragar in questo mare ! ' 
 
 In the depth of this depth is something deeper 
 still, continuous beneath the difference of individuals, 
 as the mass of the sea is one below the variety of 
 the waves. ' Penser solitairement, c'est s'acheminer 
 a penser solidairement,' Barrfe exclaimed, half 
 ironically, in Les DSracinis. If we sink deep 
 enough into our own souls, we fall into the general 
 
^ iViAUKiUE JiAKllJ^S 9 
 
 soul of all : we find the deep subterranean flood 
 that fills all the fountains of the city ! 
 
 And so the Egoist discovers that he is not alone, 
 that he is a living cell in a Hving organism. It 
 is this sense of Life and solidsirity which dis- 
 tinguishes Barres, the man of action, Barres, the 
 poUtical leader, Barres, the inventor of Nationalism, 
 the apostle of decentralisation, from the deUghtful 
 nihilist, the exquisite anarchist, that he was at 
 twenty — and even at thirty years of age. He has 
 gone far since then ! Sure, now, of the existence 
 of his race ; accompanied in all his thoughts by 
 those mysterious cohorts of the dead and the 
 imborn which prolong the importance of the 
 humblest life; our philosopher bids us lay no stress 
 upon our own experience, and sacrifice, if needs 
 be, the details of our happiness to the welfare 
 of the whole. 
 
 Slowly this second manner has developed since 
 the closing years of the last century : between 
 L'Ennemi des Lois (published in 1895) and Les 
 Deracinds (1897) there is a chasm, an apparent 
 disconnection. Something mysterious divides them 
 — something akin to a religious conversion. What 
 is the secret substratum which unites two phases 
 evidently alike sincere ? WTiat makes their diversity 
 none the less organic? It is, I think, the sense of 
 continuity, the desire to persist and to preserve. 
 The Barrds of Les Ddracinds has reached the 
 further edge of youth : he is five-and-thirty years 
 of age. 
 
 F.W. c 
 
10 MAURICE BAEIlES 
 
 Many men, on the threshold of forty, find them- 
 selves suddenly and terribly alone, in an hour of 
 solemn solstice. So far, they have struggled up the 
 hill gaily, with companions, and always have seen 
 their goal ahead, like a clifi that shines in the sun 
 and masks the horizon. Now on that topmost 
 rock they stand, and now the road slopes down- 
 ward — the road leading nowhere — ^which they must 
 follow with diminished strength, in dwindling 
 numbers, to find a tomb somewhere at the foot 
 of the hill. Such an hour, such an experience marks 
 for ever a sensitive nature. Some, then, like 
 Tolstoi, have suddenly renewed the faith of their 
 childhood and reconciled themselves with Christian- 
 ity for the sake of a promised resurrection. Others 
 build above the abyss a narrow bridge with the 
 hope of the continuance of their race and their 
 ideal. So BarrSs will one day write : — 
 
 'J'ai confiance, pour att^nuer certaines peines 
 morales, dans un esprit fait de soumission k la 
 terre natale, de fidelit6 aux morts, et de con- 
 naissance que tous nos actes entreront dans I'h^ritage 
 social.' {AmitUs Frangaises, p. 41.) 
 
 There is at Bar-le-Duc, in the church of Saint- 
 Pierre, a mortuary statue of the Prince of Orange, 
 by Ligier Richier, that tragic sculptor who left 
 Lorraine to learn of Michael Angelo. The prince 
 lies in the tomb, dead, in all the horror of corrup- 
 tion, his flesh dropping from his bones. But out 
 
MAURICE BARRES 
 
 II 
 
 of that appalling decomposition he lifts his heart 
 intact — ^his Hving, his immortal heart — and he is 
 reconciled to perish if that alone survive. So all 
 of us, from the De Profundis of our accepted 
 mortaUty, raise something we would fain bequeath 
 as an heirloom to the future. Religion is based 
 on such a sense of the persistence and the perpetuity 
 of an ideal. Something, at least, survives; some- 
 thing is incorruptible; Sursum corda ! and because 
 of that persuasion of a continuity assured, the 
 sadness of our own sure destruction is tempered 
 with serenity and hope. 
 
 II 
 
 There exist two great families of literary works. 
 One kind is complex, often diffuse, romantic, 
 representing characters and sentiments too singular 
 to be recognised save by the chosen few; of such 
 are the works of Stendhal, and down to the close 
 of the Nineteenth Century the novels of BarrSs 
 belong to this category. But in 1900, with L'Appel 
 au Soldat, he will effect his transition to that other 
 group, which instinctively we call classic, dealing 
 with the simple sentiments of general humanity, 
 seen from a great height, plumbed to a great 
 depth. With L'Appel au Soldat, Barres enters 
 the sphere of Goethe. 
 
 If the book please me greatly, it is less for its 
 animated picture of the Boulangist fever, for its 
 
12 MAURICE BARRES 
 
 portrait of the General (so deeply pathetic in its 
 human weakness), less even for the death of Mme de 
 Bonnemains (though few things are more heart- 
 rending) than for an interlude of some seven score 
 pages, La ValUe de la Moselle, the simple account 
 of a bicycle tour taken by two young men, natives 
 of Lorraine, from Bar-le-Duc in France to Coblenz, 
 which once was France. But these chapters are 
 written with a freshness and a feeling, a flexibility, 
 an evident sincerity which make them infinitely 
 touching. That Spanish crudity, bizarre, elliptic, 
 which Barres used to affect, has vanished here. A 
 romantic sentiment is expressed with the ripe calm 
 and in the pure language of a classic. Our Barres 
 sails his black Venetian gondola along the most 
 harmonious, amplest stream. He has forgotten 
 his impertinence and his perversity, but he has 
 lost nothing of his grace. 
 
 Marriage and the birth of a son had, no doubt, 
 much to do with this happy evolution. To a man 
 haunted by the dread of annihilation, a child is 
 an assurance against complete extinction. He is 
 (as the Parsees say in their touching phrase) 'a 
 bridge' : a bridge across the abyss. A child pro- 
 longs our Ego and assures the continioity of all that 
 we inherit from our ancestors. A child, we may say, 
 is the printed proof of our manuscript, safe hence- 
 forth, and no longer so unique or so important ! 
 
 The volume which Barres wrote for his little 
 son of six years old is a sunlit exception in his 
 writings, as a rule so profoundly melancholy. Les 
 
MAURICE BARRES 13 
 
 AtnitUs Frangaises is a First Reader in patriotism, 
 an alphabet of honour. It is an exquisite book 
 and might take for an epigraph the motto of the 
 town of Toul : Pia, pur a, fidelis. It is the notebook 
 of an observer who is a poet, of a poet who is a 
 philosopher, of a philosopher who is a father; yet 
 even here I distinguish that subtle, poignant note 
 of suffering egotism, as inseparable from Barres' 
 work as from that of Chateaubriand. There are 
 moments (as in the anecdote called Le Trou) when 
 this mournful undertone rises almost to the pitch 
 of rancour — a rancour almost immediately caught 
 up, it is true, in a passion of tenderness and grati- 
 tude. The child, Philippe, shall see the light of 
 the sun so many years after the abyss shall have 
 swallowed up the father ! 
 
 'Non, Philippe, tu ne glisseras dans le trou que 
 trente ann^es apres que j'y serai — vingt ann^es 
 apr^ que ta petite maman y sera. Tant je que 
 demeurerai, jamais Philippe n'ira dans le trou !' 
 
 And the same passionate prolongation shows 
 itself at another moment in a tender encroachment, 
 a yearning monopoly, as though the father would 
 engross and captivate the child and make him 
 his, nay, make him he! — ^pour into this new vial 
 the old wine of his own heart, fill the transparent 
 and unsullied vase with the precious vintage which 
 it shall carry safely for one more season, decanted, 
 as it were, from one vessel into another. The child 
 
14 MAURICE BARRES 
 
 is a new lease of life; the child is a bath of renewal; 
 new eyes wherewith to see things in the old for- 
 gotten glamour; new ears with which to hear 
 delicate sounds that this long while have escaped 
 the father's thickening tissues; above aU the child 
 is an innocence, a freshness unspeakable : — 
 
 'Tu vis chacune de mes heures. Avec toi je 
 repasserai par mon humble sentier. ma jeunesse, 
 ma plus bfite et jeune jeunesse, qui refleurit ! 
 Quand j'^tais rassasi6, voila que, par cet enfant, 
 je me retrouve a jeune devant le vaste univers.' 
 
 This paterfamilias had been the most passionate 
 of pilgrims. Under the correctness and irony of 
 his style there had trembled an exasperated sensi- 
 bility. Impassioned and methodical, enthusiastic 
 and circumspect, chimerical and positive, two 
 natures had warred in Barres; their conflict had 
 been at once his torment and his delight; and the 
 most romantic of European landscapes had long 
 been the battlefield of their interior quarrel. On 
 the red and sunburned hiUs of Toledo, Barr&s 
 had mused on the cruelty of sensual passion and 
 on the imminence of death; he had meditated in 
 the cathedral and had read the inscription on a 
 pavement at his feet: 'Hie jacet pulvis, cinis, et 
 nihil.' And Venice had dissolved in his veins her 
 enervating beauty. But now it was towards 
 Sparta that he took the road. The very title is 
 a programme — Le Voyage de SparteJ (1906). 
 
MAURICE BARRES 15 
 
 Of all the glorious memories of Greece there is 
 nothing that so much attracts our traveller as the 
 memory of two foreign visitors — Chateaubriand 
 and Lord Byron; the pathetic rather than the 
 heroic remains his ideal stiU. Yet little by little 
 Athena draws his soul towards her; first by 
 Antigone, a figure at once pathetic and heroic, 
 faithful to her dead, a holocaust to her race; and 
 next by the tombs of Greece, sepulchres carved 
 over with images of beauty and regret, yet without 
 despair or anguish. They teach that calm accept- 
 ance of the inevitable which is more than resigna- 
 tion, which is serenity. 
 
 And one day, on the banks of the Eurotas, Barres 
 discovers a form of beauty novel to his soul, made 
 of measure and ease and grace, without excess 
 or rapture. 'On y trouve des beautes que Ton 
 pent aimer sans souffrir ! ' The sense of the whole, 
 the acceptance of the inevitable, the tranquilness 
 of Art, 'epiue de tons elements de desespoir,' 
 these are conceptions which, if properly assimilated, 
 are a Kberal education for a Romantic. Barres 
 could not say, like Gautier, 'La vue du Parthenon 
 m'a gu^ri de la maladie gothique;' the process 
 was slow and painful, and the inoculation of the 
 antique was followed by a violent and feverish 
 reaction. Between him and that unequalled past 
 there is a solution of continuity; it is a perfection 
 into which he cannot enter, for lack of a few 
 drops of Greek blood in his veins; yet he has 
 had his lesson, which he will not forget, and 
 
i6 MAURICE BARRES 
 
 bears away with him a counsel to ponder in his 
 heart. 
 
 ' La deesse m'a donne, comme a tons ses pelerins, 
 le d6go1it de I'enflure dans I'art. II y avait une 
 erreur dans ma maniere d'interpreter ce que 
 j'admirais; je cherchais un effet, je tournais autour 
 des choses jusqu'^ ce qu'elles parussent le fournir. 
 Aujourd'hui j'aborde la vie avec plus de familiarite, 
 et je desire la voir avec des yeux aussi peu faiseurs 
 de complexit^s theatrales que I'etaient des yeux 
 grecs.' 
 
 In this new mood of simplicity and responsibility, 
 Barres conceived two. short novels, companion 
 pictures, lessons in civic virtue; one for a man, 
 the other for a girl : Au Service de L'AUemagne 
 (1905), and Colette Baudoche (1909). The theme 
 of the first occurs already in L'Appel au Soldat, 
 where the two heroes examine the situation of a 
 young French Lorrainer under a German govern- 
 ment. When the hour comes for his military 
 service, shall the young man desert across the 
 frontier to a land where he is scarce accounted 
 French, or drafted off into the Legion fitrangere? 
 Or shall he bow the neck to the usurper? And to 
 whom shall he owe allegiance in case of war : 
 France or Germany? 
 
 The hero of ^Im Service de L'AUemagne is a young 
 Alsatian, whose very name is a symbol : Ehrmann, 
 the man of honour. He is the son of one of those 
 
MAURICE BARRES 17 
 
 old autochthonous families who, under German 
 rule, remain at heart profoundly French; whose 
 ancestors have fought the battles of Louis Quatorze 
 and Napoleon; who continue to talk French by 
 their own fireside. In Alsace-Lorraine they are 
 at home; in France, almost as much as in Germany, 
 they are across the border. The French novelist 
 has hitherto taken for granted that his hero should 
 opter pour la France; yet in this fashion, without 
 great profit to the mother country, Alsace-Lorraine 
 is being emptied of her French blood. 
 
 Let the Alsatian serve his time in a German 
 regiment, says Maurice Barres; and, afterwards, 
 let him live his Ufe as an Alsatian doctor among 
 Alsatian patients; as an Alsatian manufacturer 
 among Alsatian workmen; let him remain true to 
 ' La Terre et les Morts ! ' Let him march in the 
 ranks with comrades who may be the foes of 
 to-morrow, for his first duty is neither to Germany, 
 which has annexed him against his will, nor to 
 France, which stirs not a finger to let him out of 
 prison, but to Alsace-Lorraine, the home of his 
 race. So Ehrniann invents a new casuistry which, 
 in an impossible situation, satisfies his conscience : 
 he will serve his time in a German corps, reserving 
 the right to desert in case of a war with France. 
 But, even in that extremity, he will be no spy; 
 he will reveal no secret learned during the time of 
 compulsory service; he will observe towards his 
 old colours a loyalty absolute while it lasts, which 
 shall be succeeded by a faithful silence. 
 
1 8 MAURICE BARRES 
 
 The sacrifice of Colette Baudoche, if not more 
 difficult or more meritorious, is simpler and easier 
 to admire. There lives in an old house at Metz 
 an old bourgeoise, Madame Baudoche, the widow 
 of a land agent, and her young orphaned grand- 
 daughter, Colette. To eke out their narrow means, 
 the two women do a httle dressmaking among the 
 neighbours who have known them in happier 
 days, and let their two front rooms. Enters to 
 them a young Prussian schoolmaster at the Lycee 
 (the 'gymnasium'), and he becomes their lodger. 
 Asmus is a good young bear, a friendly and cordial 
 young bore. It is his first contact with the Spirit 
 of France — with ease, measure, liberty, and grace 
 — quaUties which the young German begins by 
 admiring as French, but soon ends by loving as 
 peculiar to Colette Baudoche. 
 
 Asmus is the most generous of conquerors, for 
 his heart is filled by a tender admiration for the 
 vanquished. He Hstens to, looks at, admires all 
 that springs from the trampled soil. His love of 
 Nature — ^which at first is vague and pantheistic 
 — takes on the tone of France and becomes human, 
 historical, and scientific. His rich but rough nature 
 acquires finer shades and subtler blendings; in 
 fact, Httle by little, Lorraine recreates the German 
 tyrant in her own image : — 
 
 'II y a des petits villages, isoMs au milieu des 
 espaces ruraux, qui, le soir, k I'heure ou Ton voit 
 rentrer les b6tes et les gens, m'apparaissent comme 
 
MAURICE BARRES 19 
 
 des gaufriers; et je crois que tout fitre, Mt il 
 baxbare prussien, soumis k leur action patiente 
 et persistante, y deviendrait lentement Lorrain. 
 Bien des generations reposent la, au cimeti^re, 
 mais leur activity persiste; elle est de venue ce 
 groupe de maisons, ce clocher, cet abreuvoir, cette 
 ecole qu'entourent les champs bigarres de couleurs 
 et de formes; et si Ton entre dans cette communaut6, 
 on y vient necessairement a se conduire et penser 
 comme ont fait les pr^d^cesseurs.' 
 
 On Herr Doktor Friedrich Asmus the land of 
 Lorraine exercises this sort of transformation the 
 more readily that he adores Colette; and she is 
 touched by his loyalty and strength. Nature 
 pushes her into his arms; and old Madame Baudoche 
 can only sigh and say, ' C'est bien dommage qu'il soit 
 Allemand ! ' The excellent young man sets out on 
 his summer holidays almost sure of Colette's accord. 
 
 But she is a young maid of the lineage of Comeille, 
 accustomed to poise her feelings, and to decide 
 less by a passion of the heart than by a free consent 
 of the mind. For the whole world, she would not 
 forfeit her sense of honour ! And Asmus returns 
 on Commemoration Day, when all that is French 
 in Metz is met together to attend a service in 
 memory of the soldiers of France fallen during 
 the siege. During that service something larger 
 than herself takes possession of the heart and soul 
 of the little dressmaker. 'Elle se sent charg^e 
 d'une grande dignite, soulevee vers quelque chose 
 
20 MAURICE BARRES 
 
 de plus vaste, de plus haut et de plus constant 
 que sa modeste personne.' Coming out of church 
 she turns to the kind and fervent young Prussian 
 who accompanies her : ' Monsieur le docteur, dit 
 la jeune fille, je ne peux vous epouser.' 
 
 Maurice Barres also is hke his heroic Colette. 
 'II se sent charge d'une grande dignity, soulev6 
 vers quelque chose de plus vaste, de plus haut, 
 et de plus constant que sa personne.' He has 
 gone far since first we met him, half-mystical, half- 
 quizzical, rapt in the cult of the Ego. Now, as 
 we have said, freed from the service of Self, 'La 
 Terre et les Morts' is his watchword. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Or rather 'La Terre et les Morts' was his watch- 
 word, for of late years the Dead have revealed to 
 him something wider and deeper than the Land. 
 Let us compare with the perverse charm and 
 insidious nihiUsm of his earUer book on Toledo, 
 Du Sang, de la Voluptd et de la Mort (1895), his 
 treatment of the same theme in his recent essay 
 on II Greco, and we shall catch the difference. 
 In either volume the landscape is the same. The 
 scene is arid; the red, steep banks of the ravine 
 through which the Tagus rolls its tawny floods 
 lead to a city set in ruin upon its lofty rocks; no 
 site suggests a more ardent melancholy. 
 
 In his young days, Maurice Barrls declared that 
 
MAURICE BARRES 21 
 
 the traveller entering Toledo tasted the same harsh 
 and acrid pleasure that he derived from reading 
 Pascal's Pensees or from contemplating Michael- 
 Angelo's Penseroso : in three gulps, it is the same 
 rough and heroic draught. The melancholy splen- 
 dour of the scene exaggerates the stranger's sense 
 of loneliness. There is an implacable indifference 
 to his needs in these magnificent ruins, and the 
 yellow rocks repeat the strange device inscribed 
 upon a brass let into the floor of the Cathedral. 
 Twenty years ago, this device appeared, in the 
 eyes of Barrte, to declare the secret of the city. 
 They are singular words to adorn a Christian 
 tomb : His jacet pulvis, cinis, et nihil. 
 
 But see how differently in 1910 our traveller 
 will read the secret of Toledo ! Now, as of old, 
 the city on its sun-baked height, with the tawny 
 semicircle of the Tagus at its feet, seems less a 
 dwelling for men than a dreary highplace of the 
 soul, a sanctuary set apart for spiritual exaltation. 
 The dry orange tone of the soil and buildings; the 
 town compact of convents, fortresses, and prisons; 
 the barren sublimity of the prospect; the violent 
 African heat of the sky; the vast scent of sun-dried 
 lavender and sage and ben join, seem proper to 
 some Holy City of the desert rather than to a 
 European town. And yet in all this sadness there 
 is a secret pleasure. 
 
 'J'y respire une volupt^ dont j 'ignore le nom, 
 et quelque chose comme un p6ch6 se m^le k tout 
 
22 MAURICE BARRES 
 
 un passe d'amour, d'honneur et de religion. C'est 
 le mystere de TolMe, et nous voudrions le 
 saisir. Mais que done pourrait nous guider? 
 Toute societe a fui de cette ruine imperiale.' 
 
 A painter, long dead, a foreigner — II Greco — ^is 
 the traveller's guide. It sometimes happens that 
 a foreigner surprises the fine evasive spirit of a 
 place which escapes the native, staled by custom, 
 until he catch it again through the fresh acuity of 
 a stranger's glance. It was the Fleming, Philippe 
 de Champagne, newly disembarked from Brussels, 
 who discerned the austere heroism of Port-Royal; 
 and a Greek from Candy came from Venice to 
 Toledo in his twentieth year to surprise the secret 
 of Spain. He painted the souls of the men and 
 women who breathed the same air as Saint Teresa 
 and Cervantes. 
 
 Through him we learn the secret of Toledo, 
 and Barrfe will no longer tell us that it is the 
 dreary motto : Pulvis, cinis, et Nihil ; nay, he 
 assures us now that it is the mystical world beyond 
 reality — the spiritual Ufe. The Cretan painted the 
 serious, narrow faces, the bizarre, eiristocratic, 
 and elongated persons of his sitters, but also the 
 constant object of their secret thought : that 
 wonderful, mysterious, illimitable Other-World, 
 urging and surging just on the further side of 
 appearances ; a world to which they aspire, and 
 ascend, which seems to suck them up into the 
 eddying whirlpool of the glorious Unseen. 
 
MAURICE BAKKES 23 
 
 He loves to paint a double vision : on the lower 
 half of his canvas II Greco sets the world he 
 knows : the men of sad and sober visage, of neat 
 features and pointed beards and ruffs, elegant, 
 honourable gentlemen; scarcely, perhaps, men of a 
 great capacity; and then above them, only just 
 barely overhead, a mad world (if you choose to 
 caU it mad) a mystical world at any rate, of rushing 
 spirits, of flooding Hght, of joy and fire {Joie! 
 Joie! Joie! Pleurs de joie!), a world of adora- 
 tion, bhss, eternal peace. 
 
 'Et Ton a dit qu'il etait f ou ! . . . Attention! 
 Tout simplement, c'est un catholique espagnol. 
 . . . Ses toUes completent les trait^s de Sainte 
 Therese et les poemes de Saint Jean de la Croix. 
 EUes initient a la vie interieure des dignes Castillans. 
 Aucun Hvre n'en donne une idee aussi complete, 
 aussi neuve.' 
 
 The faults of II Greco, his voluntary distortion 
 of the figures that he represents, their flame-Hke 
 fragility and aspiration, the hvidness of the painter's 
 palette are not repugnant to our critic, who is 
 always wiUing to permit a sacrifice of exterior 
 truth in order to obtain a greater intensity of expres- 
 sion. The admirer of Ligier Richier may well 
 be tender to the errors of II Greco; fortunate errors, 
 since they are perhaps a condition of the utterance 
 of a certain spiritual state : — 
 
24 IVIAURICE BARRES 
 
 'De tels etats ne semblent pas compatibles avec 
 la grande civilisation et par exemple avec remploi 
 de chef de gare. Mais ils laissent dans Tolede une 
 atmosphere ou plus d'un, qui ne s'en doute pas, 
 gagnerait a frequenter.' 
 
 More and more the consideration of these spiritual 
 conditions wiU henceforth absorb the attention of 
 Maurice Barres. The indulgent historian of Berenice, 
 the heir of Montaigne, has gradually become the 
 attentive devotee of Pascal, the commentator of 
 L'Angoisse de Pascal; for Pascal, all sincerity and 
 force and fire, attracts the myriad-minded, the 
 dilettante Barres. As he has surprised the secret 
 of Toledo, so would he master the mystery of this 
 great savant who made so light of science. 
 
 There are points of resemblance between Barres 
 and Pascal : both are sons of Auvergne, with some- 
 thing positive and exact in their imagination, a 
 keen grasp of facts, a hatred of conventions. In 
 Pascal also, though so fiery on occasion, there is 
 something cold and harsh. And he, too, knew that 
 amor dominandi which so often inspired the political 
 combats of Barres; Pascal, too, in his youth, was 
 imperious, vivacious, full of bizarre melancholy; 
 he, likewise, had been a dreamer and a dilettante. 
 And though the ultimate character of Pascal was 
 a tragic spiritual grandeur, yet almost to the end 
 there was a freakishness mixed up with it, a love 
 of paradox, a delight in subterfuges and disguises. 
 Saint as he was, Pascal was prompt to disdain. 
 
MAURICE BARRES 25 
 
 proud, full of self-confidence, ardent; he had his 
 vanities and curiosities. His passionate and avid 
 soul was often unsatisfied, 'parce que ce gouffre 
 infini ne peut-6tre rempU que par un objet infini 
 et immuable, c'est a dire, par Dieu m6me.' {Pensdes, 
 
 P- 425O 
 
 Was it the memory of Pascal that incUned Barres 
 to collect the fragmentary legends and souvenirs, 
 even the documents, of a humbler mystic, half 
 saint and haK schismatic, once famous in the region 
 round Charmes, the little town where Barres was 
 bom and where he still spends his summers? 
 
 Perhaps; but Barres (whose singular tempera- 
 ment appears to combine the sense of order with 
 a contempt for law) has always sought an axiom, a 
 religion, a disciphne, which would satisfy an ardent 
 sensibility, and unite the individual with the 
 brothers of his race and faith, while yet leaving 
 free that inner Ego which, after all, has nothing 
 to do with our organisations and arrangements, 
 which transcends reason and order, being (if indeed 
 anything is) in direct communication with the 
 Infinite. From the time he wrote Un Homme 
 Libre, from the time he organised Nationalism, 
 Barres has always sought a rule and a regulation; 
 but he has never bowed his head to a yoke. Self- 
 discipline, not obedience, is what he sought — and 
 at one season he sought it in the ascetic life. But 
 we must not forget that dsKijr^s means an athlete, 
 one who has exercised himself and grown strong; 
 and that which Barres has always desired, in 
 
 F.W. D 
 
26 MAURICE BARRES 
 
 religion as in politics, is a perfecting and augmenting 
 of his own personality. 
 
 That way lies heresy ! And a heretic is the hero 
 of Barres' last novel, La Colline Inspirde. 
 
 It is a narration of religious experience (or rather 
 of religious aberration), and at the same time it 
 is an idyll of a strange Druid-Uke poetry, all the 
 native sap and strength of Celtic forests and high 
 places. Chateaubriand, with his Velleda, Renan, 
 these alone in France have touched that deepest 
 fibre of the Celtic heart, that dread, sacred, and yet 
 sweet, that sense of communion with the Invisible, 
 of which the mystery is deeper than the baptismal 
 font and larger than the consecrated altar stone. 
 Rome will never entirely wean Barrds from his 
 devotion to the Celtic divinities of wood and weald. 
 In La Colline Inspirde he opposes Poetry and 
 Dogma. On the one hand, the Church, with its 
 venerated hierarchy, its discipline, its universahty 
 and order; on the other, the mystic, the prophet 
 — impatient of all mediation between the instinct 
 of his soul and the eternal life — ^the seer of visions, 
 too often sensual or insane. 
 
 Leopold Baillard is a real personage — almost 
 contemporary, since he died in 1883. He and his 
 two brothers, born of pious peasants in the dawn 
 of the Nineteenth Century were three priests who 
 dreamed of restoring, not only in their invisible 
 supremacy but also in their positive and material 
 prosperity, the prestige and the power of the 
 native shrines of Lorraine. They were, in fact, 
 
MAURICE BARRES 27 
 
 as we should say (only a hundred years too soon), 
 Celtic revivalists. Restorers of altars fallen into 
 decay, founders of religious congregations, they 
 were, during the first years of their ministry, the 
 pride and the miracle of Alsace as of Lorraine. 
 The acropoHs of Sainte Odile in the Vosges and 
 the sanctuary of Sion-Vaud6mont in Lorraine 
 became the property of Leopold Baillard and his 
 brothers, where they founded convents and hostel- 
 ries, and instituted an Order of Begging Sisters, 
 who travelled aU over Europe collecting alms. 
 (A happy touch is that which shows Leopold 
 Baillard in the Imperial Palace at Vienna, asking 
 a contribution from the Emperor of Austria as 
 Count de Vaud^mont in Lorraine.) 
 
 Their enterprise, their intrepid imagination, their 
 financial audacities awakened the mistrust of a 
 prudent bishop, who refused to confirm the mirac- 
 ulous cure of one of the Sisters, and subsequently 
 withdrew his sanction from their quest of alms. 
 It was the axe-stroke at the root of the 
 BaiUards' prosperity; it was the dehberate quashing 
 of a new (but a less spiritual) Port Royal. The 
 BaiUards were obliged to seU all their possessions, 
 and, bankrupt in purse and credit, they were sent 
 into retreat in a Cistercian monastery. In that 
 place of peace a Cistercian father inconsiderately 
 bade Leopold Baillard visit in Normandy a wonder- 
 working visionary, Vintras, a prophet in his 
 degree. 
 
 Baillard was a sort of romantic genius — ^the 
 
28 MAURICE BARRES 
 
 genius of revolt and sentiment — a man for whom 
 the invisible world exists so naturally that nothing 
 in him protested when Vintras, on the occasion 
 of their meeting, declared himself in constant and 
 direct communication with a spiritual sphere. 
 Baiilard returned from Normandy to Sion-Vaud^- 
 mont a fervent disciple of the New Elias (as Vintras 
 styled himself), and, on the scene of his old labours, 
 began to edify — with how much less success ! — 
 a schismatic Church. But he is no longer the 
 prosperous, the genial. Abbe Leopold Baiilard. 
 His cure is taken from him, his doctrines are con- 
 demned, his person excommunicated. He is the 
 fallen Angel, he whom pride misled. 
 
 There is tenderness as well as irony, poetry as 
 well as tragedy, deep compassion mixed with a 
 half -reluctant disapproval in the eloquence of M. 
 Barres, as he relates the downfall of the schismatic 
 — ^his follies, his errors, his sufferings, his long 
 martjTdom, his final reconciliation with the Church. 
 Melius est ut pereat unus quam unitas. Yet if 
 that one be Pascal, or F^nelon, or Father T5n:rell, 
 or even an Abb^ Leopold Baiilard (so mere a 
 peasant in his harsh materialism, so nearly a saint 
 in his inspired spirituaUty), how shall one not 
 admire the ardour, the grandeur, the genius, the 
 generosity of a soul superior to the docile flock? 
 The lost sheep (depend upon it) was the fairest of 
 the fold — and was, as we know, the dearest to the 
 immortal Shepherd. The sympathies, if not the 
 convictions, of the author are evidently with the 
 
MAURICE BARRES 29 
 
 vanquished prophet. For a religion, says our 
 author, is made of two elements, with difficulty 
 conciliable, yet equally vital : on the one hand, 
 enthusiasm, inspiration; on the other, discipline, 
 authority. 
 
 ' Eternel dialogue de ces deux puissances ! A 
 laquelle ob6ir? Et faut-il done choisir entre elles? 
 Ah ! plutot qu' elles puissent, ces deux forces 
 antagonistes, s'eprouver etemellement, ne jamais 
 se vaincre et s'amplifier par leur lutte m^me . 
 Elles ne sauraient se passer Tune de I'autre. 
 Qu'est-ce qu'un enthousiasme qui demeure une 
 fantaisie individuelle? Qu'est-ce qu'un ordre 
 qu'aucun enthousiasme ne vient plus animer?' 
 
 Est aliquid hominis quod nee ipse scit spiritus 
 hominis qui in ipso est : there is more in man than 
 the soul of man conceives. This hne of Saint 
 Augustine (which serves as an epigraph to La 
 Colline Inspirie) might be inscribed above all 
 Maurice Barres' later writings : they are all laid 
 on the altar of an Unknown God. Nothing in the 
 eyes of this barely orthodox critic is more sacred, 
 more moving than a village church, whose narrow 
 chancel has echoed the prayers, the praise, of 
 countless spirits straining to approach the secret 
 Reality which sustains the world of Appearances. 
 The stones have witnessed the tears of generations 
 many times renewed as they consigned their dead 
 to lie keeping of God; before the same altar 
 
30 MAURICE BARRES 
 
 fathers and children have plighted their troth; 
 and the font served to christen the grandsires of 
 to-day. A village church is, to an imaginative 
 mind, a thing which revives the sacred memory 
 of our country and our dead. And so — not in a 
 spirit of narrow orthodoxy— but in the largest and 
 most human movement of generosity — Barr^ takes 
 up his pen to plead for the churches of France, 
 falling into ruin since the separation of Church 
 and State. 
 
 It must be remembered that, when these parted 
 company, there was a question of constituting 
 certain parish councils, or associations cuUuelles, 
 specially charged with the maintenance of the 
 churches of France; but the Vatican, ever sus- 
 picious of all that tends towards a decentralisation 
 of authority, would not allow of their existence. 
 In consequence, no responsibility towards the 
 Government obliges the communes to restore their 
 parish church; if it fall into disrepair, they may 
 abandon it or amend it at their own sweet will, 
 should it threaten to tumble about their shoulders, 
 they may disaffect it, or even at a last extremity, 
 pull it down altogether. 
 
 Now, such is the antagonism of free-thinker and 
 Catholic in France, especially in the less cultivated 
 part of the community, that in certain villages, 
 where the Church-people would be willing to 
 restore their parish church at their own expense, 
 a sectarian town council has forbidden them to 
 do so, and, by an abuse of authority, has declared 
 
MAURICE BARRES 31 
 
 the church disaffected. In other hamlets, too 
 poor for so great an outlay, the church is in ruins 
 for lack of means and initiative. In others, their 
 treasure, however slight, of old glass, enamel, 
 tapestry, or gold and silver embroideries, old lace, 
 or mediaeval carving, has awakened the cupidity 
 of those who know too well how to dispose of such 
 reHcs of the past. 
 
 It is true that certain churches and certain 
 treasures are considered worthy of the rank of 
 historical monuments, and, as such, are entrusted 
 to the protection of the State. But the thesis 
 of M. Barres is that all churches, built before 1800 
 (I don't know why he insists upon the date), should 
 be included in this immunity; that any vote of a 
 sum to be expended in repairs, decreed by a com- 
 mune or department, should be immediately doubled 
 by the Government; and that any ratepayer should 
 have the right to restore his parish church at his 
 own expense. It is not as a Catholic that he pleads 
 the cause of the altar, but in the name of civilisa- 
 tion; and he requires the nation to repair its 
 village churches just as he would demand the 
 preservation of the National Library or the College 
 of prance. 
 
 'C'est a la civilisation qu'il faut s'interesser, si 
 Ton n'a pas le sens de Dieu et si Ton est rassasie 
 du moi. Eh bien ! la civilisation, ou est-elle 
 def endue aujourd'hui?' 
 
 'Dans les conseils d'administration? Je ne suis 
 
32 MAURICE BARRES 
 
 pas de ceux qui le croient. Elle est d6fendue dans 
 les laboratoires et dans les 6glises.* 
 
 It is perhaps a little difficult to formulate the 
 intellectual position of Barres. What he craves, 
 appears to be, not an orthodoxy, but a preserve 
 of Mystery; a sort of private hunting ground for 
 the imagination; the right to lean out of the 
 visible world and draw a deep breath, hors de_ la 
 prison des choses claires. Or, shall we say? in the 
 blank wall of our science and our ignorance, he 
 wants to be free to throw open a window looking 
 on the Infinite? He defends, perhaps, less a faith 
 than a conception of life which is bound up with 
 all our ideas of honour, our notions of sacrifice. 
 I think he is inspired by a sense of ancestral piety 
 rather than by what we usually term reUgion. 
 Indeed, I imagine that no reader would have more 
 intimately vibrated to La Grande Pitie des Eglises 
 de France, than a certain old friend of mine, whom 
 Barres did not always understand, by name Ernest 
 Renan — Renan who wrote (already in 1849) : — 
 
 'N'y aurait il quelque moyen d'etre catholique 
 sans croire au catholicisme?' 
 
 And who are the followers whom Barres calls 
 to the rescue against an excess of sectarian zeal 
 — against the village science of the Radical 
 druggist, of Monsieur Homais? Nothing is more 
 interesting, more symptomatic, to those who 
 
MAURICE BARRES 33 
 
 remember the France of yesterday, when, as a rule, 
 the Intellectuals and the artists were on one side of 
 the hedge, and the priests and the pious on the 
 other. Persecution has certainly done wonders 
 for the Church in France ! Those whom Maurice 
 Barres convokes to defend the belfry and the 
 altar are the younger generation in letters ! 
 
 'Je ne doute pas de leurs r^ponses. . . . Ces' 
 mfemes jeunes troupes dfeint^ressees qui auraient 
 a d'autres moments, combattu, rejete un catho- 
 Ucisme oppressif . . . se rassemblent d'instinct pour 
 faire face a la Barbaric. Je voudrais tracer ifi 
 le tableau de la litterature nouvelle que je salue 
 et d'ou s'eleve, plus ou moins haut, la grande 
 flamme spirituelle que le Cafe du Commerce ne voit 
 pas. . . .' 
 
ROMAIN ROLLAND 
 
 Among the still young masters of the young 
 in France, the men rising fifty — Rostand, Claudel, 
 Boylesve, Gide, Suares, Francis Jammes, Romain 
 Rolland — only the first and the last are really 
 well known beyond our frontiers. Claudel is 
 appreciated in Germany as an interesting exotic; 
 but there, as well as in England and Italy, Romain 
 Rolland has an audience of his own. In some 
 ways he is the most approachable of French 
 writers to an English, or, indeed, to an Italian 
 mind. His intense moral earnestness, his love of 
 nature, his lack of irony, and his sense of sarcasm, 
 no less than an idealism devoid of all religiosity, 
 distinguish him among the men of his generation. 
 And he is an Individualist. When Claudel gibes 
 at the idols which Freethinkers raise on their 
 altars — the geniuses and the heroes, all the great 
 men — ^be sure he is thinking of Romain Rolland, 
 and perhaps of Suares. Hero-worship, love of 
 the poor and humble, faith in the human mind 
 and its divine destinies, are indeed, to Romain 
 Rolland, as much a religion as the doctrines of the 
 Catholic Church to Claudel, or to his convert, 
 Francis Jammes. 
 
 Romain Rolland owes his fame to Jean-Christophe, 
 his great novel in ten volumes, the Clarissa of our 
 
 34 
 
ROMAIN ROLLAND 35 
 
 age. But he has written many other books. Remain 
 Rolland's unknown works are voluminous and 
 abundant. Some twenty years ago I used to take 
 them to the Revue de Paris and expend all my 
 small store of diplomacy in persuading the editor 
 to print those immense and formless dramas, 
 Saint Louis, Aert, Danton, in which rare streaks of 
 real genius illumined desolate wastes of verbiage. 
 I cannot say that any of them attained success. 
 
 Having striven to express his mind in these 
 inchoate symphonies, Romain RoUand tried a 
 new form of art, in which from the first 
 stroke he was singularly successful : his Lives of 
 Great Men (Vies des Hommes Illustres), have the 
 terseness, the morality, the grandeur, and the 
 natural piety of Plutarch's Lives. He has written 
 nothing better than his Beethoven or his Michael 
 Angela, and he has given us a Mazzini, a Tolstoi 
 only less excellent. These are quite little books, 
 so far as size is concerned. And the mind of Romain 
 RoUand continued to teem with images and ideas, 
 with a sense of the tragedy of human destiny, and 
 yet with an invincible hope in human reason. He 
 had a thousand things to say to the men of his 
 generation; his heart burned within him. So he 
 invented a great man of his own making, Jean- 
 Christophe. 
 
 Here he has written the tragedy of a free soul, 
 the tragedy rather, let us say, of a whole generation 
 perpetually in quest of Truth and Liberty. There 
 are many stars in the sky; there are many virtues 
 
36 ROMAIN HOLLAND 
 
 in the soul of man; perhaps no two succeeding 
 generations make their idols of the same. Truth, 
 Justice, Freedom, inflamed our youth with a noble 
 passion. The young men of to-day adore Courage, 
 Activity, Self-control, and Faith. They are optim- 
 ists. We were pessimists. And Romain Rolland 
 writes, as a foreword to the tenth volume of his 
 novel : — 
 
 ' I have written the tragedy of a generation which 
 soon must disappear. I have sought to dissimulate 
 nothing of its vices or its virtues — neither its 
 heavy sadness, its chaotic pride, its heroic efforts, 
 nor its spent weariness under the crushing burden 
 of a superhuman task : for we had to renew our 
 whole epitome of life, our conception of the world, 
 our aesthetics and our ethics, our religion, our 
 humanity.' 
 
 A Hamlet-like generation, intensely intellectual, 
 sensitive, and chivalrous, issuing painfully from the 
 shed sheath of a worn-out creed and struggling 
 painfully towards a loftier faith and a fuller life 
 — such is the subject of Jean-Christophe. And the 
 author, merely middle-aged, has lived to see a new 
 race inherit the earth : a race ingenuous, ingenious, 
 active, alert, little given to self-questioning, or 
 to any form of subtlety, and as a rule content with 
 the religion of its forefathers, just because it was 
 the religion of one's forefather's, and is probably 
 as good as any other. Already Jean-Christophe is 
 
ROMAIN ROLLAND 37 
 
 a portrait of the past, and certain volumes — as a 
 rule those we admired the most on their appear- 
 ance : for instance La Foire sur la Place — present 
 the half-pathetic interest of a photograph album 
 ten years old. 
 
 What is still fresh, what is still moving and 
 touching and delightful is the story of a heart, 
 the painting of passion and especially the drawing 
 of the feminine figures — ^the very numerous feminine 
 figures — ^who diversify the existence of Jean- 
 Christophe. 
 
 The novel has been translated into English. 
 My readers know (or at least can easily learn) 
 that the story is that of a great German musician. 
 It follows him from his childhood in a little Rhenish 
 town, to Paris, whither Jean-Christophe resorts, 
 when, after a skirmish with a Prussian officer, 
 he has to flee for his life across the frontier. There 
 is no plot. The story is as iU-defined, as vague, 
 as fluctuating, as constantly developing, as life 
 itself ; and these ten volumes are a sequence of 
 episodes rather than a tale. Above all, they are a 
 criticism of contemporary Europe, or rather of the 
 Europe of yesterday, a Europe less infected with 
 Nationalism, Imperialism, Panslavism, than the 
 instable and agitated compound that we know. 
 
 The hero is born in Germany. No German book, 
 I think, not even Werther, gives with a sweeter 
 serenity, the peculiar charm of Rhenish 'Gemiith- 
 lichkeit ' than these early volumes oi Jean-Christophe. 
 But, as the hero grows older, he finds himself 
 
38 ROMAIN HOLLAND 
 
 constantly hostile to the dreamy optimism of his 
 environment. He hates the humbler forms of 
 German idealism — that public and private Pharisee- 
 ism which vi'ill not admit the world to be that which 
 it is; the majestic sentimentaUty which invades 
 all German art; that general artifice of emotion, 
 moral nobleness, sensibility, and poetry which 
 exasperates when it does not endear. 
 
 Even the 'cher vieux Schultz,' 'le bon AUe- 
 mand,' Christophe's one admirer; even Modesta, 
 the blind girl who will not allow that she has any 
 cause to be unhappy, irritate the choleric young 
 man, despite their candid goodness and their 
 tranquil courage, because of a certain unconscious 
 hypocrisy in their attitude, a habit of ignoring the 
 truth when it happens to be disagreeable. Christophe 
 cannot as yet admit that human nature is incapable 
 of assimilating unadulterated reality : he has still 
 to learn that every nation mixes with the truth 
 some special spice of lies; and that there are more 
 dangerous condiments than a romantic optimism. 
 He himself, in his cult of force, is no less local, no 
 less German : he is merely a German of a later 
 generation. 
 
 When Christophe flies to France, he finds to 
 his discomfiture that sincerity is not a common 
 attribute, even across the frontier; but French 
 insincerity is of a different sort, c3micaJ, excitable. 
 France has ever been a fanfaron de vices, and loves 
 to brag of her depravity rather than to practise 
 it. The angry, heady, passionate, fuming youth 
 
ROMAIN ROLLAND 39 
 
 spares no class or type in his first revolt against 
 Ws new environment : the squalor of the poor, 
 the struggling ambition and snobbish meannesses 
 of the world of art, the hoUow ceremony of fashion- 
 able circles combine to make him hate Paris. 
 Little by little he penetrates below the surface : 
 his friend Ohvier JaHn interprets to him the real 
 France. The intellectuals and the aesthetes of 
 twenty years ago, who so irritate Christophe on 
 his first arrival, were but the foam on the face of 
 a deep reaUty. 'C'est curieux que vous soyez 
 Frangaise ! ' says the musician to his friend's sister, 
 with her honest, girlish face, her round, fuU fore- 
 head, her little straight nose, her neat small chin, 
 and the brown locks that frame so demurely her 
 thin cheeks. 
 
 This quiet little girl, at once artless and dis- 
 enchanted, pious and disillusioned, does not answer 
 in the least to the conception that a young German 
 artist forms of France. But we know better ! The 
 little governess personifies that France, known to 
 few outside her boundaries, which is compact of 
 sacrifice, of duty, of delicate conscientiousness, of 
 rigid economy for self and generous outlay for 
 some treasured ideal, child, or cause : — the France 
 of Port-Royal, the France of '48. Indeed, if we 
 mistake not. Mademoiselle Antoinette Jeannin has 
 misspelt her name; and we envy the novehst who 
 (annihilating time and space) can link the mind of 
 Beethoven to the soul of Henriette Renan, and 
 make two lovers happy. 
 
40 ROMAIN ROLLAND 
 
 It is true that Romain Rolland will not let them 
 be happy : Antoinette dies; and Christophe em- 
 barks afresh on innumerable adventures. One 
 first of May, in a Socialist riot, his friend, Olivier 
 Jeannin is killed on a barricade; and Christophe, 
 red-handed, is spirited away by his friends, and 
 takes refuge in Switzerland. What an arraignment 
 of the civilisation of Bile ! Give us rather the 
 incoherence of German miUtarism mixed with German 
 schwdrmerei I Steep us in the intellectual and 
 social extravagances of France ! But keep us free 
 from that death-in-Ufe, the Phariseeism of Bale! 
 A rigid discipUne never relaxed; a collective con- 
 science ever on the watch to punish and deride the 
 faults of individuals; a perpetual constraint in 
 which diversity and spontaneity perish; all the 
 virtues — without the grace of God ! And under- 
 neath the strict uniformity of its phylacteries, 
 human passions more brutal than elsewhere, because 
 never visited by the open air and sim. As we read 
 the description of Christophe's life in Switzerland, 
 we fall in love with Bohemia. Order is only lovely 
 when it is tempered with grandeur or with grace. 
 But the order of these sordid millionaires is merely 
 a morose economy, a gloomy, dull privation, a 
 lifeless rigour, a sombre constraint. Against this 
 dark background, Romain Rolland projects a 
 figure of almost animal passion. 
 
 The story of Jean-Christophe in Switzerland 
 is the history of Wagner and Mathilde Wesendonk. 
 In either case a German musician, fleeing from 
 
ROMAIN ROLLAND 41 
 
 political difficulties, takes refuge (and takes refuge 
 in Bale) with a friend who generously comes to 
 his rescue; and in return the musician seduces the 
 wife of his protector. 
 
 We know httle of the Wesendonks, save that 
 Frau MathUde was a poetess; I imagine her very 
 different from the wife of Doctor Braun. That 
 kind, fussy httle man was oddly mated with the 
 stiff and silent spouse whose large, Michael-Angel- 
 esque tj;^e of beauty seemed almost ugly or 
 ridiculous in her awkward provincial clothes. Anna 
 is an uninteresting but perfectly virtuous woman 
 untU Jean-Christophe comes to stay in her house. 
 And then music invades her with an incompre- 
 hensible passion, turning this sombre young Haus- 
 frau into an imperious Venus. 
 
 As she and Christophe sing together the fiery 
 phrases of his Opera, a frenzy overcomes them, 
 and they experience that sort of love in which 
 there is something savage, cosmic, as far as possible 
 removed from our ideas of tenderness or duty. 
 And Christophe, the faithful Christophe, steals 
 from his generous host that httle treasure of honour 
 and domestic happiness which was aU that Dr 
 Braun had known of hfe's ideal. Christophe had 
 been received under that roof in his dire necessity, 
 and he betrayed a trust. With a woman whom he 
 barely knew, whom he did not pretend to under- 
 stand, whom he did not love. Not love? Love 
 was too weak a work to express the torrent of flame 
 that tortured the musician when he thought of 
 F.w. E 
 
42 ROMAIN HOLLAND 
 
 Anna or listened to her voice; and yet he was 
 dimly aware that this fierce instinct, this irresistible 
 intuition, was something less, or more, than human : 
 Ce n'dtait pas I' amour, et c'etait mille fois plus que 
 I'amour. 
 
 Thus in the Swiss town, in the Calvinist society, 
 which glorified rationahsm and made of Intellect 
 the sole motive power of Uf e, Christophe encountered, 
 and was conquered by, that great irreducible 
 Force which makes Ught of reason and morality, 
 and in front of which all our laws and our scruples 
 and our duties are as idle straws caught in the 
 swirl of a river in flood. 
 
 But the strength of that fragihty, which is Man, 
 lies in his power of recovery. Like the prodigal 
 son, having fed with the swine, he can always 
 return and go to his Father. Christophe, like 
 Maggie Tulliver in George Eliot's novel, sets duty 
 and faithfulness above passion, and ascends out 
 of the abyss. 
 
 'II comprenait la vanite de son orgueH, la vanite 
 de I'orgueil humain, sous le poing redoutable de 
 la Force qui meut les mondes. Nul n'est maitre 
 de soi avec certitude. II faut veiller. Car si Ton 
 s'endort, la Force se rue en nous et nous emporte 
 . . . dans quels abimes? Ou le torrent qui nous 
 charrie se retire et nous laisse dans son lit a sec. 
 II ne suffit mSme pas de vouloir, pour lutter. II 
 faut s'humilier devant le Dieu inconnu qui flat ubi 
 vtiU, qui souffle quand il veut, ot U veut : I'amour, 
 
ROMAIN HOLLAND 43 
 
 la mort ou la vie. La volontd humaine ne peut 
 rien sans la sienne. Une seconde lui suffit pour 
 aneantir des ann^es d'efforts. Et, s'il lui plait, il 
 peut faire surgir I'eternel de la poussiere et de la 
 boue.' 
 
 Jean-Christophe sacrifices his delight to his 
 ideal of conduct. He is rewarded by a great influx 
 of inspiration. In solitude and renunciation he 
 takes up his abode on the edge of a mountain, in 
 the shelter of great woods full of shadow and lone- 
 liness; and he lives there in retreat and penitence, 
 hearing nothing of Anna. And, even as Wagner 
 in his exile at Venice, when he had renounced 
 Madame Wesendonk, composed Tristan und Isolde, 
 Jean-Christophe receives at last his inspiration as 
 a great musician. 
 
 The final volume takes us back to Paris, and 
 thence to Rome. Christophe is now the genius of 
 his age, but his personal Mfe is stiU meagre and 
 sad; no wife, no child, no friend, no love, concen- 
 trates its eUxir in one golden drop. And one day 
 in the Alps he meets — as a middle-aged woman, 
 a widow stiU charming in her tired grace and kind 
 serenity, — that Countess Bereny whom he had 
 known as a girl in Paris, long ago. And Grazia 
 Bereny incarnates indulgent lazy Italy; as Anna 
 Braun, Switzerland; as Henriette Jeannin, France; 
 as the dear, feckless, gentle Sabina, South Germany; 
 in the long gallery of Christophe's lady-loves. 
 
 Of them all, it is Grazia that he desires to marry. 
 
44 ROMAIN HOLLAND 
 
 But Grazia, indifferent and gentle, loves Christophe 
 less than her quiet days, her children's interests, 
 her pleasant, nonchalant, and sociable life of a 
 handsome widow "well left,' who cares above all 
 things for her quieto vivere. She is not very inter- 
 esting, this Grazia, so much in love with peace and 
 measure; she and Christophe would have been 
 as well mated as a sleek and sober Angora with a 
 mastiff ever on the growl (though his bark is 
 worse than his bite), and we are not very sorry 
 when she dies. We have wept so many tears for 
 poor old Louisa (Christophe's mother), for Sabine, 
 for Antoinette, for Olivier, that we have none to 
 spare for the passive and elegant great lady. 
 Neither in the painting of Grazia nor in his image 
 of Rome is our author to be seen at his best. And 
 yet what citizen of Cosmopolis knows Rome as 
 well as Romain RoUand ? 
 
 By the end of this tenth volume, Jean-Christophe 
 is no longer young, and all has happened to him 
 that reasonably could be expected to happen. 
 He has mixed in the politics of several nations, he 
 has known fight and flight and exile; he has been 
 poor, he has been famous; he is now the greatest 
 musician of his times. The most exacting reader 
 could not wish to stretch him out much longer on 
 the rack of this tough world. There are ten sizable 
 volumes of him at Mr Ollendorff's — or, if you 
 prefer, seventeen of those wonderful little 'Cahiers 
 de la Quinzaine ' (beloved of garrulous and expansive 
 genius) in which M. Charles P^guy has produced 
 
ROMAIN HOLLAND 45 
 
 not only M. Remain Rolland, but himself. Now 
 we know aU there is to know, and find that (as in 
 real life) the climax is middling compared to the 
 hopes of youth. 
 
 Jean-Christophe dies a genius; but we, after 
 all, have never heard his operas. He dies, like any 
 other mortal whom a living faith sustains in the 
 last hour of all. The death of Jean-Christophe 
 has probably preoccupied more readers than the 
 end of any other hero in fiction since the great days 
 of Dickens and Thackeray. We ourselves know 
 one eminent hand in letters who wrote to the 
 author suggesting that his hero should disappear 
 in the wreck of the Titanic, conducting the band, 
 in place of the unforgettable bandmaster. Another 
 wished him to wander away alone and die in the 
 desert, after the fashion of Tolstoi. 
 
 And I should have liked for him the death of 
 Peguy — defending his country — leading his men 
 into battle on the Marne — Ah 1 there's the rub ! 
 Jean-Christophe was an enemy-alien; he would 
 have been fighting in the Prussian ranks. For 
 many years to come M. RoUand's hero cannot be 
 JUT hero. 
 
 A reader appreciative of the intentions of M. 
 Rolland might have been sure than Jean-Christophe 
 iVould die in no such picturesque or dramatic 
 fashion, but quietly yield his life on the brink of 
 a new world, as a wave effaces itself gently and 
 vanishes in the sand, obliterated by the pressure 
 of the oncoming wave. 
 
46 ROMAIN HOLLAND 
 
 The whole meaning of M. Rolland's book is the 
 continuity of Life, spreading insensibly from soul 
 to soul, from sphere to sphere, in an endless 
 symphony. And the last chapters are fuU of new 
 characters, pushing forward, rising to maturity; 
 children of the Past in whom the dead revive, 
 fathers of the Future who already are changing 
 the face of our world. The scheme of Jean- 
 Christophe (rising thus, and falling, and rising at 
 the end towards the yet unvisioned spectacle of 
 times about to be) recalls the structure of Tolstoi's 
 War and Peace. 
 
 Jean-Christophe succumbs, sordidly enough, in 
 a Paris lodging, to pneumonia. But he gives up 
 the ghost in a mood of heroic joy, thankful to 
 exchange the worn-out faculties, the dreary, dingy 
 end of life, which are all he can dispose of here, 
 for some undreamed-of harmony and power which 
 await him (as he believes) beyond. Tolstoi himself 
 has not a serener conviction that Life extends 
 illimitably around our tiny sphere, bathing the 
 shores of all the stars in a tide of continual renewal. 
 The unity of the forces which compose a Hving 
 being must sooner or later dissolve, but the pro- 
 cesses of Infinity will reassemble them again. 'Un 
 jour j'e renaitrai pour de nouveaux combats!' 
 Meanwhile, caught in a rapture beyond the delusion 
 of seU, the dying musician feels his personality 
 expand and vanish for a while in something vaster. 
 He is lost in the One-and-All. 'Tu renaitras . . . 
 Repose. Tout n'est plus qu'un seul cceur.' 
 
ROMAIN ROLLAND 47 
 
 And so Jean-Christophe greets a new dawn and 
 leaves behind him, also, on earth a new day. The 
 finest passages of this last volume contain M. 
 Rolland's masterly portrayal of the young France 
 of our times. Surely never was there a generation 
 more unlike its introspective, intellectual forbears : 
 Hamlet has given birth to Harry Hotspur ! We 
 must perhaps go back to the times of Ausonius 
 (when the fathers were readers of Seneca and Cicero 
 and the sons hardy Christian barbarians) to find 
 two generations similarly contrasted. 
 
 Jean-Christophe was a man of yesterday. His 
 creed was to think no he, to consent to no injustice, 
 and to love his neighbour as himself. Here M. 
 RoUand shows him in his puissant and solitary 
 dechne, dominating a new generation that rises 
 round his knees, strangely different, with other 
 ideals. Truth? Humanity? The old-fashioned 
 words are rarely heard. We hear of Authority, of 
 Order, of the claims of one's race, of the rights and 
 responsibilities of the strong. This new generation, 
 which has witnessed no war, has the mind and 
 disposition of conquerors. Christophe surveys with 
 tender ironical affection the lovable breed of 
 airmen, and sportsmen, and soldiers who fill France 
 to-day — afresh, and frank, and admirably valiant, 
 fuU of prompt physical courage and intellectual 
 docility. 
 
 Jean-Christophe is perhaps the most remarkable 
 work of contemporary fiction : a singular moral fer- 
 vour, a rare imagination, an unequalled sensibihty, a 
 
48 ROMAIN HOLLAND 
 
 torrent of sarcasm, rancour, revolt, tenderness, 
 stream from its disconcerting pages. But these 
 delicate notations of minute variations in sensibility, 
 though infinitely precious to the psychologist, 
 transgress the limits that strict art prescribes. 
 Remain RoUand sacrifices every grace of measure 
 and composition to his abundance, to his enthusiasm 
 for Life. He has no sense of style. His endless 
 files of short, breathless sentences succeed each 
 other interminably, with no variation, till we 
 experience at last the sensation of a drop falling at 
 regular intervals on the crown of our head ! He 
 has been called 'un volcan qui ne vomit que des 
 cendres.' And then the rare flame strikes out — 
 passages of infinite tenderness or of solemn grandeur. 
 
 Still, let me own, while I admire Jean-Christophe, 
 I think sometimes with regret of a Turgeneff, no 
 less subtle, who comppsed his novels at a like 
 tremendous length, and then, pen in hand, went 
 through his manuscript again, and reduced it by 
 two-thirds. 
 
 When we open by chance one of those old novels, 
 still famous, long unread, which nourished the 
 minds of our ancestors — Clarissa Harlowe, La 
 Nouvelle Hdloise, or L'Astree, or Amadis — or any 
 other of those immense, untidy romances, vast 
 bazaars or stores of their age, which provided 
 several generations with every necessary of life, 
 we are nearly always astonished to find them so 
 interesting and so good. Our forefather's were no 
 fools : what they loved in these books, which were 
 
ROMAIN HOLLAND 49 
 
 for them a school of feeling, was not Art, but Life. 
 Nothing is more instructive in this connection than 
 to read a letter of Mme de S6vign6's on the inter- 
 minable masterpiece of La CalprenSde; the great 
 lady, so delicate, so difficile, 'bless6e des m6chants 
 styles,' can scarcely understand her own enthusi- 
 asm : — 
 
 'Le style de La Calprenede est maudit en mille 
 endroits; de grandes p6riodes de roman, de m6chants 
 mots — ^je sens tout cela . . . et cependant je ne 
 laisse pas de m'y prendre comma a de la glu; la 
 beaute des sentiments, la violence des passions, 
 la grandeur des ev6nements tout cela m'entraine 
 comme ime petite fille.' 
 
 And even as Mme de Sevigne was absorbed in 
 CUopatre we lose oiurselves in Jean-Christophe. 
 Romain Rolland is the great spectator of our times. 
 Will this quality of moralising criticism, this ten- 
 dency to preach as well as to paint, and to hold 
 the mirror up to Nature in a mood of violent irony 
 — ^will this gift of satire keep its savour when the 
 generation whom M. Rolland alternately objurgates 
 and encourages shall have passed away? It is 
 difficult to say. He is perhaps one of a race who 
 exist rather because of a certain flame of Ufe, a 
 force of personaMty, than because of the perfection 
 of their work. Tolstoi, Dr Johnson, Rousseau, 
 are the great names of this fraternity. We are their 
 characters, they mould us, they move us, no less 
 
50 ROMAIN ROLLAND 
 
 than their puppets. And we treasure their lessons. 
 But do we often open The Rambler or La Nouvelle 
 Hdloisel Will our children know, as we know, 
 all the ins and outs of War and Peace? And have 
 we, finally, the right to include M. Remain Rolland 
 in this great category of artists who were some- 
 thing more than artists? It is too soon to say. 
 We are stUl lost in the multiphcity of detail, the 
 immense succession of portraits (not only of persons 
 but of generations and nations and societies) which 
 fill the vast canvas of Jean-Chrisiophe. 
 
EDMOND ROSTAND 
 
 When, in 1886, at eighteen years of age, Edmond 
 Rostand, carried off the Prize for Eloquence at 
 the Academy of Marseilles, the bent of his genius 
 was already plain. For in praising Honore d'Urfe 
 and his great romance, Astrde, the young poet 
 pleaded the cause of a form of art as far removed 
 as possible from the Naturalist formulas which 
 were stiU the fashion of the hour. And his praise 
 appeared a programme; and the young apologist 
 of Urfe discovered himself to be the apostle of 
 an ideaMst and sentimental revival. 
 
 Despite his amusing originahty, and notwith- 
 standing the real nobiUty of his ideas, Edmond 
 Rostand is not a poet for poets. He was too clever 
 by half — never was a clearer case of the wisdom 
 of the ancients whose proverb ran that 'the half 
 is more than the whole ! ' His poems are hke a 
 briUiant display of fireworks, whose flowers and 
 fusees, whose flashing greens, and blues, and car- 
 mines, confuse our sight and prevent our seeing 
 the quiet radiance of the stars behind, above. 
 
 And this is not saying that there are no stars 
 in Rostand's poems, no ideas, that is to say, 
 eternally calm and bright. Although not primarily 
 a thinker, yet our poet thinks : there are as many 
 ideas in Rostand as, for instance, in Swinburne. 
 
 51 
 
52 EDMOND ROSTAND 
 
 But too often he uses his unrivalled virtuosity to 
 obscure his plain meaning, as, in some modern 
 music, the importance of the accompaniment 
 drowns the voice. Contrasting the simple nobihty 
 of his intention with the quips and the quirks, 
 the puns and the periods, of his rhapsodies, his 
 rhetoric and his rodomontade (the style is catching), 
 shall I say that he reminds us of that mediaeval 
 acrobat who, not knowing how to express all his 
 adoration of the Virgin Mary, turned a somersault 
 before her altar? It is amusing to discover that 
 the ideas of Rostand, when we get at them, are 
 not so very different from the ideas of Paul Claudel, 
 who stands at the other extreme of the pohtical 
 and hterary horizon. 
 
 'Ungefahr sagt das der Pfarrer auch, 
 Nur mit ein Bisschen andem Worten.' 
 
 Rostand, too, believes that order is rooted in 
 self-sacrifice. His heroes, like Claudel's, strike 
 free of the sterile introspection which marred the 
 art of the Fin-de-Siecle. They make for action, 
 and aim at an end outside themselves (in which they 
 always fail), but Rostand amalgamates his modern 
 Anti-Individualism with the old Liberal romantic, 
 idealist enthusiasm, perfectly sincere so far as it 
 goes. If not devout, he is at least devoted. His 
 plays have generally for their subject some sort 
 of a burnt-offering. For instance in La Princesse 
 Lointaine, Bertrand and the Princess sacrifice 
 
EDMOND ROSTAND 53 
 
 their passion to the peace of mind of the d5^ng 
 Rudel :— 
 
 ' Oui, les graiides amours travaillent pour le Ciel ! ' 
 
 even as in Cyrano the poet renounces his love in 
 favour of his friend. And that friend again . . . 
 Cyrano is a veritable vertigo of self-sacrifice ! 
 
 The tragedy of L'Aiglon is the oblation of a 
 young man's life to a great idea. Chantecler also 
 is a man — or rather a cock — ^with a mission to 
 which he is willing to immolate all personal delight. 
 The plays of Edmond Rostand are a sort of serum 
 against selfishness ! Despite their rodomontade 
 and their buffoonery, they are nobly moral. 
 
 But how they irritate a fastidious taste, with 
 their perpetual posturing, their gesticulations, their 
 pirouettes, and their impertinence ! Was ever a 
 real poet and a sincere knight-errant so quaintly 
 disguised as an acrobat, and sometimes, alas ! 
 even as a commercial "gent' ! Is it possible to 
 be at once quite sincere and yet so appallingly 
 clever? He moves us when he expresses the sense 
 of patriotism or the praise of courage. He had 
 a pecuKar gift for expressing admiration blent 
 with pity. He had, in fact, a chivalrous soul, 
 an instinct for all that is gracious or grand, a 
 sensibility that was sincere but shallow. Had 
 he but lived a few months longer, how admir- 
 ably he would have celebrated the FStes oi 
 Victory ! 
 
54 EDMOND ROSTAND 
 
 Was he a great poet? It is perhaps too soon to 
 say. Bad taste never yet prevented any one from 
 being a great poet. This is a point on which I 
 cannot insist too strongly. When Juliet says : — 
 
 'Give me my Romeo and when he shall die. 
 Take him and cut him out in little stars, 
 And he shall make the face of heaven so fine 
 That all the world shall be in love with night.' 
 
 Shakespeare is writing Rostand with a ven- 
 geance. 
 
 When in Victor Hugo's La For&t MouilUe the 
 sparrow makes believe his woodland glade is the 
 court of Louis XIV., and says in a series of puns, 
 first of all, to a tuft of heather (bruyere) : — 
 
 'Bonjour, 
 La Bruyere ! (k une branche d'arbre) 
 
 Bonjour, Rameau ! 
 (k une corneille sur le rocher) 
 
 Bonjour, Corneille ! 
 (au n^nufar) Bonjour, Boileau!' 
 
 let us admit at once that Victor Hugo wallows 
 (and not in this instance only) in the very slough 
 of that bad taste so dear to Rostand. How 
 pleased Rostand would have been to call the 
 water-lily, say, John Drinkwater ! 
 
 But then Shakespeare and Victor Hugo have 
 amazing qualities wherewith to counter-balance 
 
EDMOND ROSTAND 55 
 
 these conceits. In art, that is everything. The 
 smallest chip of pure gold compensates for a bag 
 full of pebbles : a work of art must be estimated 
 by the degree of its merits and not by the quantity 
 of its defects. If there is dross along with the gold 
 — even though there be much more dross than 
 gold — let us be thankful if the gold itself is pure 
 and unaffected by the presence of the baser residue. 
 There is the question. 
 
 I borrow from a book, recently published in 
 French by a Hungarian Professor, M. Haraszti, 
 some details of the youth and origin of Rostand. 
 In 1868, he was born at Marseilles of a wealthy 
 family of merchants and bankers, long established 
 there. For a hundred years, at least, they had all 
 been lovers of the arts. Early in the Nineteenth 
 Century, the quatuors of Beethoven were per- 
 formed, for the first time in France, in the Rostands' 
 salon. In 1844, a Mademoiselle Victorine Rostand 
 — a great-aunt of the poet's — pubhshed a volume 
 of lyrics in the manner of Lamartine. Edmond's 
 uncle, the banker, Alexis Rostand, has composed 
 an opera and more than one oratorio; and his 
 father, the economist Eugene Rostand, is himself 
 a poet. A volume of verse, Les Sentiers Unis, 
 published in 1876, celebrates the precocity and 
 charm of the child, Edmond, at that time eight 
 years old; and it is interesting to learn that, 
 even at that early date, he was remarkable 
 for his original grace of words and flow of 
 language : — 
 
56 EDMOND ROSTAND 
 
 ' Cette petite langue exquise, 
 Un vrai jargon de Paradis, 
 De mots qu'il fa^onne k sa guise, 
 De diminutifs inddits; 
 D'inimitables tours de phrases. . . .' 
 
 At eight years of age the child, Edmond Rostand, 
 was certainly the father of the man. As a school- 
 boy, at the lycde of Marseilles, his Quixotic, pathetic 
 temperament — ^his characteristic preference for the 
 imsuccessful — ^was already estabHshed. An old, 
 drunken usher scorned by the masters, tormented 
 by the boys, a dreamy Bardolph whom his pupils 
 (on account of his shining nose) sumamed Pif- 
 Luisant, was young Rostand's chosen companion. 
 And in his first volume of verse, the poet dedicates 
 a charming poem to the tippler of genius who gave 
 him, perhaps, his first idea of Cyrano : — 
 
 'Toi que j'ai tant aime . . doux pochard . . . 
 Pif-Luisant.' 
 
 At one-and-twenty years oi age, Edmond Rostand 
 published his first volume of verse, Les Musardises, 
 and shortly afterwards married the beautiful young 
 poetess of Les Pipeaux, three years younger than 
 himself. I can remember Rosemonde G6rard in 
 her nineteenth year, a vision of loveUness, as, one 
 evening, in the salon of the old poet, Leconte de 
 Lisle, she stood up, so slender, so smiling, so 
 ravishingly blonde and fresh, and recited a lytic 
 
EDMOND ROSTAND 57 
 
 as charming as herself. Madame Rostand has a talent 
 of her own, sincere, simple, femininely sentimental. 
 All the lovers in France know her Chanson eiernelle : — 
 
 'Car vois-tu chaque jour je t'aime davantage, 
 Aujourd'hui plus qu'hier, et bien moins que 
 demain.' 
 
 This marriage with Mademoiselle Gerard, grand- 
 daughter of Napoleon's marshal, the victor of 
 Wagram, the victim of Moscow and Waterloo, 
 confirmed Edmond Rostand in his meditations on 
 the dramatic fiasco of the First Empire — that 
 extraordinary antithesis of triumph and disaster, 
 of all tragedies the most touching to martial and 
 patriotic France. 
 
 The poet, however, was too wise to undertake 
 this tremendous subject with a 'prentice hand. 
 He made his debut as a pla5rwright in 1894, at the 
 age of twenty-six, with a pretty Uttle fanciful 
 comedy, Les Romanesques. A year later, Sarah 
 Bernhardt produced his Princesse Lointaine, play- 
 ing herself the part of the Lady of Tripoli. Sarah 
 Bernhardt again, in the Easter week of 1896, 
 brought out La Samaritaine. And at Christmas, 
 1897, came the conquering hero, Cyrano de Bergerac. 
 
 I cannot analyse Rostand's plays, which every- 
 body knows, which are (with Kiphng's novels) tht 
 immense, the international, the universal succes- 
 of our times ; I cannot calmly plod through the 
 plots of these famihar pieces with the patience I 
 F.w. F 
 
58 EDMOND ROSTAND 
 
 employ on an obscure play of Paul Claudel's, 
 known perhaps to a hundred readers in the British 
 Isles. 
 
 Every one (every schoolboy, as Macaulay would 
 say) has by heart the story of Cyrano. We all 
 remember the chivalrous hero, with his hideous 
 nose {Pif-Luisant) , and his romantic nature; his 
 passion for the pretty blue-stocking, Roxane; his 
 handsome, stupid friend. Christian, in whom Roxane 
 thinks she discovers a kindred soul; and how Cyrano 
 writes Christian's love letters, using the comely 
 face and figure of his friend as a mask for his own 
 soul, which thus approaches the beloved, though 
 under another name; and how Christian, when he 
 finds that his betrothed really loves, not him, but 
 the mind of the chivalrous friend whom he has 
 used as a secretary, gets himself killed in battle, 
 in order that the two persons whom he loves best 
 may be free to meet and to mate; and we have not 
 forgotten that Roxane is inconsolable for the hand- 
 some Christian; that Cyrano never has the cruel 
 courage to reveal his passion until, after fifteen years 
 of mute misery, he dies : is it not written in the 
 chronicles of every theatre in Europe? 
 
 But it is not this pretty, precious, sentimental 
 story which made the triumph of Cyrano; it is 
 the indescribable, incommunicable glory and gaiety 
 of youth, the ardour, the joy, the fun, the fury, 
 the froHc which make the piece -a perfect Fountain 
 of Jouvence. There is a heroic cheerfulness in 
 Cyrano, a love of Ufe, a generosity, an activity, a 
 
EDMOND ROSTAND 59 
 
 movement, and a flame, which so admirably suit 
 the temper of the dawning Twentieth Century that 
 we hardly know whether the public made the play, 
 or the play the public. 
 
 Ten years afterwards, Rostand produced his 
 L'Aiglon, which was not greeted with quite the 
 same triumph — the same joy for success, the same 
 rejoicing for victory. But little by little it, too, 
 won its audience; and, personally, I prefer this 
 travesty of Hamlet, with all its faults, to the 
 brilliant, the inimitable Cyrano. 
 
 For there is a deeper tenderness, a loftier poetry, 
 a more impassioned patriotism in L'Aiglon than 
 in any other of Rostand's plays; that superficiality, 
 that haunting sense of insincerity, which elsewhere 
 are as the snake in the grass, are scarcely perceptible 
 here. The poor sick son of the dead hero, the 
 'ineffectual angel,' the sensitive, inefficient young 
 Due de Reichstadt, Napoleon's heir, is drawn with 
 a feehng and a depth of knowledge which make me 
 suspect that in his sad protagonist the poet drew, 
 not merely a historical personage, but his own 
 generation, the children of 1870, the sons of the 
 defeat, decadent and dilettante, incapable of action, 
 but so touching and so often noble in their dis- 
 interestedness, their sense of the Ideal, their love 
 of liberty. Rostand, I think, in love and pity has 
 drawn their portrait — and then drew that of 
 Flambeau to inspire a bolder generation. 
 
 The boldest of the bold is Chantecler, the cock 
 of Gaul. In his legend of Chantecler, Edmond 
 
6o EDMOND ROSTAND 
 
 Rostand bids us mark that courage needs more 
 to its making than mere temerity. He does not 
 say, with Danton, 'De I'audace, de I'audace, et 
 toujours de I'audace.' He says, 'De I'audace, et 
 puis du bon sens, et puis le sens de la v^rit^ ! ' 
 
 This history of a poultry-yard has somewhat 
 disconcerted the adorers of Cyrano. But Boileau 
 and the big-wigs of the Court of Loiiis Quatorze 
 were doubtful at first (and thought that Pegasus 
 had taken to pedestrian by-ways) when La Fontaine 
 produced his inimitable Fables; and only a few 
 years ago in London the public, expectant of more 
 Plain Tales from the Hills, gave a hesitating recep- 
 tion to that Jungle Book of Mr Kipling's which 
 already (in France at least) is regarded as his 
 principal title to honour. There are always amateurs 
 who insist on repetition, and blame Wouvermans 
 if he paint a picture without a white horse in it. 
 To my thinking, Edmond Rostand proved himself 
 a poet in looking no further than the farm-yard 
 gate to find a subject for his verse. 
 
 There is something singularly impressive to the 
 dreamer, to the man of imagination, in the cer- 
 tainty that our world is inhabited by a race of 
 beings who see the things we see, and move in the 
 circles wherein we have our being, but look on 
 everything from a different point of view, and 
 perhaps with different senses. Ants, that have 
 no ears, yet hear through their feet, perceiving the 
 \'ibrations conveyed by solid bodies; flies, whose 
 innumerable eyes discern the X-rays as a colour; 
 
EDMOND ROSTAND 6i 
 
 these, and homing swallows, are more mysterious 
 than fairies. In the eye of a mystic, a cock is no 
 less wonderful than a ghost; a mouse than a muse; 
 a primrose by the river's brim than the herb moly 
 (that white-blossomed flower which Hermes gave 
 to Ulysses), or than the plant called Love-in- 
 idleness that charmed Titania's eyes. The fact 
 that so immense a variety of existences shares with 
 us the boon of life, and feels the same sun, is a 
 perpetual fable to a certain order of minds, who 
 may affirm with Chantecler : — 
 
 'Et quant a moi, Madame, il y a bien longtemps 
 Qu' un rateau dans un coin, une fleur dans un vase, 
 M'ont fait tomber dans une inguerissable extase, 
 Et que j'ai contracte devant un liseron 
 Cet emerveillement dont mon oeil reste rond ! ' 
 
 This was Rostand's attitude during the first two 
 acts, the two acts in which he showed himself a 
 poet. There is a hmnour, a tenderness, a charm 
 which recall Hans Andersen's inimitable stories in 
 his vision of a world where none of our thoughts, 
 none of our knowledge, but perhaps most of our 
 feehngs have free play. Man is absent. 
 
 'Malebranche dirait qu'il n'y a plus une ame; 
 Nous pensons humblement qu'il reste encore 
 des cceurs.' 
 
 The Cock's Hymn to the Sun is so devoid of all 
 our cosmic ideas that I have heard more than one 
 
62 EDMOND ROSTAND 
 
 critic deride it on this account; but how wise, how 
 truly a seer, is the poet in showing the wonder of 
 the sun as it appears to an animal who sees no 
 further than the almond trees at the end of the 
 valley ! The Infinite is the Infinite, though we 
 look at it through a keyhole, and to an animal or 
 an infant the sun is still the sun. The poet has 
 chosen just those aspects and effects which may 
 appeal to a mind deprived of reason no less than 
 to ourselves. The sun dries the dew from the grass, 
 and lends a grace even to the faded almond flowers; 
 the sun shining on a pane of glass or the soapy 
 water in a tub makes of them a glory; the sun 
 turns the sunflower westward in his course, and 
 makes the tin cock on the church tower a dazzUng 
 chanticleer; the sun shining through the boughs 
 of the lime-walk sheds on the gravel trembling pools 
 of light which wobble so lovely that one scarcely 
 dares to walk there; the sun makes a banner of the 
 clout that dries on the hedge; and gilds with a wonder- 
 ful lustre the varnished earthenware crock in the 
 farm-yard; thanks to the sun the ha57rick has gold 
 on his hat and the hive has gold on her hood : — 
 
 ' Gloire a toi sur les pres ! Gloire a toi dans les 
 
 vignes ! 
 Sois beni parmi I'herbe et contre les portails ! 
 Dans les yeux des lizards et sur I'aile des 
 cygnes ! 
 O toi qui fais les grandes lignes 
 Et qui fais les petits details ! 
 
EDMOND ROSTAND 63 
 
 'C'est toi qui, decoupant la soeur jumelle et 
 
 sombre 
 Qui se couche et s'allonge au pied de ce qui luit, 
 De tout ce qui nous charme as tu doublet le 
 nombre, 
 A chaque objet donnant une ombre 
 Souvent plus charmante qui lui ! 
 
 'Je t'adore, Soleil ! Tu mets dans I'air des roses, 
 Des flammes dans la source, un dieu dans le 
 
 buisson ! 
 Tu prends un arbre obscur et tu I'apotheoses ! 
 O Soleil ! toi sans qui les choses 
 Ne seraient que ce qu'elles sont ! ' 
 
 In this beautiful ode, Edmond Rostand reaUy 
 enriched French Uterature with an image of the 
 greatest thing in the universe as it may appear to 
 the humblest living being; and, despite here and 
 there an ugly, trivial turn of phrase (we shudder at 
 tu I'apotheoses), despite the hard, happy-go-lucky lilt 
 of the verse, its simplicity is full of a natural magic. 
 No less than man, just as naturally, and (owing 
 to his more limited imagination) even more fer- 
 vently, Chantecler considers himself the centre of 
 the universe. In a recent letter to Jean Coquelin 
 about the scene-painting and staging of his play 
 Rostand has put his point of view : — 
 
 ' L'idee de mon decor est ceci : donner la sen- 
 sation qu'une petite all^e de jardin est, pour les 
 volailles, une voie immense, une Via Appia.' 
 
64 EDMOND ROSTAND 
 
 They live no less than us hi the middle of immen- 
 sities, only, from their lower standpoint, they 
 remark (even less than we do) the disproportion 
 between the world they inhabit, and the unthink- 
 able Infinity they leave unmodified. 
 
 'Tr^s peu de del dans ce decor; c'est important 
 de doimer I'impression qu'6tant trcs bas, k hauteur 
 de poule, on en voit moins.' 
 
 Knowing so little about it, Chantecler is con- 
 vinced that the magic of his cock-a-doodle-doo! 
 makes the sun rise every morning ! The pearl of 
 the poem is the scene in the second act, where 
 Chantecler confides this marvellous secret to the 
 gloriosa donna della sua mente, the Hen-Pheasant, 
 who has taken refuge in the poultry-yard. A 
 pheasant sees more of the world than a cock, flies 
 and rockets up in the sky, dwells in the forest, and 
 therefore, half-sceptical, half-scandalised, she listens 
 while Chantecler, manlike, expatiates on the neces- 
 sity of his existence. 
 
 So far at least the myth is charming in its quaint 
 philosophy, the characters appear full of himaour 
 each of them as French as French can be; for 
 why should not animals as well as htunan beings, 
 have a nationality and racial qualities of their 
 own? Chantecler is a coxcombed Don Quixote, 
 chimerical, infatuate, peremptory, and brave; but 
 he is, we have said, a French Don Quixote, and so 
 he represents not only chivalry, but also order and 
 
EDMOND ROSTAND 65 
 
 authority; he is not only generous but masterful; 
 loyal to his subordinates, vain of his beauty and 
 prone to vaunt it; and he thinks himself the 
 natural sultan of every female fowl. Chantecler, 
 hke Don Quixote, is absurd; and yet not merely 
 lovable, but honourable in his absurdity. If his 
 adventure proves anything, it is that an illusion 
 and a chimera are necessary to prevent us from 
 lapsing into scepticism or savagery. 
 
 Chantecler, with his valiance, his vain-glory, 
 and his optimism, is one type of French character 
 (a noble or mihtary sort of type); another French 
 fowl is the blackbird, the 'Merle.' Le Merle is a 
 French Mephistopheles — a Geist der stets verneinet 
 — paralysing all effort by his scepticism, his criti- 
 cism, his pitiless raillery, his pitiable blague, which 
 is often merely, — 
 
 ' Une prudence, un art de rester vague, 
 Un Elegant moyen de n'avoir pas d'avis.' 
 
 He is 
 
 'Le petit croque-mort de la Foi.' 
 
 The blackbird is at once a boulevardier and an 
 intelkctuel. He is the 'Chat Noir,' he is Mont- 
 martre; alas, he is the pretext for many bad 
 verses, execrable conceits, and parlous puns. Not 
 that a poet, I repeat, is obliged to have good taste; 
 but there are moments when the pun kills the 
 poem. When the Blackbird says to the philosophic 
 
66 EDMOND ROSTAND 
 
 fowl, 'Fichez le Kant ! ' (camp); when he interrupts, 
 'C'est vieux oeufs!' (vieux jeu) — surely he out- 
 distances the most trivial dialogues of Moth and 
 Armado; and we answer with old Chaucer, — 
 
 ■ Alias ! concey tes stronge ! ' 
 
 and exclaim with Shakespeare's Troilus, — 
 
 ' He would pun thee unto shivers ! ' 
 
 Chantecler took seven years in the writing. I 
 know nothing of the mystery of its composition; 
 but one may perhaps suppose that Rostand 
 wrote the first two acts in a real objective vein 
 of poetry — tender, amused, imaginative, and then 
 shut them in a drawer, forgot them, and some time 
 later on, resumed the task in a mood of intellectual 
 exasperation against the literary world of Paris. 
 In this latter part, the poultry-yard a la La Fontaine 
 has changed to a parody of the boulevard and all 
 the charm has vanished. This third act is a sort 
 of bantam imitation of Jean-Christophe, in La Foire 
 Sur la Place. There is an operatic beauty in the 
 hymn of the owls; there is gaiety and good humour 
 later on; and, in the episode of the Nightingale, 
 I find a tender philosophic loveUness. And yet 
 we cannot defend ourselves from the impression 
 that Rostand wrote the first two acts in a sudden 
 vein of poetry; and then, long afterwards, took 
 up the incompleted masterpiece and finished it as 
 best he could, with the help of his gifted family 
 
EDMOND ROSTAND 67 
 
 circle. We know that of the four Rostands, three 
 were poets — Edmond Rostand, his wife, and Maurice, 
 their elder son. . . . This, of course, is the mere 
 supposition of a critic's idle brain. 
 
 We might take for the motto of all Rostand's 
 work, a sa5dng of Friar Trophime in La Princesse 
 Lointaine : 'La seule vertu, c'est I'enthousiasme.' 
 Like Maurice Barr^s, Rostand too, in his way, was 
 a Professor of Energy. In his last years, he 
 was writing a new Faust. That story of a great 
 InteUectualist who quits the kingdom of his mind 
 for the freshest fields and humblest pastures of 
 the realm of instinct is well suited to the genius of 
 Edmond Rostand. Why should he not write a 
 new Faust} Did not the classic poets of antiquity 
 all work on the same subjects? And did not 
 ComeiUe and Racine (in the same year, if I remember 
 right) each of them produce a Titus et Bdrenice? It 
 would be interesting to read the Faust of Rostand's 
 eager imagination. Edmond Rostand, as I have 
 said, is not a poet for poets. He had the same sort 
 of reputation in France that Mr KipHng has in 
 England — colossal, undoubtedly, but hardly literary. 
 Either of them, perhaps, is more appreciated in 
 Europe at large — in Europe and America — than in 
 the salons of their own metropolis. Something 
 inelegant, cocksure, aggressive, sometimes a little 
 superficial, checks in either of them the natural 
 homage of the difficult — of the delicate. They 
 gather no violets — Athena's, Sappho's violets ! — but 
 what a quantity of buttercups and daisies ! 
 
PAUL CLAUDEL 
 
 It is not easy to account for the enthusiasm aroused 
 in France, among the younger writers, by the 
 works of Paul Claudel, unless we accept the explana- 
 tion that, with all his faults, he is a great poet. 
 He is a difficult author, often wilfully obscure and 
 allusive; his dramas are lyrical symbols rather 
 than plays and, whatever he write, ode or tragedy, 
 he uses the same medium, a sort of rhythmical 
 prose, sometimes like Walt Whitman's dithyrambs, 
 and sometimes like the Psalms. 
 
 Nothing is less familiar, less lifelike, more hieratic, 
 than the manner of Claudel. In every detail of 
 his art he innovates and experiments : style, 
 language, conception, even the very names of his 
 characters bear witness to a restless personahty, 
 starting off on a quest of his own, continuing no 
 other writer, impatient of yoke or path. And 
 though he lose himself and stumble in his search 
 for an Ideal, be sure he will never turn back, never 
 take the highroad, but just go on persistently, 
 making a rule and a guide for himself out of the 
 exigencies of his own peculiar temperament and 
 creating a doctrine out of his fantasies. 
 
 He is often absurd, violent, rhetorical, extrava- 
 gant; his plays are frequently no more than 
 psychological dialogues between the dissociated 
 
 68 
 
PAUL CLAUDEL 69 
 
 elements of his own personality. At other times 
 he will suggest to us a Pindar disguised in the 
 mantle of Saint Thomas Aquinas. He is often as 
 unreal as II Greco ! And yet this incomplete and 
 exasperating poet is, in truth, a great artist (or 
 at least has the makings of one), and it is not out 
 of pure perversity that a P'rancis Jammes has 
 compared him to Pascal, that others have called 
 him haut comme Dante. They exaggerate; but 
 there is in them more understanding than in the 
 perplexed spectator of L'Echange or L'Otage, who 
 is persuaded that M. Claudel only does it to annoy. 
 
 What is then the message that Paul Claudel is 
 obscurely crying to his generation, faltering like 
 the prophet, 'a, a, Domine, nescio loqui?' 
 
 He brings to these young men, accustomed to 
 the shifting relativities of Bergson, bathed since 
 their boyhood in the perpetual flow of a stream 
 whose onrush falls into no estuary, the vision of 
 an absolute Unity. To Claudel, movement, life, 
 are but a transient wave-and-wobble on the surface 
 of Reality, "un tremblement essentiel devant la 
 face, du Saint.' Behind the streaming veil he 
 discerns, the Eternal Face within, ever serenely 
 smiling. Behind Life there is that which Life is 
 not : there is the living God. Hidden by the 
 mists of our apparent disorder, he divines a crystal 
 sphere — an indivisible, unalterable, absolute Exist- 
 ence — ^where right is always right, where wrong is 
 always wrong, to all eternity. This religious 
 idealism brings a sense of rest and peace to minds 
 
70 PAUL CLAUDEL 
 
 unconsciously fatigued by Bergson's theories of 
 incessant evolution. And then, also, the principle 
 of perpetual change is a solvent of energy; Faith 
 is a school of energy; and energy is what France 
 chiefly prizes among her many spiritual gifts : — 
 
 ' Tournons done, comme la religieuse Chaldee, 
 nos yeux vers le ciel absolu oil les astres, en un 
 inextricable chiffre, ont dresse notre acta de nais- 
 sance et tiennent greffe de nos pactes et de nos 
 serments.' (Connaissance du Temps, p. 40.) 
 
 It is the prose writings and the Odes of Paul 
 Claudel that give us a clue to the secret of his 
 influence, but it is his plays that have made his 
 reputation. Strange and dithyrambic as is their 
 form, compHcated and obscure as is their substance, 
 they are the same in Tite d'Or, composed in 1889 
 (when the poet was one-and-twenty years of age), 
 and in L'Annonce Faite d Marie, played in Paris 
 in 1912, of which a definitive version was pub- 
 hshed in 191 4. The same carnal and violent 
 imagination, the same heroic romance, are set to 
 serve the same central theme : the insufficiency of 
 worldly success. 
 
 It is a commonplace to say that the Twentieth 
 Century is an age of deeds, not words, that the 
 young generation (in France especially) are bom 
 not dreamers, but doers. Claudel himself is a 
 traveller and a man of action. A native of Picardy 
 (he was bom in 1868 of a Vosgian stock,) he has 
 
PAUL CLAUDEL 71 
 
 lived of late years little in Paris and in the world 
 of letters. A pupil of the Ssonbolists, Arthur Rimbaud 
 and Mallarm6, he left France for America in his 
 early youth, at four-and-twenty years of age, to 
 make his way in the Consular service. It would 
 be interesting to learn in what degree this aristocrat 
 (by temperament at least), this Catholic, suffered 
 the contact of the democratic prophet, Walt Whit- 
 man. There are points of similarity, not only in 
 the form. A few years later we find him Consul at 
 Tien-Tsin (one of the finest of his odes is dated 
 from Pekin), and since then, Paul Claudel has become 
 an authority and a specialist in the Chinese affairs 
 of the French Foreign Office. In 1908 he returned 
 to Europe in order to assume the duties of Consul 
 at Prague, then at Frankfort-on-the-Main, and, 
 at the present moment, he is Consul-General at 
 Rio- Janeiro. 
 
 The poet, therefore, is no idle singer of an empty 
 day; and his heroes, too, are men of action — a 
 general in Tite d'Or; a hydrauUc engineer in La 
 Jeune Fille Violaine ; an American merchant in 
 L' £change; a Consul in Partage de Midi; a poHtical 
 agitator in L'Otage; an architect in L'Annonce 
 Faite d Marie. And the sense of his plays, if we 
 read them right, is that not poetic feeling, but 
 effort, should be our daily bread; that mere senti- 
 ment is sterile and incoherent (the adventurous 
 Louis Laine in L'^change is the slave of the 
 sentiment of the hour); that activity, even when 
 it is evil activity, may bring forth a better future 
 
72 PAUL CLAUDEL 
 
 (the murderous Mara in L'Annonce, the brutal 
 Toussaint in L'Otage are, no less, the begetters of 
 to-morrow); but that while energy should inspire 
 our life, yet none the less there is something 
 infinitely better which comes not by taking pains, 
 something better than all our work and labour, 
 just as there is something infinitely better than 
 Life, which may descend upon us, uplift us, carry 
 us into a superior sphere : there is the Grace of 
 God, there is Inspiration, there is 'La Muse qui 
 est la Grace ! ' 
 
 For, at heart, this poet of airmen and soldiers 
 is a sort of lay monk, reserving his palm of praise, 
 not for the conqueror, but for the rapt ecstatic — 
 the solitary, dying with half his labours unachieved, 
 the hermit Violaine, the broken-hearted wife of 
 Toussaint Turelure. And we might inscribe all 
 his books, for an epigraph, with that line of the 
 Vulgate, which Renan wrote in the monks' ledger 
 at Monte Cassino : ' Unum est necessarium . . . 
 et Maria elegit optimam partem.' 
 
 From these plays — romantic, disconcerting, over- 
 subtle — emerge (as Meredith's women, wonderfully 
 human, break through the tinsel veU of his arti- 
 ficiaUties) the most Uving and the most lovable 
 of heroines. The Marthe of L'^change may be a 
 symbol, may mean the Church, as we have been 
 told, or (as the poet himself has recently informed 
 us) may incarnate one state of his own soul; she 
 is certainly the most adorable of Frenchwomen — 
 French and woman to the tips of her fingers, 
 
PAUL CLAUDEI. 73 
 
 prudent and pure, silent and sage, wife-like and wise, 
 full of well-planned economies and exquisite order : — 
 a type our poet is never weary of reproducing. 
 
 The heroine of L'Otage might be her sister; the 
 long, slim, silent, energetic girl, who is all con- 
 science and courage, lifted just one degree higher; 
 no herome, no virgin merely, but a saint, stretched 
 on the Cross to the extreme of human greatness. 
 The one exception in M. Claudel's gallery is the 
 extraordinarily living portrait of an Englishwoman, 
 or Irishwoman, in Partage de Midi : Yse, with her 
 fresh beauty and her yellow hair — Yse, who is 
 just woman, as Eve was woman; all passion, 
 instinct, sex, all beauty, flower and grace : Yse, 
 whom we associate mysteriously with the Epode of 
 La Muse qui est la Grace, when the poet, overcome 
 by memory, cries to the Grace of God : — 
 
 ' Va-t-en ! Je me retourne desesp^rement vers 
 
 la terre ! 
 Va-t-en ! Tu ne m'oteras pas ce froid gout 
 
 de la terre, 
 Cette obstination avec la terre qu'il y a dans 
 la moelle de mes os et dans le caillou de 
 ma substance, et dans le noir noyau de 
 mes visc^res ! 
 
 'Qui a crie? J'entends un cri dans la nuit 
 
 profonde ! 
 J'entends mon antique soeur des t^n^bres qui 
 remonte une autre fois vers moi, 
 
 F.W. G 
 
74 PAUL CLAUDEL 
 
 L'epouse nocturne qui revient une autre fois 
 
 vers moi, sans mot dire, 
 Une autre fois vers moi, avec son coeur, comme 
 
 un repas qu'on se partage dans las tenfebres. 
 Son cceur, comme un pain de douleur, et comme 
 
 un vase plein de larmes.' 
 
 It is extraordinary that this great prose-poet, 
 who is known at least to an dlite in Italy, who, in 
 the course of the year 1913, has been acted with 
 success in Germany, at Strasburg, at Frankfort, 
 and at Dresden; whose plays, in 1914, have twice 
 excited enthusiasm on the Parisian stage, should 
 have no pubUc in our islands. Is there no trans- 
 lator brave enough to undertake L'Otage, the most 
 accessible of Claudel's plays, or L'Annonce, so hke 
 the poems of our own pre-Raphaelites? The 
 readers who enjoy Thomas Hardy's Dynasts, or 
 Doughty's plays of Britain, should not find them 
 impossibly difficult, they might even welcome the 
 fresh source of a singularly noble pleasure. 
 
 In order to encourage and enUghten this hjrpo- 
 thetical translator, I will run through the plots 
 of the principal of these dramas. It is not an easy 
 task, for no sooner has Claudel accustomed his 
 readers to a set of characters, than he is out with 
 a second version of the same play; and lo ! in the 
 twinkling of an eye, all is changed. I do not advise 
 my imaginary translator to begin with the first 
 of these pieces, Tite d'Or, which is really intolerably 
 prohx. Yet there is much that is fine and moving 
 
PAUL CLAUDEL 75 
 
 in the sombre, magnificent pictures which show 
 us the folly of individualism. The hero staggers 
 on the stage, like Lear burdened with the dead 
 body of Cordelia, carrying the corpse of his young 
 wife; he is young and strong, but he has not been 
 able to save her; and under the beating rain in the 
 open field, he digs her grave and lays her there : — 
 
 'Va la, entre dans la terre crue ! A mfime ! Lk 
 ou tu n'entends plus et ne vois plus, la bouche 
 contre le sol. 
 
 'Comme quand, sur le ventre, empoignant les 
 oreillers, nous nous ruons vers le sommeil ! 
 
 'Et maintenant je te chargerai une charge de 
 terre sur le dos ! ' 
 
 Simon is the man of action, the strong man, the 
 soldier. He becomes a popular general, a sort of 
 Bonaparte, whom his soldiers on account of his 
 touzled yellow curls call Goldilocks : T^te d'Or. 
 And, in the second act, he returns from a brilliant 
 victory having redeemed his country. But he 
 finds his one friend dying. This poor lad implores 
 the hero to save him — or, at least, to console him. 
 And Goldilocks discovers the limits of his power ! 
 Finally he himself, though a king triumphant, 
 perishes as miserably. 
 
 'Que je grandisse dans mon unite,' cried Goldi- 
 locks. But one man alone, however great, is little; 
 and his last words are: 'Je n'ai et^ rien.' 
 
76 PAUL CLAUDEL 
 
 This play was written by the unregenerate 
 Claudel; it shows a nature born to mysticism and 
 religion, with as yet no active faith. A few years 
 later, we find our poet the most convinced of 
 Catholics. Like the poet, Coeuvre (in his play, 
 La VUle), we leave him, at the end of the second 
 act, a simple dilettante; and when next the curtain 
 rises we find him resplendent in priestly vestments. 
 Not that Claudel has ever actually taken orders, 
 yet in his own way he is a priest and ordained to 
 a ministrj'. He, too, has found in thought a second 
 birth — 'dans la profondeur de I'^tude, une second 
 naissance.' 
 
 And now he writes to promulgate his certitude. 
 Man does not live for man but for God; the happi- 
 ness of self is an illusion; the soul alone exists; 
 the only true order is based on sacrifice and associa- 
 tion : such is the lesson that all his plays expound. 
 
 La Jeune Fille Violaine is an early study for 
 Claudel's masterpiece, L'Annonce faite d Marie. 
 It is a modern play, a touching, romantic story, 
 not unlike the work of the modern Irish school. 
 The setting is a large farm near Soissons. The 
 heroine, Violaine, is the elder of the two daughters 
 of the house. Because she is so happy and he so 
 miserable, the young girl bestows an innocent kiss 
 on Pierre de Craon, the hydrauHc engineer, who 
 loves her and whom she cannot love; she embraces 
 him 'en tout bien et tout honneur;' but, just as 
 her fresh Ups are on her lover's cheek her jealous 
 younger sister, Mara, opens the door and stealthily 
 
PAUL CLAUDEL 'n 
 
 witnesses their farewell; and Mara thinks that her 
 sister is the man's mistress. 
 
 Their father, Anne Vercors, the master of the 
 farm, is forced to leave his home for America, 
 where his brother has died, to go to the relief of 
 two young nephews. Before setting out on so 
 long a journey, he wishes to marry one of his 
 daughters to a young neighbour, Jacques Hury, 
 an active and honourable man, capable of managing 
 the land. Violaine is the eldest; Violaine shall 
 be the bride, and, having celebrated their betrothal, 
 the farmer sets out consoled. 
 
 Violaine loves her promised husband. Alas, 
 the treacherous Mara loves him too ! She tells 
 Jacques of her sister's kiss, and suggests that 
 Violaine's love is given to Pierre de Craon. She 
 confides her own desperate passion to her mother 
 — vows she will hang herself in the woodshed 
 on the wedding-day. 
 
 'Tell Violaine,' she says, 'tell Violaine.' 
 
 And Violaine gives up her hope of happiness 
 in order to save her sister. 
 
 Mara is not yet satisfied : Mara the practical, 
 Mara the unanswerable, — 
 
 'You cannot stay here now,' she says to the 
 sad Violaine. 'And I suppose you will hardly 
 again think of marr5dng? Every one knew you 
 were betrothed to Jacques.' 
 
 'No,' says Violaine, 'I do not think of marrying. 
 
 'Then, in that case, you may as well give me 
 
78 PAUL CLAUDEL 
 
 your half of the farm ! What use would it be to 
 you, if you do not live with us, and if you do not 
 marry? Come, sign ! Here is the pen !' 
 
 And then, while Violaine signs away her birth- 
 right, Mara seeks in the hearth a handful of wood 
 ashes to pounce the signature, and having dried 
 the writing, fiings the remainder of the hot, stifling 
 dust in her sister's face. And she laughs, coarse 
 and gay; but the ashes set up an inflammation 
 that ends by bUnding Violaine for Ufe. 
 
 ^\^len the third act begins, several years have 
 passed. Violaine, an outcast and a beggar, a sort 
 of pious wise-woman, lives alone in a wood. The 
 peasants revere her as a saint, and indeed her 
 virtues are acceptable in the sight of Heaven, so 
 that she performs many miracles. (This situation 
 in a modern play appears less far-fetched than it 
 would in England among the fields of France, 
 where the wise-woman and the sorcerer, the 'meije' 
 and the "rebouteux' and the 'jetteuse de sorts,' 
 with their herbs and their charms and their clever 
 massage, stiU play so large a part in the Ufe of the 
 remoter villages.) The art of Violaine is much 
 esteemed by the simple rustics that know neither 
 her name nor her birthplace. And so one day, in 
 order to consult the wise woman of the wood, 
 Mara sets out with her first-born, bUnd from birth. 
 She knows not whom she goes out in the wilderness 
 to see, as she joins company with a poor woman 
 bent on the same quest. They track the healer 
 
PAUL CLAUDEL 79 
 
 for some while vainly, through a wood, in the 
 snow : — 
 
 La Femme : Si c'est pas un malheui- de courir 
 les bois comme ca k mon age ! Pour sur que 9a 
 me fera pas de bien ! 
 
 Mara : Alors on ne sait pas ou elle gite ? 
 
 La Femme : Un jour ici, I'autre ailleurs. Et 
 puis des mois sans qu'on la voie. Faut la traquer 
 comme une b^te. 
 
 Et comme 9a, votre petit est aveugle? 
 
 Mara : Oui. 
 
 La Femme : Moi, j'ai mal dans le corps. 
 {Silence. II neige.) 
 
 Mara : Alors c'est des miracles qu'elle fait ? 
 
 La Femme : Y a pas de miracles, que vous ^tes 
 simple ! C'est ce qu'on appeUe la ' force,' voila ! 
 
 Y a pas de miracles. C'est seulement la 'force' 
 vous comprenez? On m'a bien explique tout 9a. 
 
 At last Mara finds the wise woman in a cavern, 
 and blind Violaine gives to her sister's child the 
 gift of sight. 
 
 The fourth act brings us back to the farm. 
 Mara, incurably jealous, has murdered Violaine, 
 and left her for dead in a ditch. But Pierre de 
 Craon has found her body, and brings her back to 
 her old home, still breathing, though blind and 
 bleeding. Jacques Hury opens to them and sees, 
 aU mangled, murdered, the broken form of the 
 
8o PAUL CLAUDEL 
 
 woman whose fresh youth he. had loved. Violame 
 tells him all. She dies forgiving, reconciling, every- 
 body — even the mtirderous Mara who, in her dread- 
 ful, jealous, earthly way, had after all 'loved much.' 
 Mara, not Violaine, was the mother of the child ! 
 And we divine that Mara is Profane Love, and 
 Violaine that other Love. 
 
 'L'Amor che muove il sole e I'altre stelle.' 
 
 Quite recently, in igi2, Paul Claudel has made 
 the symbol clearer in a new version of his play 
 The Angelus {L'Annonce faite d Marie), though it 
 is at some expense of the fresh, primitive grace, 
 the Celtic charm of the earlier conception. There 
 is something artificial, stiff, consciously pre-Raphael- 
 ite in L'Annonce faite d Marie, but also a rare 
 spiritual beauty. 
 
 In the second version, place and personages 
 remain unchanged, but the time is altered; we 
 are no longer modern but plunged in the early 
 Middle Ages. Anne Vercors, the master of the 
 farm, leaves his home not on an errand of charity 
 to America, but in order to join the Crusade. 
 Pierre de Craon, instead of canalising rivers, builds 
 cathedrals : he is a great master-mason, so gifted 
 that, by a special dispensation he is allowed at 
 large, although a secret leper. And Violaine's 
 kiss of compassion infects het with his disease. 
 
 This seems to me a grave artistic error, since 
 to some extent it exculpates the faithless Jacques, 
 
PAUL CLAUDEL 8i 
 
 the cruel Mara, who follow but the fashion of their 
 age in driving a leper from her home. But the 
 end : the death of Violaine, stifled under a cart- 
 load of sand, from which the treacherous Mara 
 has drawn the back panel; and the return of Anne 
 Vercors; and the relative repentance of the obstinate 
 Mara; and the great mystical wind that rises and 
 uphfts us into a region where happiness and tragedy 
 are lost in a peace beyond understanding — all this 
 moves us deeply in the second rendering. 
 
 Each version has its beauties, and either makes 
 us reaHse the Celtic base of France — at least, of 
 the north of France. The French have ever Rome 
 upon their Hps, and their education has been 
 strictly Latin since the time of the Gallo-Romans, 
 but, by instinct and blood, they are Celts : no 
 deep racial difference divides a Paul Claudel from 
 a Synge, or a Barbey dAurevilly from a Walter 
 Scott. 
 
 La Jeune fille Violaine presents no great diffi- 
 culties to a reader broken in by a sufficient course 
 of recent Irish Hterature. L'£change is simpler 
 still — one of the most spontaneous and agreeable, 
 as also one of the earliest of Claudel's pieces. It 
 is a little tragedy with four personages : Louis 
 Laine, an adventurer, a libertine, a man incapable 
 of discipKne or of order — in fact, an Individualist, 
 and, as such, abominable in the sight of Paul 
 Claudel; his wife, the pure girl he has eloped with, 
 a Frenchwoman of a type which Claudel is never 
 weary of reproducing. Laine, an American, has 
 
82 PAUL CLAUDEL 
 
 carried off his French bride to the New World, 
 a land whose traditions and conditions are con- 
 trary to all her experience. Louis Laine incarnates 
 the mercantile American spirit, but he knows 
 nothing of its energy, its initiative; qualities 
 swiftly apprehended by the self-possessed and 
 diligent Marthe. She says to the Yankee, Lame's 
 employer, Thomas PoUock Nageoire (Finn) : — 
 
 'Thomas Pollock, il y a plusieurs choses que 
 j'aime en vous. 
 
 'La premiere c'est que, croyant qu'une chose 
 est bonne, vous ne doutez pas de faire tous vos 
 efforts pour I'avoir. 
 
 'La seconde, comme vous le dites, c'est que 
 vous connaissez la valeur des choses, selon qu'elles 
 valent plus ou moins. 
 
 'Vous ne vous payez point de rSves, et vous 
 ne vous contentez point d'apparences, et votre 
 commerce est avec les choses reelles. 
 
 'Et par vous toute chose bonne ne demeure 
 point inutile. 
 
 'Vous fetes hardi, actif, patient, ruse, opportun, 
 persev6rant; vous fetes calme, vous fetes prudent, 
 et vous tenez un compte exact de tout ce que 
 vous faites. Et vous ne vous fiez point en vous seul. 
 'Mais vous faites ce que vous pouvez, car vous 
 ne disposez point des circonstances. 
 
 'Et vous fetes raisonnable, et vous savez sou- 
 mettre votre d&ir, votre raison aussi. 
 
 'Et c'est pourquoi vous fetes grand et riche.' 
 
PAUL CLAUDEL 83 
 
 Thomas Pollock is the natural mate of Marthe; 
 and he judges her ill-matched with her vagabond 
 adventurer of a husband so much better suited 
 to his own feckless mate, the dissolute actress, 
 Letchy Elbemon. So he proposes an exchange. 
 He will divorce anew (he is familiar with the process) 
 and marry Marthe, endowing sufficiently Letchy 
 to make it worth Laine's while to espouse her. 
 Ah, if Nature were all ! But to the delicate Marthe, 
 marriage is a sacrament, and only in marriage 
 may she love entirely anything less than God. 
 Unconsecrated love is but an 'abjuration passionnee' 
 — 'la seule vie qu'on puisse partager — le seul 
 echange possible — c'est le marriage,' as we have 
 learned already in Partage de Midi. 
 
 So Thomas Pollock argues in vain : — 
 
 ' Oil est le regie de la vie 
 Si un homme ancien et eprouve, 
 Mur, soHde, avise, capable, reflechi, ne cherche 
 
 pas 
 A avoir une chose qu'il trouve bonne? 
 Et si je suis plus riche et plus sage que lui, 
 
 est-ce ma faute? 
 J'ai et6 honnete avec lui . . . 
 Je lui ai offert de I'argent et il est tomb6 
 
 d'accord avec moi.' 
 
 When the mad and vicious Letchy has murdered 
 Laine and nuned her husband, Marthe still stands 
 firm. Her love is with the dead adventurer; his 
 
84 PAUL CLAUDEL 
 
 duty is to the gibbering Letchy. They two can 
 pretend but to a perfect friendship. They stand 
 there loveless, homeless, penniless, but there is in 
 either an innate capacity which dreads no change 
 of circumstance. The fortunes of the American 
 wiU rise from the ashes hke the Phoenix; and 
 Marthe fears nothing, having that to offer which 
 is always needed : — 
 
 'I can earn my Uving by my needle — ^just finish 
 the piece of sewing that hes across my knee.' 
 
 Here, despite the lyric disorder of our poet's 
 style, we have a fable perfectly clear, and four 
 personages quite alive and characteristic. Yet 
 Paul Claudel has set before us not a story, but a 
 symbol. 
 
 As he explained in a recent letter to the Figaro, 
 his personages mean more than meets the eye. 
 Aware of the symbolism of our poet, mindful that 
 he is essentially a pupil of Mallarme, a subtle critic 
 has already interpreted L'£change : Marthe was 
 the Catholic Church; Laine, her seducer, was the 
 Romantic spirit; Thomas Pollock, the friend to 
 whom in her distress she reaches her hand, was to 
 stand for the spirit of social activity. Nothing 
 could be neater than this gloss, so admirably 
 typical of our times; and I think, for my part, 
 that Paul Claudel would have been wise to leave 
 his ingenious scholiast in possession of his com- 
 mentary. 
 
PAUL CLAUDEL 85 
 
 When a poet is so obscure that he needs a Brown- 
 ing Society or a Dante Society, or a Claudel clique, 
 to discover his meaning, he should never turn on 
 his interpreters, pointing-pole in hand; it is not 
 playing the game. They have found out some- 
 thing — perhaps better than what he originally 
 meant. M. Claudel, however, informs us of his 
 real intention. 
 
 L'£change was written in 1893 and 1894, at 
 New York and Boston, where the young poet was 
 occupied in the Consular service, and this melo- 
 drama is in reality a lyric, an expression of his 
 own feelings during those first years of adminis- 
 trative exile ; — 
 
 'I realised at last those old dreams of flight and 
 travel to which my hero, Louis Laine, gives expres- 
 sion; and yet my heart was full of homesickness, 
 of the sense of strangeness, of not belonging to 
 my surroundings : my second personage, Marthe, 
 expresses this regret of my native land. . . . 
 From another point of view, the play, which is the 
 drama of exile, is also that of a young man, a poet, 
 obliged to choose between two vocations, apparently 
 contradictory : on the one hand, free love, inde- 
 pendent life, unfettered fancy, art; on the other 
 hand, the obstinate, divine, conservative forces : 
 conscience, family, religion, the Church, and a 
 man's sworn faith.' 
 
 But these symbolic forms of art should enjoy 
 
86 PAUL CLAUDEL 
 
 the divine liberty of music. Like Calverley's 
 lyric 'the meaning is what you please'; or as 
 Claudel himself puts it : — 
 
 'L'interfet d'un drame doit depasser I'anecdote 
 qu'il raconte; il veut dire quelquechose; quelque- 
 chose de g6n6ral et qui n'est stranger k aucun 
 des spectateurs.' 
 
 All Claudel's dramas are symbols; all of them 
 tend to the condition of music; and yet all of them 
 are profoundly impregnate with his individual 
 experience. They take place all over the globe, 
 because Claudel, a pupil of the School of Political 
 Sciences, has followed the consular career in many 
 climates. He has visited India, Japan. He has 
 spent years of his life in China, in Bohemia, at 
 Frankfort, in Switzerland. He is almost as great 
 a traveller as Loti. But the multiplicity of experi- 
 ence, the knowledge of many men and many ways 
 of Ufe, which in Loti's case has increased an innate 
 tendency to scepticism — deepening it to an mtel- 
 lectual nihilism— -has sent Claudel off at a tangent 
 back to the unquestioned certitudes of his childhood's 
 prayers : he dare not be less than the devoutest 
 Catholic, for that way madness lies. Faith with 
 him is an appetite, almost a carnal satisfaction. 
 
 The theme of L'Echange — the incompatibility 
 of Action and the Soul — is the subject of one of 
 the most intense and original of Claudel's plays, 
 Partage de Midi, a play revered and cherished by 
 
PAUL CLAUDEL 87 
 
 the poet's esoteric admirers partly, no doubt, on 
 its own considerable merits, but also because it is 
 not to be bought. (It was published in an edition 
 of a hundred and fifty copies for the benefit of a 
 chosen few, admitted to this record of a private 
 experience, so enveloped in S37mbolism that, of 
 those hundred and fifty, perhaps, not fifteen could 
 lift the veil.) 
 
 Here again four personages fill the stage : Ys6, 
 who is just woman, as Eve was woman, all passion, 
 instinct, sex, all beauty, freshness, grace, as devoid 
 of a spiritual soul as any houri; her husband, De 
 Ciz, a gentle, inefficient man of pottering medioc- 
 rity ; Amalric, the man of action, the adventurer, 
 the Empire-builder, the colonial a la Kipling; and 
 Mesa, the mystic, the virgin, the visionary, the 
 man for whom there is but one thing needful. 
 And all these men belong to Ys6 in turn. 
 
 The theme is double : first, the gradual conquest 
 of Parseval by Kundry — of the imaginative and 
 spiritual man by the instinctive woman. Neither 
 has grasped the secret of love, but Ys6 at least 
 apprehends it : — 
 
 Ys^ : L'amom: m^me? . . . ^a, je ne sais ce 
 que c'est. 
 
 Mesa : Eh bien, ni moi nori plus . . . Cependant, 
 je pins comprendre. 
 
 Ys^ : II ne faut pas comprendre, mou pauvre 
 Monsieur ! 
 
 II faut perdre connaissance ! 
 
88 PAUL CLAUDEL 
 
 And for the full space of a year Mesa loses, 
 in the arms of Ys^, that consciousness of a fuller 
 life, hidden behind the tattered screen of appearances, 
 which had long been to him the Unum necessarium. 
 
 But Mesa has his revenge. We make acquaint- 
 ance with these four persons on a ship sailing east- 
 wards, just as they cross the line. De Ciz is an 
 errant engineer, in search of employment; Amahic 
 is a trader ruined yesterday, but sure of his million 
 to-morrow; Mesa is, by his worldly situation, a sort 
 of Sir Robert Hart, a great functionary, equally 
 indispensable to the Europeans and the Chinese, 
 but by temperament he is a mystic, meditating the 
 full oblation, hesitating whether or no he shall 
 embrace the life of a monk. Ys6 is a new world 
 to the visionary Mesa : — 
 
 ' II fait bon pres d'une femme ! 
 On est comme assis a I'ombre et j'aime a 
 
 I'entendre parler avec une grande sagesse, 
 Et me dire des choses dures, mahgnes. 
 Pratiques, bassement vraies, comme les femmes 
 
 savent en trouver. Cela me fait du bien.' 
 
 The second act is two long duets in the cemetery 
 of the Hong Kong Happy Valley. The first between 
 Ys6 and her husband, who leaves her on an expedi- 
 tion to Siam; the second between Y's6 and Mesa, 
 who, like a greater mystic, has sent the husband 
 to a place of danger in order that the fair Bath- 
 sheba may be his own. 
 
 But the third act is a surprise. The scene opens 
 
Photo : Dornac 
 
 To face p. SS 
 
 Paul Claudel 
 
PAUL CLAUDEL 89 
 
 in the great first-floor living-room of a European 
 factory or store in Southern China. It is evening; 
 all is peace within; Ys6 is alone in her white tea- 
 gown, her yellow hair loosely plaited for the night; 
 a babe sleeps in its cradle; but without rages the 
 thunder of cannon with the shrieks of a pillaged 
 city, sacked by fanatics. The Boxers in revolt 
 are ravaging the Concession; this sole building, the 
 strongest, still holds out against them. 
 
 To Ys6, anxiously watching, enters her protector; 
 and, oh, most dramatic surprise ! — it is not Mesa; 
 it is Amalric ! And yet we learn the child is Mesa's. 
 The man of action has carried off the love and the 
 son of the dreamer : all the profits of life are for 
 him. This night the lovers are to die. As club 
 after convent, store after villa, fall into the hands 
 of the screaming insurgents, Amalric (ever the 
 man of action, and even in this tragic hour cheerful, 
 limited, master of his fate) neatly adjusts the 
 mechanism of an infernal machine which, before 
 the Chinese can break down the gates and bolts 
 of the great factory, will blow the house, its inhabi- 
 tants, and its assailants high in the air, shattered 
 to dust in the twinkling of an eye : — 
 
 YsS : Et cependant il est terrible d'etre morte. 
 (Elle se trouble et lui prend la main.) 
 . . . Et, Amalric, est ce que vraiment il n'y a 
 point de Dieu? 
 
 Amalric : Pourquoi faire? S'il y en avait un, 
 je te I'aurais dit. 
 
 F.W. H 
 
90 PAUL CLAUDEL 
 
 But here comes Mesa; he has a pass from the 
 insurgents which permits him to go where he 
 will; he comes to save Yse. Amalric furious at 
 the sight of his rival, leaps at him with one bound, 
 wrestles with him, flings him off, broken, uncon- 
 scious, his shoulder out of joint. And he takes 
 from Mesa the talisman which will save their lives, 
 as he has already taken his love and his child. 
 Then, leaving Mesa still in his deep swoon, he 
 carries Ys6 down to the harbour, where a ship is 
 waiting, just under the walls. 
 
 While Mesa still stirs and murmurs in his swoon, 
 Ys6 returns; Amalric thinks her safe in her cabin. 
 But let Amalric live, let Amalric prosper ! She 
 will choose rather to die with Mesa in voluntary 
 expiation. Like Gretchen, in Goethe's Faust, Yse 
 forgoes her chance of life; she will risk the great 
 adventure of Eternity : ' L'esprit vainqueur dans 
 la transfiguration de Midi.' And these last worii. 
 explain the enigmatic title : Midi, Noon, is eartljy 
 passion which must be purified by suffering and 
 sacrifice before it content the soul. 
 
 The Sharing of Noon, Le Partage de Midi, would 
 make an admirable opera for the music of a Claude 
 Debussy. 
 
 To my mind, the most interesting of Claudd's 
 plays, is L'Otage (The Hostage), an historical piece 
 in the sense that our poet has captured the atmo- 
 sphere and character of the period he revives. 
 'Though, as for the facts, he invents them at his 
 pleasure. This is the more starthng that the time 
 
PAUL CLAUDEL 91 
 
 is 1814, and among the personages are Louis XVIII. 
 and Pope Pius, whose ghosts must be surprised 
 to learn some of their adventures. 
 
 We are at the end of the First Empire; Napoleon 
 has the Pope safe in his keeping, a prisoner; so 
 far so good. But here Claudel parts company with 
 History. He imagines that a Royalist conspirator, 
 the Vicomte de Coufontaine, carries off the Pope 
 by a deed of derring-do, and conveys him by night 
 to a half-ruined abbey hidden in the woods of 
 Picardy — all that is left of his family estate. 
 Coufontaine is an Emigre, a dangerous exile, with 
 a price set on his head, and the abbey is inhabited 
 by a young girl, his cousin. Mademoiselle Sygne 
 de Coiifontaine, who lives there in great retirement, 
 striving by endless patience, tireless economy, to 
 piece again together the tattered fragments of the 
 family fortimes — not for herself, but for the little 
 children of that exiled cousin whom, half -unwittingly 
 she adores. 
 
 The opening scene is exquisite : its delicate yet 
 homely poetry recalls Carpaccio's Saint Ursula 
 asleep. But Sygne keeps vigil. She is alone by 
 night in the library of her abbey. The books of 
 the exiled monks line the walls; on the one side 
 left bare, a Christ of bronze is nailed to a huge 
 blackened cross made of the charred beams of 
 the Chateau de Coufontaine, burned under the 
 Revolution. The tall shuttered windows have no 
 curtains. There is no carpet on the speckless 
 floor, where the very nails are burnished. Great 
 
92 PAUL CLAUDEL 
 
 solemn chairs are ranged against the wall. In 
 one corner, on a wicker hurdle, the harvest of 
 plums is laid out to dry. In another corner of 
 the huge bare place the young mistress of the 
 abbey has established her abode; over her head, 
 sole ornament, is hung a torn fragment of tapestry, 
 snatched from the burning, blazoned with the 
 arms of Coflfontaine. In front of her, a pretty 
 old-fashioned bureau is covered with ledgers and 
 files of papers neatly tied. Close by a Httle table 
 is spread with bread and wine and the cold meat 
 for a frugal supper, as though some belated visitor 
 might be expected. 
 
 Coufontaine arrives in the dead of night; he 
 brings with him an old nameless priest for Sygne 
 to house and hide; the girl does not guess it is 
 the Pope. She greets her cousin with quiet joy, 
 and with a girUsh pride shows him her filed accounts, 
 her savings, all the store acciunulated for the two 
 exiled children whose miniatures stand on her 
 writing-table. But both httle ones are dead; the 
 scarlet fever has killed them over in England. 
 And their mother is dead too, their mother who 
 had betrayed hearth and home, their mother who 
 had been the Dauphin's mistress. Coufontaine is 
 a desolate man, beset with bitter memories. What 
 future is there for the race of Coufontaine? The 
 scene closes on a betrothal. But (as m Corneille's 
 Polyeude) the hearth of phghted love is destined 
 to be shattered by the stroke of Grace, and the 
 act of God. 
 
PAUL CLAUDEL 93 
 
 The second act rises on the same background, 
 but it is afternoon. The sun streams in at the 
 uncurtained windows and illuminates the bare 
 room; ajid the delicate beauty of Sygne, and the 
 figure of ruse and power in front of her. This is 
 her foster-brother, the son of the village sorcerer 
 and of her old nurse; Toussaint Turelure is now a 
 person of importance, one of Napoleon's barons, 
 and Prefect of the Mame. Toussaint Turelure is 
 a vigorous portrait : the vulgarity, the unmannerli- 
 ness, the ostentation, the parvenu quality of the 
 First Empire are manifest in him; but also its 
 real capacity and power, its grasp of hfe and men. 
 Toussaint is an Amalric under other circumstances. 
 He loves his delicate and fearless foster-sister even 
 as Napoleon was attracted by the aristocratic 
 Josephine. But so far he has had no hold over 
 her. A woman who asks for nothing and dreads 
 nothing, and cares for nothing, is difficult to terrorise 
 or to seduce. Now Toussaint has surprised her 
 secret ; he knows that she has in her keeping the 
 hfe of Coufontaine — and that her hostage is the 
 Pope! 
 
 So he puts the bargain to her : her hand or their 
 heads ! He gives her two hours to decide on all 
 their fates. And the English readers of Claudel 
 remember William Morris and the 'Haystack in 
 the Floods' — ^more than once Claudel will remind 
 us of the pre-Raphaehtes of yesterday. 
 
 The natural woman in Sygne decides for death 
 and freedom. But her parish priest comes to her 
 
94 PAUL CLAUDEL 
 
 and (in a heartrending scene) points out to her 
 the path of sacrifice. No law, no obligation, 
 compels a human being to immolate his happiness 
 to the welfare of the community. Should Sygne, 
 in the interest of her personal honour, give up the 
 Pope, no priest dare refuse her absolution : she 
 is within her rights. But there are rights and 
 duties superior to our human rights. Man does 
 not live for man, but for God; and Sygne hears 
 the voice that, in the midst of his reasoning, sur- 
 prised the philosopher of Konigsburg — ^the voice 
 that whispers : ' Du kannst, denn du sollst ! ' 
 
 The third scene rises on the Chateau de Pantin. 
 Toussaint Turelure is Prefect of the Seme; he 
 holds in his hands the destinies of France. A 
 bevy of Napoleon's officers are drinking the health 
 of his first-born, whose bells of baptism are ringing 
 loud and clear — for France has re-entered the 
 fold of the Church. But the mother is not present 
 at the festival : the Baronne Toussaint Turelure 
 is a shattered invalid. Her head, haK-palsied, 
 moves continually from side to side, slowly from 
 right to left, and again from right to left, in the 
 weariest gesture of denegation and denial. She is 
 the wreck of Sygne de Coufontaine. 
 
 While Toussaint drinks and sings with the 
 Imperial captains, he leaves his sick wife to draw 
 up a secret treaty with an emissary of the lawful 
 king of France — for he meditates a timely treason, 
 a la Talleyrand. Need I say that King Louis's 
 envoy is the Vicomte de Coiifontaine? Need I 
 
PAUL CLAUDEL 95 
 
 add that their negotiations are varied by the cruel 
 reproaches of Coufontaine, by the broken-hearted 
 disculpations of Sygne. 'Is there anything higher 
 than Love?' says he; 'is there anything deeper 
 than one's Race? You have been a traitor to 
 your heart and your blood.' 'There is God/ says 
 Sygne,— 
 
 'J'ai sauv€ le Pretre eternel.' 
 
 But Coufontaine will not be convinced. At least 
 he ■w'iU wreak his vengeance on the usurper. So, 
 having signed the papers which bring the king to 
 his own, having carried them off, he takes, through 
 the open French window, a parting shot at Toussaint 
 Turelure, which Sygne intercepts, receiving it in 
 her heart, while Turelure, with a shot of his pistol, 
 Idlls the aggressor. Thus the two cousins perish; 
 their kingdom is not of this world; yet they leave 
 an heir : a chUd of the body of Sygne, an heir to 
 the name and the titles of Coufontaine by an act 
 of legal substitution. Like Violaine, like Mesa, 
 Coufontaine can leave no child : the hateful Mara, 
 the brutal Toussaint — brief the children of Action 
 — can make the fruits of the spirit flourish and 
 multiply, and they alone. 
 
 Why does Sygne save the hfe of the husband 
 she never forgives? Is it an act of sacrifice? A 
 homage to the sacrament? No, for she dies un- 
 shriven because unforgiving. It is because Death 
 is better than Life: 'une chose trop bonne pour 
 
96 PAUL CLAUDEL 
 
 que je la lui eusse laiss^e.' This heartrending 
 last act of L'Otage is especially moving in the 
 last version, that acted in Paris during the 
 summer of 1914, in which, mute, dying, relent- 
 less, Sygne opposes only silence to the blatant 
 triumph of her odious master. It is, indeed, the 
 dialogue of Life and Death. 
 
 What will be the ultimate position of Claudel? 
 It is yet too soon to say. His influence on the 
 writers of our time is a fact. He is still young; 
 he is incontestably original; he is no doubt obscure. 
 But many of the greatest writers were and remain 
 obscure — Dante, for instance, and Pascal. 
 
 In our own times, Carlyle, Browning, Whitman, 
 Ibsen, Nietzsche, are often mysterious. And 
 none the less, from the date of their appearance, 
 they have been read with eagerness, and they 
 continue to be read (a httle less eagerly), and, 
 indeed, to be revered, as the bearers of a message, 
 by an undaunted band of followers. Like all 
 these, Claudel aspires to be a conductor of souls. 
 And in the things of the spirit a certain obscurity 
 is no disadvantage, if there be a real message behind 
 it. We fill out the author's adumbrated meaning, 
 as we read an intention into a fine musical phrase, 
 and his sentence gains by all the priceless bulk of 
 our accumulated interpretations. 
 
 There are passages of Shakespeare, there are 
 Pensdes of Pascal, which we contemplate, as it 
 were, in an atmosphere of moral beauty, a halo, a 
 luminous aura, through which they shine 
 
PAUL CLAUDEL 97 
 
 transfigured and augmented. They certainly mean 
 more to us than to the most admiring of their 
 contemporaries : their words have been messages 
 to so many passionate and earnest souls ! This 
 phenomenon of accretion is the reward of the 
 obscure : they only, like the saints of Afghanistan, 
 continue to grow in their graves. An Addison, 
 a Voltaire, however great, means what he has 
 always meant. But your obscure genius, in time 
 to come, will be either a gospel or a Gongorism ; 
 there's no third state for him. 
 
FRANCIS JAMMES 
 
 Francis Jammes is a Faun who has turned Fran- 
 ciscan Friar. As we read his early poems, his 
 delicious rustic prose, we seem to see him sitting 
 prick-eared, in some green circle of the Pyrenees, 
 with brown hands holding to his mouth a boxwood 
 flute, from which he draws a brief, sweet music, 
 as pure as the long-drawn note of the musical frog, 
 as shriU as the plaintive cry of some mountain bird 
 who feels above its nest the shadow of the falcon. 
 
 And then he met Paul Claudel and was con- 
 verted. 
 
 After all, little was changed, for his innocent 
 paganism had been tinged with natural piety, 
 and in his religion he might say, like the Almighty, 
 in the Roman de Liivre, — 
 
 'J'aime la terre d'un profond amour. J'aime 
 la terre des hommes, des bStes, des plantes et 
 des pierres.' 
 
 Only henceforth we see him, in our imagination, 
 like Saint Francis, with a monk's hood drawn 
 over his brow, sandals on his feet, his brown gown 
 cinctured with a knotted cord, a couple of doves 
 hovering over his shoulders, and, at his side, 
 fawning and faithful, a converted wolf. . . . 
 
 98 
 
FRANCIS JAMMES 99 
 
 I met M. Jammes at Madame Daudet's house 
 one winter, and, in fact, his appearance was not 
 wholly unlike this fancy portrait. The gown was 
 a brown woollen suit, but just the Franciscan 
 colour. Above the ruddy, jocund, rustic face, a 
 crown of grizzling curls, behind which Nature had 
 provided the tonsure. Neither dove nor wolf, 
 but, in their stead, all the young Catholic poets of 
 Paris, pressed in serried ranks to meet the Master 
 who, for a few days, had consented to quit his 
 beloved soUtude of Orthez. 
 
 We can remember a different Francis Jammes. 
 The poet has said of himself, 'My soul is half the 
 soul of a Faun, and half the soul of a young girl.' 
 But let me quote an admirable strophe from his 
 Le Poete et sa Femme : — 
 
 'II est de ceux qui voient les parfums et il sent 
 
 Les couleurs. Et il s'interesse 
 Au scarabee comu, au h6risson piquant, 
 
 Et aux plantes des doctoresses. 
 Mais le voici, avec sa figure camuse 
 
 Et son sourire de sylvain. 
 Fatigue par I'amour bien plus que par les muses 
 
 Qui aiment son coeur incertain . . . 
 Lui-m^me est un Silene, on le voit au jardin 
 
 Veiller au legume, k la treille. . . .' 
 
 This gentle Francis Jammes recalls sometimes 
 the charming La Fontaine, and also Verlaine. A 
 La Fontaine bereft of his philosophy, his deep 
 
100 FRANCIS JAMMES 
 
 knowledge of human nature; a Verlaine from whom 
 the taint of corruption has been washed and there- 
 with his terrible sincerity. And if we can imagine 
 these two great poets mulcted so utterly in their 
 essential substance, the residue in them, too, 
 might remind us of a Faun and a young girl — a 
 mischievous, experienced rustic maid, yet holding 
 in her arms a bunch of lilies. The first prose study 
 of our poet — ^which still remains one of his most 
 exquisite pages — is the story of a young girl, Clara 
 d'EUdbeuse. What a delightful book ! It is the 
 sort of little story one can read a dozen times in 
 a dozen years, and find it as affecting the last time 
 as the first. 
 
 If any attentive student should feel incHned, 
 having read these pages, to fill a shelf with some 
 selected volumes of these modem French writers 
 — with Colette Baudoche, for example, from among 
 the novels of Barrls, and Antoinette from Romain 
 RoUand; with La Jeune Fille Violaine from Paul 
 Claudel; with La Porte Etroite from Andre Gide; 
 to which he might add La Jeune Fille Bien Eleoie 
 from the works of Rene Boylesve; L'Ombre de 
 I' Amour by Madame Tinajnre; Marie-Claire by 
 Marguerite Audoux; and the young girls of Francis 
 Jammes, especially Clara d'Elldbeuse, — ^what an 
 idea, what an admirable, unconventional idea such 
 a reader would get of the young French girl ! 
 What a gift, at once instructive and delightful, he 
 could make to some young English girl on, say, 
 her five-and-twentieth birthday 1 
 
FRANCIS JAMMES loi 
 
 Francis Jammes has spent nearly all his life in 
 or near that little town of Orthez (in the department 
 of the Lower Pyrenees), where he was born about 
 1869. In that part of France, almost as much as 
 in Ireland, Protestants and Catholics divide society 
 pretty equally. Our poet was born and baptized 
 a Catholic, but many of his nearest relations were 
 Huguenots, and, seeing so much of both sides, he 
 does not seem to have taken either very seriously. 
 He showed no particular precocity and, though he 
 began to write poetry, Hke most people, in his 
 twentieth year, he made his real debut only in 
 1898, with a voltmie caUed De I'Angelus de I'Aube, 
 i I'Angelus du soir. 
 
 A certain languor mixed with fervour ran in 
 his blood. He had inherited Creole traditions. 
 His grandfather, the doctor, and his grand-uncle 
 had emigrated from B^am to Guadeloupe, and had 
 settled there, had died there; his father was sent 
 back to France to be educated at seven years of 
 age; his dim memories of the Antilles, his stories 
 of the cousins in Martinique, and the little chair 
 in rare colonial wood that the child had used on 
 the passage, were, a generation later, to set 
 a-dreaming another child, our poet, whose first 
 heroine will belong, hke him, to a family dispersed 
 among the Atlantic Islands and the Pyrenees. 
 
 I suppose that a doctor would describe Clara 
 d'Ell^beuse as a victim of the maladie du scrupule. 
 She is a girl of sixteen; a dear little old-fashioned 
 girl, living in a dear little old-fashioned manor, 
 
102 FRANCIS JAMMES 
 
 sheltered among the foothills of the Pyrenees, 
 towards 1848. She has that dread of sin, of impurity, 
 as a sort of quagmire into which one may fall 
 unawares and be lost for ever, which the practice 
 of confession may exaggerate, or palliate, according 
 to the wisdom of the confessor. (Our poet Cowper 
 was no Catholic.) Poor Clara d'ElMbeuse, because 
 one day the young poet she secretly adored had 
 wiped away her nervous tears and laid upon her' 
 bowed nape a pitiful, respectful hand, imagines 
 that she has fallen into the sin of unchastity and 
 that she is with child ! (And we think of Renan 
 who, in his twelfth year, I think, accused himself 
 in confession of 'the sin of simony.') 
 
 The mischief with Clara is that she does not 
 confess; she teUs no kind elder of her secret fear; 
 she lets concealment feed, Uke a worm in the bud, 
 upon her damask cheek. And we know how that 
 ends. Clara does not pine away. One day in 
 March, overcome by horror and remorse for her 
 imaginary crime, she drinks a dose of laudanum 
 and quits this unkind world. 
 
 In telling the pathetic history of Clara d'EUebeuse, 
 Francis Jammes left unhampered that haH of his 
 soul which is that of a young girl; but in narrating 
 the fate of Almaide d'Etremoni, jeunefiUe passionnde, 
 that other half (which belongs to a Faun) shows 
 the cloven foot. More tenderly does he com- 
 memorate the sad life of Pomme d'anis, jeune fille 
 infirme. 
 
 But it is not to be supposed that a poet who, 
 
FRANCIS JAMMES 103 
 
 by his own showing, partakes so largely of the 
 nature of Silenus and his Sylvans, should frequent 
 exclusively the society of virgins. Some of his 
 earlier poems betray an ardent sensuality. One 
 cannot read either these or the Notes printed in 
 the volume called Le Roman du Lievre (or even, 
 perhaps, that most touching idyll of a play : La 
 Brebis Egarde) without feeling that the poet's 
 experience has lain also among the lost sheep . . . 
 among the lost sheep, and perhaps among the 
 swine; for there was a moment when he was even 
 as the Prodigal Son ! 
 
 In 1 9 13, making a general confession of those 
 past errors (oddly enough) to a reporter of Le 
 Temps, Francis Jammes recalled their bitterness. 
 Nothing except a love story is so interesting as 
 the true history of a conversion — I give this one 
 therefore without apology, though it appeared for 
 the first time in a newspaper (November 3, 1913). 
 
 'Je me suis converti le 7 juillet, 1905, commence 
 M. Francis Jammes lorsque je lui demande s'il 
 n'est pas indiscret que je cherche a savoir com- 
 ment sa pensee evolua de I'indifference a la ferveur.' 
 
 'Vous n'etiez pas catholique?' 
 
 'De baptSme? Si. Mais pas davantage, avec 
 des sympathies pour les beaux motifs litteraires 
 du catholicisme, avec beaucoup de d6dain pour 
 ce que j'appelais, pour ce que je n'appelle plus le 
 cathoUcisme des vieilles femmes. J'^tais un paien, 
 un veritable faune. Les fieurs, les bois, les femmes ! 
 
104 FRANCIS JAM3IES 
 
 J 'avals la passion de tout ce qui existait; il n'y 
 avait pas dans toute la nature de gamin plus 
 d6chaln6; j'aimais tellement la vie que la seule 
 pens6e de la quitter un jour me paraissait un 
 6pouvantable blaspheme.' 
 
 'Et vous ne I'aimez plus?' 
 
 'Plus de la m6me mani^re.' 
 
 ' Ce f ut un coup de la grace ? ' 
 
 *Non. Avant la grace, il y eut les 6preuves et 
 il y eut Claudel. . . . Claudel, dont, par I'inter- 
 m6diaire d'un de ses anciens camarades de classe, 
 Marcel Schwob, je devins I'ami a I'dpoque faunesque 
 ail je battais les buissons . . . 
 
 Claudel ! Le po^te prononce ce nom avec une 
 Amotion et une admiration touchantes. 
 
 'Claudel! Je n'oublierai jamais, raconte M. 
 Francis Jammes lyrique, ma premiere entrevue 
 avec lui; il 6tait d6ja grand pour quelques-uns 
 d'entre nous. Je vols encore cette petite chambre 
 ou Ton nous introduisit, mon camarade et moi. 
 C'^tait une sorte de cellule nue; trois choses 
 attirferent mon regard, les seules : un chapelet, 
 VAppel au soldat de Barres, et un paroissien de 
 vieille femme. II parut. Le marbre romain allait 
 parler. II avait de I'antipathie pour la personne 
 qui m'accompagnait : j'entends le son sec et 
 tranchant de ses braves r^ponses. Le lendemain 
 je d^jeunai avec Schwob et lui. Le marbre, rest^ 
 glacial la veille, s'anima : ce fut pour moi un 
 imerveillement. Le catholicisme entrait dans ma 
 vie.' 
 
FRANCIS JAMMES 105 
 
 ' Le f aune avait des inquietudes ? ' 
 
 'Le faune ^tait tenace. Mais insensiblement 
 je commengais a me demander : ou est la verite? 
 Et de ne pas la connaitre, de sentir une limite 
 a rhomme, j'eprouvais une impression penible, je 
 d6couvrais un ver dans la pomme. Je m'aperce- 
 vais qu'il y avait une force dans la vie et que 
 cette force je ne la possedais pas.' 
 
 'J'etais dans cet ^tat de desillusion et de doute 
 quand je fus la victime d'une crise morale affreuse. 
 Je tombai dans le desarroi le plus complet. J'avais 
 demande a un des mes amis de Bordeaux I'hospitalite 
 et je m'abandonnai a ma detresse; c'est alors que 
 par un bienfait de Dieu une lettre de Claudel nous 
 parvint, une lettre admirable de consolation et 
 d'enseignement. Je fus frappe, je refl6chis. Si 
 cette vie que j'aime tant, me disais-je, ne me donne 
 pas son explication, elle n'est qu'une horreur, 
 nous sommes dans un hopital de fous; j'allai a 
 la cathedrale, longtemps je pleural : le travail de 
 la grace s'operait en moi. 
 
 ' Je rentrai a Orthez. Ce que la lettre de Claudel 
 avait commence, la parole de Claudel devait le 
 finir. J'eus bientot le bonheur de le voir arriver; 
 il me parla du cathoUcisme en grand philosophe, 
 en savant. Ensemble nous priames. J'etais au 
 fond du fosse, mourant, aneanti. Je me relevai 
 gueri, suav6. Le 7 juillet, 1905, je me confessai, 
 je communiai; Claudel, mon ange gardien, servait 
 la messe. Depuis lors j'ai retrouve tout ce qui 
 me manquait, j'ai r^cuper^ la joie. Apres avoir 
 F.w. I 
 
io6 FRANCIS JAMMES 
 
 travers6 d'ipres solitudes, j'ai la joie de la 
 certitude, I'explication de ma vie. Je suis catho- 
 lique ! ' 
 
 Dans I'espace, M. Francis Jammes lance cette 
 profession de foi comme un cri de triomphe. 
 
 'Catholique pour de bon, insistai-je, pratiquant? 
 La foi totale, absolue, ob^issante? 
 
 'La foi du dernier savetier. Je ne suis pas un 
 neo-chretien. Je pratique, comme vous dites, 
 i 'observe tous les pr6ceptes de I'Eglise, ma mere. 
 . . . Je sais : on rit, vous riez des devotionnettes. 
 J'en ai ri jadis moi-mSme. Je me les suis expliquees. 
 L'Eglise ne les aurait peut-6tre pas imposees si 
 tous les hommes dtaient des Pascal et des Claudel. 
 Mais rhumanite n'est pas composee que de Pascal 
 et de Claudel. Ces pratiques, ces observances sont 
 comme des noeuds au mouchoir, elles constituent, 
 en quelque maniere, un rappel a la vertu et a la 
 pi6t6. L'Eglise les a jug^es necessaires ou utiles. 
 Je m'incline sans discussion. Cette attitude a 
 d6concert6 certains hommes qui n'ont rien de 
 catholique mais qui veulent exploiter le catho- 
 licisme au profit d'un systeme poUtique. Quand 
 on a la flamme de la foi, comme je I'ai, on trouve 
 humihante cette exploitation. Nous, nous sommes 
 catholiques foncierement, par-dessus tout. 
 
 'Vous parlez comme si vous etiez certain de 
 poss^der la v6nt6.' 
 
 'Je la poss^de. Je suis dans la v6rit6 puisque 
 la s^curitd ou je suis est si bonne! II n'y a 
 rien dans le monde k quoi je puisse comparer le 
 
FRANCIS JAMMES 107 
 
 bonheur que ma foi me donne. J'y tiens davantage 
 qu'a la vie elle-m^me. J'ai ete comme un verger 
 ou le vent a pass6, maintenant je suis un verger 
 dor6 avec de beaux fruits. 
 
 'Et comme j'esquissais un discret sourire de 
 scepticisme, M. Francis Jammes me regarda avec 
 infiniment de g6n6rosite. 
 
 'Je vous souhaite le bonheur que j'ai.' 
 
 'I was converted on the 7th of July, 1905,' 
 began M. Francis Jammes, when I asked him if I 
 were not indiscreet in seeking to trace the progress 
 of his mind from indifference to fervour. 
 
 ' You were not always a CathoUc ? ' 
 
 'I was christened a Catholic, but that was about 
 all : that, and a sort of sympathy for the fine 
 Mterary themes afforded by the Church, mixed by 
 much disdain for what I no longer call the " churchi- 
 ness " of old women. I was a Pagan, a veritable 
 Faun ! Flowers, forests, women — I was in love 
 with aU that Uved ! In all Nature there was not 
 a merrier young vagabond alive. Life was so 
 delightful in my eyes that the very idea of one 
 day quitting all that, seemed to me a frightful 
 blasphemy.' 
 
 'And you are no longer so much in love with 
 Life?' 
 
 'Not in the same way.' 
 
 'You were changed by a sudden flash of grace?' 
 
 'No; there were trials before the Grace of God 
 touched me; and there was Claudel, too, . . . 
 
io8 FRANCIS JAMMES 
 
 Claudel with whom I made friends (through one 
 of his old schoolfellows, Marcel Schwob) when I 
 was still a Faun, haunting the thickets. 
 
 (Claudel ! The poet pronounces the name with 
 a touching admiration and emotion.) 
 
 ' Claudel ! I shall never forget our first inter- 
 view. He was akeady a great writer in the eyes 
 of a Httle clan. I still see the small room into which 
 we were shown, my friend and I. It was a sort 
 of bare cell : three things attracted my attention, 
 a rosary, an old woman's prayer-book, and Barry's 
 Appel an Soldat. And then Claudel came in. It 
 was as if a Roman bust were to move its lips and 
 speak. He dishked the person who accompanied 
 me, and I remember the harsh cut-and-dry tone 
 of his short answers. But the next day I lunched 
 with him and Schwob; and the icy marble softened 
 into flesh and blood. I was lost in wonder, a sort 
 of happy astonishment. CathoUcism had entered 
 into my hfe. . . .' 
 
 'The Faun began to feel anxious?' 
 
 'The Faun stood firm! But, httle by httle, I 
 began to ask myself : Where lies the Truth? And 
 the sense of my ignorance, that feehng of a limit 
 to what man can do and be, was the canker in the 
 fruit. I felt there was a force in Life — a force that 
 I did not possess. 
 
 ■ And while in that state of doubt and disillusion, 
 I was overtaken by a cruel moral crisis. I wallowed 
 in the Slough of Despond. One of my friends lived 
 at Bordeaux; I went to stay with him, and it was 
 
FRANCIS JMIMES 109 
 
 there that, by God's grace, I received a letter 
 from Claudel. Such an admirable letter, full of 
 consolation and instruction ! I was struck by it. 
 And I pondered it in my heart. "If this dear Ufe," 
 said I, " that I so love, remains a riddle, if there 
 is no answer to our questions, then away with it ! 
 Life is a horror, a madhouse ! " I went to the 
 Cathedral, and for a long while I wept; the miracle 
 of grace began to operate in my soul. 
 
 'I returned to my home at Orthez. That which 
 Claudel's letter had begun, speech with Claudel 
 was to effectuate. He came; he spoke to me of 
 religion like a great philosopher, like a man of 
 science, too; and we prayed together. I was in 
 the bottom of the pit, dpng, dejected. On the 7th 
 of July, 1905, I went to confession, I received 
 the Communion; Claudel, ray guardian angel, 
 served the Mass. Since then I have found aU that 
 I missed in hfe; I have recovered my delight. 
 After the harshest soUtudes I have come to a 
 place of certamty : I am a Catholic ! ' 
 
 (And M. Jammes flings this cry forth into space, 
 like a chant of triumph.) 
 
 'A real thorough-going Catholic?' said I; 'absolute, 
 obedient faith?' 
 
 'The faith of a cobbler ! I am no neo-Christian; 
 I practise aU the precepts of the Church I know. 
 You smile (I used to smile) at certain observances. 
 The Church would not have enjoined them if all 
 the faithful stood on the intellectual level of a 
 Pascal or a Claudel. But humanity is not made 
 
no FRANCIS JAMMES 
 
 up of Pascals and Claudels. These minor practices 
 are just knots in our handkerchief, lest we forget ! 
 The Church thinks them necessary; I bow to her 
 decision. I know this attitude seems disconcerting 
 to certain persons, who really are not Catholics 
 at all, but would like to exploit the Church 
 in favour of a political system. But, when the 
 flame of faith is Ut in our hearts, we scorn 
 to be the catspaw of a politician. We are just 
 Cathohcs.' 
 
 ' You speak as though you were sure of possessing 
 Truth itself ! ' 
 
 'So I am; Truth is my heritage, since I find my 
 security so good ! Nothing in Life is comparable 
 to the happiness which I derive from my religion; 
 it is dearer to me than life itself ! I was as an 
 orchard hjirassed by the wind; and now I am an 
 orchard golden with ripe fruit.' 
 
 So spake Francis Jammes. I smiled the slight 
 smile of the sceptic. The poet glanced at me with 
 an infinite generosity. 
 
 ' I wish you the same happiaess ! ' he said. 
 
 Elie- Joseph Bois, Le Temps. 
 Nov. 3, 1913. 
 
 But this conversion has not greatly changed the 
 nature of the poet. His verse is stiU fresh with 
 the fragrance of wild thyme newly wet with dew. 
 He continues to sing his happy valley, with the 
 mountain towering up behind, right into the blue- 
 ness of the sky. Only, in his landscape, he gives 
 
FRANCIS JAMMES 
 
 III 
 
 more prominence to the village church, gar- 
 landed with yellow roses ; L'£glise habilUe de 
 Feuilles. 
 
 'Par cette grande paix que I'homme cherche en 
 
 soi; 
 Par les jours finissants aux vieux balcons de bois 
 Ou le ccEur noir des geraniums blancs s'attriste; 
 Par I'obscure douceur des choses villageoises; 
 Par les pigeons couleur d'arc-en-ciel et d'ardoise; 
 Par le chien dont la t^te humble nous invite 
 A lui passer la main dessus; par tout cela : 
 Chapelle, sois benie a I'ombre de ton bois ! ' 
 
 His verse has stiU its candour, its ingenuous 
 freshness, its Franciscan simplicity : — 
 
 ' Je prendrai mon baton et sur la grande route 
 J'irai, et je dirai aux anes, nos amis : 
 Je suis Francis Jammes et je vais au Paradis. 
 Car il n'y a pas d'enfer au pays du Bon Dieu.* 
 
 And yet so great a change has necessarily had 
 its repercussion in the very form of the poet's art : 
 Francis Jammes is no longer a ver-Uhrist. Having 
 accepted a discipline for his soul, he may well 
 admit one for his muse. He would no longer 
 write : — 
 
 'J'avais €i€ assez ^prouv^ pour connaitre 
 Le bonheur de finir ses jours dans la retraite;' 
 
113 FRANCIS JAMMES 
 
 and think he had done his duty by the rh37me. 
 He would not now content himself with the loose 
 and lazy assonance of a verse (a beautiful verse) 
 like the following : — 
 
 'Accable, je m'etais assis, tant les ajoncs 
 
 fitaient imp6n6trables. 
 Quand j'eus 6quilibr6 mon fusil contre un arbre, 
 Je relevai le front.' 
 
 His last charming volume of Bucolics, Les 
 Gdorgiques ChrMennes, is written in rhymed Alexan- 
 drines, which differ only from those of classic 
 French poetry in a few innocent and agreeable 
 hberties — a plural and a singular being allowed to 
 rhyme together, the mute E not counting where 
 it is not pronounced. It is a pleasant form of 
 verse. The picture of the harvesting angels whirling 
 in the sky, which opens the poem, has the rich colour 
 and the large facility of a fresco by Correggio — 
 say, the Assumption at Parma. It is beautiful 
 with a calm beauty : — 
 
 ' De temps en temps I'un de ces anges touchaient 
 
 terre 
 Et buvait k la cruche une gorgee d'eau claire. 
 
 'Sa joue etait pareUle a la rouge moitie 
 De la pomme qui est I'honneur de compotier. 
 
 'II reprenait son vol, et d'abord sa faucille. 
 Quelque autre alors foulait I'ombre qui fait 
 des grilles. 
 
FRANCIS JAMMES 113 
 
 ' Ou tous ils descendaient ensemble, ou bien encor 
 Ensemble reprenaient avec calme I'essor. 
 
 'Chacun avait passe le bras a sa corbeille 
 Dont les tresses formaient comme un essaim 
 d'abeilles 
 
 'Clarte fondue a la clarte, ces travailleurs 
 Recoltaient da froment la plus pure des fleurs. 
 
 ' Ils venaient visiter sur ce coin de la Terre 
 La beaute que Dieu donne a la vie ordinaire.' 
 
 One of my friends, who is Professor of Rhetoric 
 (Modern Literature) in a High School, tells me 
 that the enthusiasm of her scholars for Francis 
 Jammes is a thing touching to behold — for we of 
 a bygone generation can never quite attain their 
 diapason. Michelet and Renan leave them cold; 
 Claudel and Francis Jammes fire their imagination. 
 If I were a teacher, certainly I should profit by 
 the experience; by all means let the young learn 
 from the young ! 
 
 Les Georgiques Chreiiennes is full of the most 
 delightful episodes of country life told in beautiful 
 (if rather free-and-easy) French* There is no 
 particular tale in it. It is rather a series of pictures; 
 the daily life of a family of husbandmen on a farm. 
 It is a sort of rural Christian Year. But what 
 candid and happy pictures ! What a sense of rustic 
 cheer and frugal abundance ! What primitive 
 poetry in the labourer's account of the creation of 
 
114 FRANCIS JAMMES 
 
 his daily bread; the chestnut, the maize, the vine ! 
 And the betrothal of the Uttle farm servant ! 
 And the vocation of the farmer's daughter who 
 takes the veil. 
 
 There is but one thing in the whole volume 
 which I find displeasing. It is the short certificate 
 of orthodoxy which the poet delivers to himself 
 on the first page and on the last. He is at great 
 pains to assure us that he is not a reformer, a 
 philosopher, a modernist, or a free-thinker. We 
 should never have suspected this gifted and in- 
 genuous singer of being any kind of thinker ! 
 He is a poet, a most indubitable poet, and that 
 is enough. 
 
REN^ BOYLESVE 
 
 Rene Boylesve reminds me of some twy-faced 
 Roman statue, some bust of Janus, turning a 
 different mask to opposite points of the horizon. 
 One of these visages (but that regards the Nine- 
 teenth Century) has the Ubertine grace, the refined 
 scepticism, the voluptuous detachment of an 
 Anatole France or a Henri de Regnier, with less 
 philosophy than the one and less poetry than the 
 other; but these are the quaUties which distin- 
 guished our Republic yesterday : Non ragionam 
 di lor. The second face looks at the new Renais- 
 sance of our time, and is that of an inhabitant 
 of the province of Touraine, poet and gentleman- 
 farmer, a man pleasantly occupied with the affairs 
 of his neighbourhood, in which he finds the diversity, 
 the unexpected developments, the food for thought, 
 which animate, in any place, if sufficiently observed, 
 the innumerable acts of the Human Comedy. 
 
 In addition to a mind of the subtlest moral 
 delicacy and a more than feminine refinement, 
 M. Boylesve possesses a literary style of transparent 
 ease and charm; just the style to suit the landscape 
 he describes, the moderate classic harmonies and 
 Attic graces of Touraine. He is the historian of 
 the charming gros bourgs that surround Loches or 
 Azay, He describes their neat, white houses built 
 
 "5 
 
ii6 RENE BOYLESVE 
 
 of freestone, topped with slate, their raised stone 
 perrons (or stoops, as they say in America) and 
 handsome ornamented windows; and we see the 
 trellised vine up the front, and the flowers in the 
 gardens, and the fruit trees everywhere. The 
 villages of Touraine have brought prosperity to 
 to the very brink of poetry ! 
 
 These little farms where every sunny slope all 
 round is planted with the vine; these old gray 
 manors and priories nestling under some cHff 
 Ughtly planted with slender oak-woods (so unlike 
 ours !), in which the gray-blue periwinkle and the 
 gray-pink cyclamen grow wild; these prosperous 
 rural' properties, with their air of solid comfort, 
 their teeming vats of wine; their kitchen-gardens, 
 full of melons, cucumbers, asparagus, artichokes, 
 cardoons, green peas, egg-plants, tomatoes, salsify, 
 and scarlet-runners; their great bams; their stone 
 stables where the cattle spend so much of their 
 time (for the land is too fertile and too valuable 
 to lay down in pasture); all this dignified, deUght- 
 ful, indolent country of Touraine has found its 
 prophet in Ren6 Boylesve. Except Balzac in his 
 Lys dans la ValUe, no one has described it half 
 so well — the land and the dwellers on the land . . . 
 'Molles Turones,' said Caesar, and Tacitus calls 
 them 'imbeUes,' and Tasso thought the peasant 
 here was like his field, which is 'molle, lieta e 
 dillettosa.' And, in fact, these adjectives serve 
 very well to describe the lazy, charming art of 
 Ren6 Boylesve. 
 
RENE BOYLESVE 117 
 
 I find in him the moral features of his race : 
 measure and tact, delicacy of sentiment, love of 
 ease, something at once noble and voluptuous, 
 something humorous and nonchalant, and yet, at 
 the same time, something precise and positive, 
 despite his softness. And often, when I read a 
 novel of M. Boylesve's, the book slips from my 
 hands, and I see the Plain of Touraine under its 
 customary sky of sunny gray — ^its great wide 
 rivers, its rocky cavernous cHffs, its forests of Loches 
 and Amboise, its rambling lanes sunk deep between 
 two rows of poUard windows, the great straight 
 white high-roads that the aspens fleck with shadow, 
 and all the pleasant sequence of woods and fields, 
 which seem to be reasonably deduced the one from 
 the other, Hke the different parts of a discourse. 
 Did M. Boylesve know, he woiold be charmed; 
 for the object of his art is, not to hurry the reader 
 along on a current of breathless events, but to 
 foster in him this habit of reverie, of reminiscence 
 "chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancy.' 
 
 Rene Boylesve was born in 1867 at La-Haye 
 Descartes, in Touraine, and his first book, Les 
 Bains de Baden, was pubhshed in 1896; but this 
 belongs to the Boylesve whom we renounce. In 
 1899, with Mademoiselle Cloque, he opened that 
 series of 'Scenes de la vie de province' (as Balzac 
 would say), which have made his reputation. Mile 
 Cloque is an old maid of/ narrow means; just one 
 of those 'churchy' old foaids for whom Francis 
 Jammes has expressed a respectful tenderness. 
 
ii8 RENE BOYLES\^ 
 
 But Francis Jammes was still a 'Faun' when his 
 contemporary, Boylesve, delineated this delightful 
 lady. 
 
 MUe Cloque's affections are divided between 
 two absorbing objects, her pretty young niece 
 and her church. That church is the basilica of 
 Saint Martin, fallen into ruin; and the dearest 
 aim of this devoted worshipper is to restore and 
 repair the great sanctuary of Tours. For to her 
 Tours is still that Jerusalem of the West that our 
 forefathers called it, in memory of the first con- 
 fessor of the Latin Church, Saint Martin, once the 
 honour and glory of France, neglected now in his 
 own diocese. 
 
 Long before Maurice Barres wrote his apology 
 for the churches of France, the author of 
 Mademoiselle Cloque showed how a great monu- 
 ment may be a hberal education, may raise an 
 Uhterate mind to heights where it apprehends the 
 mystery which extends beneath, beyond, appear- 
 ances; he, too, affirmed that the prayer of an old 
 woman in her parish church may rank with the 
 meditation of the man of science and with the 
 inspired presentiment of the poet. 
 
 La Becqude followed Mademoiselle Cloque. It 
 is impossible to read this long, slow, humorous, 
 enchanting book, without seeing a resemblance (a 
 moral resemblance, for the setting, of course, is 
 widely different since the setting is Touraine), still, 
 a strong moral resemblance to the English novel 
 of Victorian days. Tante F^licie and her nephew. 
 
RENE BOYLESVE 119 
 
 Riquet Nadaud, remind us, though so unlike, of 
 Aunt Betsy Trotwood and little David Copperfield. 
 It seems to me that those who love the one might, 
 at least, like the other? I shall speak again of 
 Riquet Nadaud in my chapter on the Novel of 
 Childhood. 
 
 A great part of the charm of these stories is 
 the atmosphere of Touraine, so marvellously cap- 
 tured. I do not mean only the physical atmosphere : 
 M. Boylesve is above all things a man for whom 
 the inner world is important. Twenty years ago, 
 French literature was positive, objective, and, if 
 I may say so, visual. But now our younger masters 
 are men for whom the invisible world exists; they 
 are chiefly occupied with the interior sphere. 
 Some while ago, Rene Boylesve described this 
 change of front very happily to a reporter of the 
 Revue des Frangais (September 25, 1912). He 
 said : — 
 
 'In my young days, I used to visit Alphonse 
 Daudet whom I greatly admired. He was very 
 encouraging, and we would talk of literature; he 
 used to say to me gently : "I have never described 
 anything that I have not seen." He was very 
 kind, very discreet, and I would go away despair- 
 ing, for I felt he was offering me a suggestion, a 
 piece of good advice. And for long afterwards 
 I was incapable of writing anything, since at every 
 turn I caught myself on the point of describing 
 things I had never seen, could never see ! ' 
 
120 RENE BOYLES^^ 
 
 These unseen things — emotions, beliefs, traditions, 
 opinions, all tliat makes up the moral atmosphere 
 of a society — are the peculiar sphere of M. Boylesve. 
 On this occasion he showed our jomrnalist the plan, 
 or scenario, for a novel which was l5dng on his 
 writing-table : no project of a plot, no hst of 
 personages, but a sequence of maxims and reflec- 
 tions. 'Take care of the moral atmosphere,' he 
 seems to say, "and the characters will take care 
 of themselves.' So soon as he begins to write, he 
 forgets these notes, which transpose themselves 
 into persons and events; but his preliminary care 
 is to invent the moral world which naturally 
 brings them forth. 
 
 The classic grace of his native province, its sober 
 delicacy, its quiet order, do not exclude a latent 
 energy, an amorous ardour, decently dissimulated 
 under the discretion and retinue of a civilised and 
 courtly tradition. The Tourangeau is sensual as 
 well as temperate; he is never perverse; he is 
 seldom excessive ; none the less, if his name be 
 often Descartes or Berthelot, he may by chance 
 be called Ronsard, or Rabelais, or Balzac. How 
 should he Uve in a world of such good things, such 
 an earthly paradise, and not know — ^though he 
 discipline them — ^the pleasures of sense ? His purity 
 is not austere and his piety no flaming romantic 
 enthusiasm. 
 
 All the deUcate sensibihty, all this impassioned 
 moderation of his native place, M. Boylesve has 
 put into the human, touching figure of his Jeune 
 
RENE BOYLESVE 121 
 
 Fille Bien Slevde. It is the story of a refined ajid 
 gentle girl, convent bred, pious, reared in all the 
 old-fashioned dignities and dehcacies of a small 
 provincial society in Touraine. Her parents com- 
 bine for her a sensible match — a manage de raison 
 with a Parisian architect who, visiting Chinon, 
 has espied the white sequestered hly; he marries 
 the dowerless Madeleine for her perfect manners, 
 her charming grace, her moral solidity — et parcequ'il 
 ne veut pas Sire. . . . Poor Madeleine in her wedding 
 veil has overheard the unthinkable word ! 
 
 M. Serpe has evidently a great opinion of that 
 moral solidity which he so much admires, for, 
 diuing their married life in Paris, he takes no 
 pains at aU to shield it, plunging his young wife 
 into the busy, frivolous circle of contractors, 
 speculators, money-makers, and pleasure-hunters 
 that eddied round the great Exhibition of 1889. 
 This is the subject of Madeleine, Jeune Femme, 
 which is the continued history of his heroine — M. 
 Boylesve's novels have the broad full flow and 
 lengthy winding course of his native Loire ! 
 
 Madeleine passes unscathed among the booths 
 of Vanity Fair. But by a friendly hearth (the one 
 spot which recalls the peaceful surroundings of 
 her early years) she meets a man of letters, a student 
 of subtle moral problems, a lover of Pascal, an 
 inhabitant of her own intellectual world, yet in 
 his private hfe just as much an average sensual 
 man as any bachelor of the Boulevards. Madeleine 
 succumbs at once almost without resistance to the 
 
 F.W. K 
 
122 RENE BOYLESVE 
 
 charm of M. Juillet — she succumbs morally, we 
 mean, and in secret; for in the world of fact she 
 never succumbs at all, and her would-be seducer 
 retires, rebuffed and ashamed, persuaded that she 
 is one of those impregnable fortresses it were a 
 waste of time to besiege, while Madeleine is half 
 enraged by that inalienable aureole, or aspect of 
 virtue, which so efficiently protects her. The flood 
 of sentiment which invades the charmed, the 
 passive soul of Madeleine, its mysterious regression, 
 and the final triumph of her old ideals — Duty, 
 Order, the Interior Altar — are evoked with a magic 
 which touches in the reader's heart a secret spring, 
 and makes him share in Madeleine's temptation, 
 her danger, her reluctant escape. 
 
 If Madeleine does not succumb, it was not the 
 beautiful quality of her soul that saved her (our 
 author seems to say) but the regularity and discipline 
 of her early education; and, to point his moral 
 still clearer, he places in front of Madeleine a 
 charming madcap, a dear little modern hoyden. 
 Pipette Voulasne. Pipette has not a bad instinct 
 in her composition, but neither has she a principle; 
 she has never heard of the spiritual combat. 
 Pipette, too, falls in love with tlxe irresistible M. 
 Jtdllet. Pipette is sweet and twenty, rich, un- 
 married and M. Juillet is a bachelor; but the lover 
 of Pascal hesitates at the idea of marriage with a 
 romp whose ideas of fun is to dress up as a seal at 
 a fancy ball and swim in the pond. 
 
 Pipette is marked out for fate, and here no 
 
RENE BOYLESVE 123 
 
 sudden angel intervenes; Pipette commits suicide, 
 — an almost comic suicide, in keeping with her 
 character; she makes a hearty meal of plum- 
 pudding and then takes a sea-bath ! M. Boylesve 
 is a traditionaUst, a lover of the ancient faiths and 
 disciplines of France (a lover, perhaps, rather than 
 a believer). He delights to show us, in his magic 
 mirror, the neat, well-ordered world of civilised 
 society; but sometimes the figures that move 
 there become transparent, reveahng behind them 
 the great primeval forces, never completely dis- 
 ciplined, which drop into our neatest systems some 
 soul irreducibly irregular, a grain of sand throwing 
 all things out of gear. All his novels are une 
 invitation cl reflechir sur la vie. 
 
 There is decidedly something English in the 
 talent of M. Rene Boylesve — perhaps his patience, 
 his slowness, his minuteness, his lambent humour, 
 as also his repugnance to all that is spasmodic, 
 jerky, or effective — for sometimes his art reminds 
 us not only of David Copperfield, but also of The 
 Mill on the Floss; and perhaps we must go back 
 so far to find a novel whose moral effulgence is as 
 persuasive. A pure and lonely soul, accustomed to 
 the quiet meditations of the inner life; a young 
 pilgrim of the ideal, suddenly plunged into the 
 robust materialism and frivolous worldliness of a 
 middle-class coterie, abruptly brought up face to 
 face with passion — ^with unlawful passion, in which, 
 none the less, the young soul recognises something 
 more akin to the altar of her inner worship than 
 
124 RENE BOYLESVE 
 
 was to be found in the daily round and common 
 lot; the swift temptation, the sick revulsion. 
 
 'There came and looked him in the face 
 
 An Angel beautiful and bright; 
 And that he knew it was a Fiend, 
 This miserable Knight ! ' 
 
 Are we not telling the story of Maggie Tulliver? 
 It is also the history of Madeleine Serpe. It is 
 her story, with one great, one incalculable difference. 
 There is an old tale, familiar in many variants 
 to the students of monastic lore. Tempted, a nun 
 leaves her convent, errs, returns full of shame, to 
 find that no one has missed her, that her sin is 
 unguessed at, since the Virgin has taken her place 
 and her semblance, performing all her duties in 
 her place. This interior Virgin, who saves Madeleine 
 Serpe, who intervenes too late for Maggie TuUiver, 
 is the habit of goodness, the inheritance and practice 
 of virtue, which protects some natures half against 
 their will. For (and there lies the dehcacy and 
 naturalness of M. Boylesve's story) Madeleine's 
 soul is saved against her will ! She feels aU the 
 attraction of the abyss. For one dizzy moment 
 she leans over, longs — ^but something pulls her back, 
 and places her reluctant feet on the dusty highway 
 they had thought to quit for ever. 
 
 Ren6 Boylesve is not one of the greatest names 
 in contemporary French literature — not a name 
 
RENE BOYLESVE 125 
 
 to conjure with. No one has ever compared him 
 to Pascal or Dante, as (to our stupefaction) they 
 compare Claudel; no one has said of him, as it 
 has been said of Peguy, that he is greater than 
 Victor Hugo. And it is as well : this discreet 
 and moderate artist would find no charm in im- 
 moderate praise. But we may say without fear 
 of contradiction that he is one of the most readable 
 of contemporary novelists. 
 
ANDRE GIDE 
 
 Andre Gide is one of the acutest, one of the most 
 sensitive critics of the Twentieth Century. His 
 review, La Nouvelle Revue Frangaise, has been no 
 less indispensible to the development of our younger 
 writers in France, than the English Review to the 
 Georgian authors across the channel. Instead of Mase- 
 field, of Conrad, Andr6 Gide has fostered the talent 
 of a Charles-Louis Philippe, of Marguerite Andoux. 
 But this critic, so perspicacious, so alert, so 
 abreast of his times, is, at the same time, a novehst, 
 apparently of another generation. The Nineteenth 
 Century in its decline — ^the dear, delightful, decadent 
 Nineteenth Century — with its dreams, and its 
 nihilism, and its irony, and its delicate disenchant- 
 ment — the Nineteenth Century which already seems 
 such worlds away ! — remains incarnate stiU in the 
 novels of Andre Gide, hardly less than in those of 
 France, or R6gnier, or Pierre Loti. He has the 
 same sense of beauty, the same regret for some 
 ante-natal magic never since re-found, the same 
 perfection of form, or rather a perfection almost 
 equivalent in its transparent and insidious grace, 
 in its purity, in its rare elegance : few writers of 
 the Twentieth Century are elegant ! And, like 
 Anatole France, Gide, in his latest work, is full of a 
 bitter contempt, a mordant, an almost impious 
 
 126 
 
AM)RE GroE 127 
 
 derision of human nature. Evil is, in his eyes, the 
 mortar that binds together our earthly tenement; a 
 necessary condition of our being; man is a creature 
 made of dust and mud. But I will not speak of his 
 later books. Of the dozen volumes he has produced, 
 no one is neghgible, and at least three, Paludes, 
 L'Immoraliste, and La Porte £troite, have quahties 
 for which one may suppose survival. 
 
 Paludes has a charm of youth and decadence too 
 different from our serious age for me to praise it 
 here; but L'Immoraliste and La Porte Etroite are 
 as much in earnest as the Twentieth Century can 
 demand, and yet they are not of it ! 
 
 L'Immoraliste is the story of a young man, newly 
 married, highly gifted, with aU his hfe before him 
 apparently, who suddenly falls sick of a mortal 
 illness. Hitherto he has been a student, spiritually 
 minded, almost austere. But the sudden neigh- 
 bourhood of death, the dread possibihty of annihila- 
 tion, change his philosophy; he feels that instinctive 
 shudder, that sense of the futility of creeds and con- 
 ventions which Mademoiselle Leneru has called le sens 
 profond de la mort. And his ideals are reversed. 
 
 Henceforth he esteems not the moral, not the 
 refined, but such things as seem especially vital : 
 Life, in such manifestations, bad or good, as appear 
 the most spontaneous, the most energetic. Instinct 
 and Vigour draw him like a magnet, for these 
 make for survival. At Biskra, where he winters for 
 his health, he finds himself admiring the httle Arab 
 boy who steals his wife's scissors — the scamp is so 
 
128 ANDRE GIDE 
 
 adroit, so deft ! — ^and when he returns to his country 
 home in Normandy, it is the drunkards and the 
 poachers in the tavern who strike him as the most 
 alive, and therefore the most estimable. When 
 his wife, worn out with nursing, falls ill in her turn, 
 he neglects her (for illness has become in his eyes 
 disgusting, almost monstrous) and she dies in 
 isolation. 
 
 Andre Gide may be himself, perhaps, something 
 of an Immorahst — or rather an Amoralist — as was 
 the manner of the Fin-de-sidcle, but he preserves, 
 as the clay preserves the trace of the long crumbled 
 sea-shell, the imprint of a severe and religious 
 education. Like our English Edmund Gosse, he 
 has left behind him a Protestant past, which he 
 looks back upon to-day with some distaste, and 
 yet perhaps with something of an unconscious 
 nostalgia. 
 
 His best novel. La Porte Etroite (1909), is laid, 
 so to speak, on the grave of that Huguenot youth 
 of his, so utterly vanished, like a handful of flowers. 
 
 'Le gotit exquis craint le trop en tout.' These 
 words of F6n61on's rise to one's mind in reading 
 this story of a rare soul drawn into the abyss of the 
 inner life, ' as waters are by whirlpools suck'd and 
 drawn,' through a sort of dread of the excess, the 
 commonness, the transitoriness of mortal happiness. 
 
 Alissa Bucolin was the child of a West Indian 
 Creole and a Norman banker, Protestant and 
 pious. The beautiful Mme Bucolin never took 
 root in the Huguenot society of Havre; she spent 
 
ANDRE GIDE 129 
 
 her days swinging in a hammock or reclining grace- 
 fully upon a couch, a shut book dropping from her 
 idle hand; sometimes a violent crise de nerfs would 
 interrupt the languid course of her existence, would 
 alarm and arouse aU the quiet, plain, provincial 
 household; only sometimes at dusk she would awake 
 for a moment as it were, show a transient anima- 
 tion, or sit at the piano and begin some slow mazurka 
 of Chopin; but her lovely hands would stop in the 
 middle of a chord, her voice leave the phrase 
 unfinished, and the sleeping beauty sink again into 
 her incommunicable ennui. 
 
 Alissa Bucolin drew from her mother her dark 
 romantic beauty and a neurotic temperament, but 
 her spiritual strain reflected the cultured Huguenots 
 of her father's family. Born in the native town of 
 Mademoiselle de Scudery (the author of the Grand 
 Cyrus) and of Bemardin de Saint-Pierre (the author 
 of Paul et Virginie), she was akin to the great 
 prdcieuse and to the idealist philosopher — and the 
 likeness makes us wonder if a peculiar morbid 
 sentimentaHty, a rare delicacy of emotional fibre, 
 be usual in the inhabitants of that flourishing 
 seaport ! Alissa had grown up in the companion- 
 ship of a sister, a brother, and a young boy cousin, 
 two years her junior — and from their childhood it 
 had been understood that AUssa and Jerome were 
 one day to marry. 
 
 But when the girl was sixteen years of age, the 
 mystery of Evil, and aU the scars and scoria of 
 mortal passion, were suddenly revealed to her by 
 
I30 ANDRE GIDE 
 
 the conduct of her mother. A novel gaiety and 
 laughter transfigured Mme Bucolin, coinciding with 
 the frequent visits of a certain young lieutenant. 
 And one day Jerome found Alissa weeping and 
 praying by her bedside while from the floor below 
 her mother's laughter pealed up — ^imaccustomed as 
 a portent. 'Bucolin, Bucohn,' drolled the young 
 Heutenant, 'Si' j'avais un mouton, surement je 
 I'appelerais Bucolin ! ' and Alissa, weeping, mur- 
 mured to her dear confidant, 'Jerome, ne raconte 
 rien a personne . . . mon pauvre papa ne salt rien 1 ' 
 
 Thus, in its very bud, the young shoot of love 
 in her heart was infected by shame; and she felt 
 the longing to expiate and offer her life as an 
 oblation. Moreover, Juliette, three years younger 
 than Alissa, had let her fancy light on her young 
 cousin; and the serious Alissa (to whom every 
 preference appeared a vital passion) determined 
 to sacrifice her dream of happiness in her sister's 
 favour. Her strenuous soul was naturally inclined 
 to sacrifice, finding in privation that mysterious 
 exaltation of the will, that constant and progressive 
 self-mastery, which animate with an intense though 
 secret interest the Ufe of the ascetic. 
 
 But neither her young sister nor Jerome would 
 accept her oblation. Juliette married very young 
 a middle-aged wine grower in the south of France, 
 had several children, became her husband's asso- 
 ciate, provided an opening for her younger brother 
 — fulfilled, in fact, the French ideal of feminine 
 activity, importance, and devotedness, and was 
 
ANDRE GIDE 131 
 
 perfectly happy; while Alissa was left (so to speak) 
 with her sacrifice returned unopened, left upon her 
 hands. And Jioliette's recovery from her first love, 
 her happiness in a simple marriage of reason, 
 contributed to discredit human passion in the 
 mind of the fastidious Alissa : — 
 
 'Ce bonheur que j'ai tant souhaite, jusqu'a 
 offrir de lui sacrifier mon bonheur, je souffre de 
 le voir obtenu sans peine. . . . Juhette est heureuse; 
 elle le dit, elle le parait; je n'ai pas le droit, pas 
 de raison, d'en douter. . . . D'ou me vient, aupres 
 d'elle, ce sentiment d'insatisfaction, de malaise? 
 Peut-6tre a sentir cette felicite si pratique, si facile- 
 ment obtenue. ... Seigneur ! Gardez-moi d'un 
 bonheur que je pourrais trop facilement atteindre ! ' 
 
 To Alissa, as to Mary, the usefulness and occupied 
 content of Martha appear the husks of life : Unum 
 est necessarium. Such natures need the liberty, 
 the solitude, the rapt interminable progression, 
 and ideal refuge of the inner Hfe. A sort of disgust 
 of reahty seizes them at the very moment when the 
 earthly paradise they dreamed of appears, at last, 
 within their reach. AUssa has only to stretch out 
 her hand in order to take her happiness. After 
 all, is it worth while? The dread of disenchant- 
 ment, the sense of mortal imperfection, paralyse 
 her. The dawn of love is surely its most dehcate, 
 delicious moment; the high day of noon can never 
 improve upon that exquisite suggestion. 
 
133 ANDRE GIDE 
 
 ' Enough; no more ! 
 'Tis not so sweet now as it was before. . . .' 
 
 Those who have once imagined themselves in 
 direct communication with that which lies behind 
 appearances cannot resume unaltered the conditions 
 of human society. Pascal in the full glory of scientific 
 discovery — and is there any human emotion to 
 compare with that of the man who suddenly sees 
 enlarged the very boundaries of Nature? — ^in the 
 passion of scientific debate, knew that abrupt 
 revulsion of the mind, that withdrawal from finite 
 things, that unique absorption in spiritual perfection 
 which drove a Charles V. to quit the affairs of 
 Europe for a monk's cell in Estramadura. 
 
 More than once the sense of Divine things has 
 suggested to a strong nature some cruel doctrine 
 of voluntary martyrdom, which (according to our 
 own bias) we may deplore as a partial alienation 
 of the mind, or admire as evidence of eternal truth. 
 M. Gide's Alissa is only a woman who renounces a 
 permitted love; yet, in the same spirit, and with 
 something of the same high strenuousness, she erases 
 her dream and writes across the page of Ufe : Hie 
 incipit amor Dei. ' La saintete n'est pas un choix ' (she 
 tells the unfortunate Jerome), 'mais une obligation.' 
 
 But Alissa was not a saint. She was an artist 
 in Mysticism, a refined and fastidious spirit 'who 
 would give all Hugo for a few sonnets by Baude- 
 laire.' Nothing in her life shows that warmth, that 
 zeal, that desire to rush in and save which marks 
 
ANDRE GIDE 133 
 
 the saint, however visionary, however ecstatic, be 
 she Saint Teresa or St Catherine, be he St Francis 
 of Assisi or St Francis of Sales. In place of that 
 simple and passionate impulse of the soul Alissa, 
 in her self-regarding solitude, is all scruple, all a 
 fastidious fear of doing wrong. We think of her, 
 and, opening Fenelon's Spiritual Letters, we read : — 
 
 'Rien n'est si contraire a la simphcite que le 
 scrupule. II cache je ne sais quoi de double et de 
 faux; on croit n'6tre en peine que par d^licatesse 
 d'amour pour Dieu; mais dans le fond on est 
 inquiet pour soi, et on est jaloux pour sa propre 
 perfection, par un attachment naturel a soi. . . .' 
 
 Over against these strenuous, self-torturing 
 spirits, who arrive with difficulty at perfection, 
 thanks to "une certaine force et une certaine 
 grandeur de sentiment,' the great Archbishop sets 
 the luminous peace of those quiet souls who glide, 
 as it were, into their true haven, without a conscious 
 effort. 
 
 'Tout les surmonte, selon leur sentiment; et 
 elles surmontent tout, par un je ne sais quoi qui 
 est en elles, sans qu'elles le sachent. Elles ne pensent 
 point a bien souffrir; mais insensiblement chaque 
 croix se trouve port^e jusqu'au bout dans une 
 paix simple et amdre, ou elles n'ont voulu que ce 
 que Dieu vouloit. II n'y a rien d'^clatant, rien 
 de fort, de distinct aux yeux d'autrui, et encore 
 
134 ANDRE GIDE 
 
 moins aux yeux de la personne. Si vous lui disiez 
 qu'elle a bien souffert, elle ne le comprendroit pas.' 
 
 We read and reflect that such a friend as this 
 was just what was lacking to AHssa Bucolin. She 
 would doubtless have been happier as a Roman 
 Catholic (only even then she might have chanced 
 on a Pascal, who would have exasperated her 
 quaUties, instead of on a Fenelon, who would have 
 tempered and allayed them to a milder perfection). 
 A spiritual director would have turned her energies 
 into courses of work and prayer, would have drawn 
 her mind from the attraction of the abyss, would, 
 perhaps, have married her (like Juliette) or, more 
 happily, have fulfilled her vocation in some great 
 active religious order, where an Alissa may succour 
 and inspire a multitude of lesser natures. Or, had 
 the bent to contemplation proved too strong, he 
 would have let her enter the contemplative life, 
 but not alone. A soul, scarred by what Sainte- 
 Beuve has described as la griffe de I'archange, 
 may be seized with a vertigo, on attaining the 
 summits of the inner world, if on these giddy 
 heights no stajang, guiding, protecting hand be 
 near. Vae soli ! 
 
 But in that case AHssa would not tragically have 
 died, leaving behind a long train of sterile regret 
 and hopeless memories, and M. Gide would not 
 have composed the frail and spiritual story, which, 
 in its purity and charm, reminds us sometimes of 
 Dominique. 
 
CHARLES P^GUY 
 
 When war broke out between Austro-Germany 
 and the Allies, Charles Peguy went to the front 
 as a lieutenant in the reserves of the line and 
 was struck by a ball, or a fragment of shell, 
 on the forehead as he was leading his men 
 into action at the Battle of the Marne. This 
 heroic death fitly crowns a career devoted to the 
 love of country and the gospel of fraternal self- 
 sacrifice. 
 
 In its light, I re-read the trivial pages, the feeble 
 half-affectionate pleasantries with which I had 
 saluted the poet and teacher who, no doubt, 
 occasionally abused the privilege which genius 
 sometimes claims to alloy the sublime with the 
 ridiculous — or the merely ultra-lyrical and weari- 
 some. Is it possible that I did not appreciate, in 
 his lifetime, the prophet, the hero, the poet, whom 
 France reveres to-day? I examine my conscience. 
 It is clear that I was not drawn to Peguy in his habit, 
 as he lived. ... I see him still. An odd httle man 
 with the look of a small farmer from the Loire 
 — a farmer, a village schoolmaster, a country doctor, 
 a cur6 even — ^there was something of aU that in 
 the refined and yet rather common little man with 
 the bent shoulders, the charming hands, the square 
 jowl, and the deep-set blue eyes whose glance was 
 
 135 
 
136 CHARLES PEGUY 
 
 at once so keen and so gentle, often so quizzical, 
 sometimes so mystically tender, and sometimes so 
 irritable and angry. 
 
 ' Un petit homme barbu (said Barr^s) un paysan, 
 sobre, poll, circonspect, defiant et dou6 du sens 
 de I'amitie, bien camp6 sur la terre, et toujours 
 pr6t a partir en plein ciel. C'6tait un petit homme 
 terne et lent, de qui se d^gageait un merveilleux 
 rayonnement.' 
 
 He seemed to me like some preaching friar of 
 the Middle Ages, vowed to Dame Poverty; and, 
 for himself, content with a crust in his wallet, — 
 a wretched hving picked up as he went along the 
 roads, yet, where his Order was concerned, insatiable, 
 a relentless beggar for the Love of God. Pitiless 
 to any human hobby or pursuit of yours which 
 did not square with that sublimer hobby and 
 pursuit of his; himself disinterested, and yet in 
 his ardent piety as dauntless an intriguer as any 
 Jesuit of Eugene Sue's; cordial and frank by fits 
 and starts, with that engaging air of rustic sim- 
 plicity and popular plain-deaUng, yet, on the 
 morrow, infinitely wily, full of craft, subtlety, and 
 innocent guile. I thought him (notwithstanding 
 the mysterious, irradiating kindness which beamed 
 from that wonderful glance of his) on the whole 
 a crotchety creature, 'difficile a vivre,' with a 
 temper full of sudden twists and turns and un- 
 suspected asperities. 
 
CHARLES PEGUY 137 
 
 Admirable he was, nevertheless. Patient as a 
 peasant and courageous as an apostle, wise and 
 witty, bitter and gay, P^guy was full of sense and 
 of charity — ^was almost that rarest of geniuses, a 
 saint — and failed there (remaining merely a poet 
 and a hero) chiefly, perhaps, because of that 
 insatiable vanity of his. He hungered and thirsted 
 not only after righteousness, but after praise. And 
 in his hfetime he never had his due share of it. 
 That meed so scantily meted I might in some small 
 degree have swelled, and now regret my suspended 
 judgment; but Peguy roughed me up in every 
 fibre, and I disapproved of him almost as much 
 as I admired him. There was something of Rousseau 
 in the fiery little autodidact with his penetrating 
 delicacy of sentiment, and that sore vanity of his 
 as touchy as a gouty foot which always fears the 
 man across the way may stumble on it. When 
 that aching place was hurt, the poet, so exquisite 
 in his sense of friendship, so abundant in his 
 recognition of encouragement, would surprise 
 those most who knew him best by certain restive 
 or morbid quarrels — the blemishes of a too sensitive 
 temperament. 
 
 Despite this temperament, which was not great, 
 there was something really great and grand in 
 Peguy. There was in him the most generous passion 
 of rescue — ^the desire at all risks to rush in and 
 save. The grandeur and misery of Man and his 
 need of salvation was the idea which dominated 
 all his life. P^guy was a mystic; Time was nothing 
 
 F.W. L 
 
138 CHARLES PEGUY 
 
 to him, and he was sincere in saying that an act 
 of rescue such as that which cost him his Ufe was 
 worth a career of thirty years. Yes, Peguy was a 
 mystic, and one of the real, the greater race, no 
 romantic idealist, not at all vague or dreamy, but 
 positive and practical and intensely ahve to every 
 detail, because every fact in nature (and indeed 
 all the best things in industry and in art) appeared 
 to him, in Meister Eckhart's phrase, 'the words of 
 God,' and therefore infinitely precious and important. 
 One day that his friend and mine, Daniel Halevy, 
 that subtle and yet substantial critic, found him 
 reading Dante's Paradiso, in view of a certain 
 Mystery he meant to write : Le Propre de I'Esper- 
 ance (and the part, the lot, of Hope is Paradise), 
 M. Halevy asked the audacious poet if those 
 whirling worlds of Dante's and all those whorls 
 of singing aureoled angels did not inspire him 
 with at least a certain vertigo? 'Not at all,' 
 replied Pdguy. ' My Paradise will be quite different.' 
 
 ' " II y aura dans mon Paradis des choses reelles. 
 . . . Toutes les cathedrales." . . . Et il faisait 
 avec les deux mains le geste d'y poser quelque 
 chose. " Je les y mettrai." ' 
 
 And in fact (continues M. Hal6vy in the letter from 
 which I am quoting) P6guy would have admitted 
 to his Paradise, not only the great Cathedrals, but 
 anything perfect in its own peculiar sphere. For 
 instance, he adduces : — 
 
CHARLES PEGUY 139 
 
 'this ink with which I am writing to you, which 
 indeed was Peguy's ink, made of the oak, coal- 
 black, indeUble; and his pens — they too would 
 have gone into his Paradise, certainly, aU his pens ! 
 You have understood I am sure; Peguy extends 
 the future life, not only to souls and sentiments, 
 but to all that has achieved existence; a resur- 
 rection not only of the flesh but of the things 
 made, cherished, and perfected by man on earth.' 
 
 It was more or less Swedenborg's Paradise. In 
 Peguy's eyes the soul vivified and transfigured 
 and made aUve all that it touched. Hence his utter 
 incomprehension of all attempts to examine matter 
 that the soul had not transfigured, his withering 
 contempt for science and scientists, the scorn he 
 would pour on those miserable insects, the ' puissants 
 millepieds' of the University, in their laboratories 
 and archives : — 
 
 ' Et ce ne sera pas ces distingues cloportes 
 Qui viendront nous chercher dans notre enterre- 
 
 ment. . . . 
 Et ce ne sera pas par leur usage externe 
 Que nous nous leverons de notre pourriture; 
 Mais la Foi qui nous sauve et seule nous discerne 
 Saura nous retrouver dans la fange et I'ordure.' 
 
 {Eve.) 
 
 What discussions I have had with Daniel Halevy 
 concerning the final value of this poem of Eve, 
 whose mighty jog-trot extends interminably over 
 
140 CHARLES PEGUY 
 
 a length which exceeds the Odyssey and the Iliad 
 together ! My friend, to whose opmion I attach 
 the greatest weight, insists on ranking P6guy with 
 Victor Hugo for poetry and with Rabelais for prose ! 
 And no doubt he emphasises his expressions in 
 order to spur my tranquil spirit to the fray. Indeed 
 the incitement never yet failed of its effect; I rush 
 to the encounter; sometimes, at the point of the 
 bayonet, M. Halevy recedes from his position as 
 regards Victor Hugo; but he maintains unshaken 
 that comparison with the creator of Pantagruel. 
 
 Well, all that is vain; Peguy now will never fiU 
 his measure. His monument is a broken column, 
 Hke those we see in cemeteries. In these brief 
 passages of recollection, I may not even stay to 
 point out the extraordinary design and intention 
 of that monument; nor to quote that prose, surely 
 unlike any other prose, which creeps up, wave after 
 wave, with infinite repetitions and over-lappings, 
 until, Hke the tide on the strand, it has submerged 
 and sucked in all the subj ect it meant to cover. How, 
 in two words, could I give an idea of that style? 
 
 P6guy is a great prose writer, a wonderful wielder 
 of image and trope, a master juggler with all the 
 intricacies of French syntax. And the nation which 
 produced Agrippa d'Aubign6, Pascal, Voltaire, 
 has always loved the prose of a brisk polemic. 
 The prose works of P^guy are due to polemics. 
 And he lays into his enemy with a dexterity, a 
 surety, a variety of attack unrivalled — ^here a 
 shower of swift and sudden blows, there a slow 
 
CHARLES PEGUY 141 
 
 and paralysing envelopment of the adversary. 
 P6guy is an incomparable wrestler. 
 
 For the rest, shall we say that Peguy was the 
 Walt Whitman of France? ShaU we translate 
 him into English under the name of Carlyle — or 
 even W. E. Henley? There was something of all 
 of them in the irascible, quizzical, and lovable 
 ideaUst whose life was one long struggle against 
 conventional standards and a conventional style; 
 against middle-class prosperity, modern commodities 
 (generally 'tout le confort moderne'); against 
 the preferences of a well-to-do democracy; against 
 also, and no less, Parliamentary ideals; documen- 
 tary historical methods and culture; and, compendi- 
 ously and inclusively, all that is political as opposed 
 to mystical, aU that is temporal as opposed to 
 spiritual, all that is matter as opposed to soul, all 
 that is personal as opposed to general, and, one may 
 add by extension, aU that is rich as opposed to all 
 that is honourably, contentedly, and modestly poor. 
 
 With these dispositions it is natural that Peguy 
 should have begun life as a Socialist. Born of 
 humble stock in 1874 (on those prosperous banks 
 of Loire where the humblest have all things pleasant 
 and comely about them, and are themselves men 
 of a slow, wise wit and kindly culture) Peguy rose 
 from class to class, from board school to training 
 college, untU at twenty he found himself at the 
 University of Paris, one of the future glories of 
 the Ecole Normale. In the old house of the Rue 
 d'Ulm he wrote his first poem, Jeanne d'Arc (for 
 
142 CHARLES PEGUY 
 
 already this son of Orleans was possessed by the 
 memory of the Maid), of which the singular dedi- 
 cation reflects not only his young ideas of fraternal 
 democracy, but that extraordinary tide-like style, 
 creeping on inch by inch, wave by wave, until it 
 submerge the whole ground of the matter, which 
 Paris, in later days, was so often to admire, to 
 praise, or to deride : — 
 
 ' A toutes celles et a tous ceux qui auront vecu, 
 A tout celles et a tous ceux qui seront morts 
 
 pour tacher de porter remade au mal 
 
 universel; 
 En particulier, 
 
 'A toutes celles et k tous ceux qui auront v6cu 
 
 leur vie humaine, 
 A toutes celles et a tous ceux qui seront morts 
 
 de leur mort humaine, 
 pour tacher de porter remade au mal universel 
 
 humain. 
 
 'Parmi eux, 
 A toutes celles et k tous ceux qui auront v6cu 
 
 leur vie humaine, 
 A toutes celles et a tous ceux qui seront mort de 
 leur mort humaine 
 pour r^tablissement de la R^pubUque Social- 
 
 iste universelle, 
 ce po^me est d6di6. 
 Prenne k pr&ent sa part de la dedicace qui 
 voudra ! ' 
 
CHARLES PEGUY 143 
 
 'Tacher de porter remede au mal universel 
 humain' : To attempt to ease the universal disease 
 of humanity ! All P^guy is there ! As time went 
 on, he ceased to believe in the establishment of the 
 universal Socialist Republic; and, indeed, although 
 ineradicably attached to the Republican ideal, he 
 became increasingly anti-radical, anti-democratic, 
 almost tending towards the military, and aristo- 
 cratic theory of a State strongly constituted in 
 definite classes, each respectable, respected, and 
 informed with the same sense of national honour 
 and personal self-sacrifice. But Peguy went back 
 on no word of that early dedication. He simply 
 made over, so to speak, his stock in the universal 
 SociaHst RepubHc to the credit of the Catholic 
 Church. For before Claudel, before Francis Jammes, 
 after Bnmeti^re (or we should rather say along 
 with him) Peguy suffered a conversion to the faith 
 of his fathers. 
 
 Yet such was his respect for the individual 
 conscience, that he continued, in the eyes of the 
 Church, to live in sin. His wife, the daughter of 
 a Socialist, was a Free-thinker; she had never been 
 baptized; she had married Peguy before the Mayor 
 of her Commune and not before the priest of her 
 parish; she had not followed him in his conversion 
 and stUl maintained her rights. P6guy, that 
 arch-persuader, could not shake her. And, since 
 the indissolubility of the marriage-tie was the very 
 cornerstone of Peguy's social doctrine, he continued 
 to live with this free-souled woman, who shared 
 
144 CHARLES PEGUY 
 
 his life but not his faith, in an unblessed union, 
 that the Church condemned; his children were 
 not baptized. Rome bade him bring them into 
 her fold. Peguy, in his pride of pater-familias, 
 upheld his claim to consider the convictions of 
 their mother. Deprived of the sacraments, he 
 ceased to go to Church, while stiU continuing to 
 believe and pray. . . . Anti-clerical and ardently 
 Catholic; tenderly preoccupied with his children's 
 welfare and yet accepting for them that which his 
 new-found creed must have made him conceive 
 as the most dreadful risk of all — such was the 
 stubborn and irascible convert whom the Church 
 honours in his death, but whom in his life- 
 time she covered with reprimands and ardent 
 reproaches. 
 
 Such was P^guy in his life — an enigmatic being; 
 nor was he less difficult to appreciate in his art, 
 which attempts to enlarge our sensibility and 
 quicken our moral vision much in the same way 
 as instantaneous photography has increased and 
 instructed our sense of sight. I am the first to 
 concede that this art of his (which proceeds, 
 perhaps, rather from Dostoieffsky than from any 
 great French tradition) appears, in its disconcerting 
 diversity, as one of the most interesting phenomena 
 of a new age. It is full of audacity, interest, genius, 
 adventure. But is it an art? Let us open any 
 page of P^guy and take at. random a charming 
 page, where the book opens, p. 63 of the Porche 
 de la Detixieme Veriu : — 
 
CHARLES PEGUY 145 
 
 ' Et pourtant on est si fier d'avoir des enfants ! 
 (Mais les hommes ne sont pas jaloux) : 
 Et de les voir manger, et de les voir grandir. 
 Et le soir de les voir dormir comme des 
 
 anges. 
 Et de les embrasser le matin et le soir et a 
 
 midi. 
 Juste au milieu des cheveux. 
 Quand ils baissent innocemment la tete comme 
 
 un poulain qui baisse le tfete. 
 Aussi souples comme un poulain, se jouant 
 
 comme un poulain. 
 Aussi souples du cou et de la nuque. Et de 
 
 tout le corps, et du dos. 
 Comme une tige bien souple et bien montante 
 
 d'une plante vigoureuse. 
 D'une jeune plante. 
 Comme la tige m^me de la montante esper- 
 
 ance ! 
 lis courbent le dos en riant comme un jeune, 
 
 comme un beau poulain, et le cou, et la 
 
 nuque, et toute la t^te. 
 Pour presenter au pere, au baiser du pere, juste 
 
 le milieu de la t6te. 
 Le milieu de la t6te, la naissance, I'origine, le 
 
 point d'origine des cheveux. 
 Ce point, juste au milieu de la t6te, ce centre, 
 
 d'ou tous les cheveux partent en tournant, 
 
 en rond, en spirale. 
 (^a les amuse ainsi. 
 lis s'amusent tout le temps.' 
 
146 CHARLES PEGUY 
 
 The volume, the sensitiveness, the stammering 
 reiteration, the precision, the tenderness, the 
 subtlety of Peguy are all in this passage. One 
 would say an artist of genius, afflicted with general 
 paralysis, attempting to describe a miraculous 
 vision. And he is telling us that a father kisses 
 his small boy on the crown of his cropped little 
 pate. And this passage of Peguy's is no more 
 extraordinary than any other passage of Peguy's 
 on any other possible subject. Imagine Walt 
 Whitman turned a Christian mystic and endowed 
 with ten thousand times his original flux of 
 words. 
 
 And now, having reHeved my soul, having put 
 the accent on this intolerable defect of our poet's 
 — and it is almost, to my thinking, a redhibitory 
 vice — let me turn to his bright side and discover 
 what it is that attracts to him so many and such 
 distinguished admirers. 
 
 It is, first of all, a touch on the canvas, a liquid 
 and a living palette, an animation and abundance 
 of composition which, in his too rare happy 
 moments, suggest some large and brilliant sketch 
 of the school of Rubens. Take the opening quatrains 
 of the poem to which I have referred; let us 
 open Eve : — 
 
 'O m6re ensevelie hors du premier jardin 
 Vous n'avez plus connu ce climat de la grice, 
 Et la vasque et la source et la haute terrasse, 
 Et le premier soleil sur le premier matin. 
 
CHARLES PEGUY 147 
 
 'Et les bondissements de la biche et du daim 
 Nouant et denouant leur course fraternelle, 
 Et courant et sautant et s'arretant soudain 
 Pour mieux commemorer leur vigueur etemelle.' 
 
 There is, in Peguy at his best, something not so 
 much antique as unchanged since ancient times, 
 like the pronunciation of certain peasants; and 
 this something makes us understand how there 
 once was in France a people of artists, the unknown, 
 unnamed, immortal builders of the great Gothic 
 cathedrals; we almost believe there might still be 
 such in reading his verse. 
 
 There is also in Peguy at his best a peculiar 
 humanity which makes me often remember those 
 lines of Mrs Browning concerning her favourite 
 Greek poet : — 
 
 'Our Euripides the Human 
 With his droppings of warm tears,* 
 
 and an imagination so naturally and naively 
 reUgious that it would enchant me but for its 
 famiharity. No Baptist minister over his tea and 
 muffins, is on more intimate terms with the Eternal. 
 The interminable poem of Eve (as long — ^but 
 not as beautiful ! as the Iliad and the Odyssey 
 united) fulminates against the Intellectuals of 
 France in an outburst of rhetoric which too often 
 degenerates into mere violence. P6guy is more 
 really poetic in his prose. The description of rural 
 
148 CHARLES PEGUY 
 
 life on the banks of the Loire, in Victor-Marie, 
 Comte Hugo; the death of Bernard Lazare in Notre 
 Jeunesse; above all, the long but the inspired 
 elevations and prayers of Jeannette — especially 
 the conversation with her little fourteen-year-old 
 friend Hanorette (which we keep in our remem- 
 brance along with the dialogue of Antigone and 
 Ismene, and with the scene in the Gospel of Martha 
 and Mary, as a perfect characterisation of the two 
 great types of Charity and Piety) — are to our 
 thinking far more interpretative of Peguy's true 
 genius than the mighty jog-trot of his later muse. 
 Still there is a power and an eloquence in that. 
 So far as the meaning goes, all his voluminous out- 
 pourings have the same. There is but one thing 
 needful, and that is to be a hero or a saint. Prefer- 
 ably, perhaps, a hero ! 
 
 'Ainsi Dieu ne salt pas, ainsi le divin maitre 
 
 Ne sait quel retenir et placer hors du Ueu, 
 Et pour lequel tenir, et s'U faut vraiment mettre 
 L' amour de la patrie apr^s 1' amour de Dieu.' 
 
 The saints that P6guy sang were patriot saints : 
 Genevieve, who preserved the city of Paris from 
 the Huns of Attila; Jeanne, who hunted the English 
 out of France. Of all glories, of aU honours, that 
 dearest to this poet was military glory and national 
 honour — 
 
 'II n'y a rien k faire a cela, et il n'y a rien a 
 dire. Le soldat mesure la quantite de terre ou 
 
CHARLES PEGUY 149 
 
 on parle une langue, ou regnent des moeurs, un 
 esprit, une ame, un culte, une race. Le soldat 
 mesure la quantity de terre ou une ame pent respirer. 
 Le soldat mesure la quantite de terra ou un peuple 
 ne meiirt pas. 
 
 This was Peguy's firm conviction : no duty so 
 important as the military duty ! When the war 
 broke out, man of forty as he was and father of 
 a struggling family — ^man, too, much engrossed 
 and overworked by his triple occupation as poet, 
 prose-writer, and pubhsher — ^he changed from the 
 Territorials into a regiment sent on active service 
 to the front. 'No man hath greater love than 
 this. . . .' 
 
 Thanks to the recital of one of his soldiers, Victor 
 Bondon, we can witness the fall— or rather I would 
 say the assumption — of the poet and brother of 
 Joan of Arc. For he too fell in driving the invader 
 out of France ! There is an extraordinary breath 
 of heroism in this page of an unknown private 
 soldier relating the end of a great man. I cannot 
 do better than translate it here, with some abridg- 
 ments and suppressions : — 
 
 'On the 5th September in the morning, the 
 55th division of the army of Paris was ranged on 
 the left of the forces which had received the general 
 order, " Die where you stand, rather than retreat." 
 In front of us, on the wooded hills that reach 
 from Dammartin to Meaux, von Kliick and his 
 
ISO CHARLES PEGUY 
 
 Boches, who had followed us step by step from 
 Roye during our terrible retreat, lay in wait 
 for us, hidden in their trenches, like beasts of 
 prey. 
 
 'The heat was tropical; the battalion halted a 
 moment at the pretty village of Nantouillet. I see 
 again, with the mind's eye, our dear Lieutenant 
 P^guy, seated on a stone, white with dust (as indeed 
 we all were), covered with sweat, his beard rough 
 and shaggy, his eyes shining behind his pince-nez. 
 Such he was, as we had seen him in Lorraine during 
 the retreat, impervious to fatigue, brave under a 
 storm of shells, going from one to another of his 
 men with a cheering word for each throughout the 
 whole length of our company (the 19th), sharing 
 our rations (and we eat as a rule one day in three), 
 never complaining despite his forty years, as young 
 as the youngest, knowing just the right way to 
 take the Parisians that we were, heartening the 
 discouraged with a word, satirical enough some- 
 times, but more often a friendly quizzical quip, 
 always brave, always an example; ah, yes ! I 
 see again our dear lieutenant, bidding us fight in 
 hope, raising our flagging spirits in an hour when 
 many were near despairing, with the assurance 
 of his own absolute confidence in our final 
 victory.' 
 
 'At last the sun began to slope towards evening; 
 it was five o'clock. After four hours' incessant 
 fire, our 75 's had silenced the Prussian batteries on 
 the ridge, and the infantry were ordered to attack 
 
CHARLES PEGUY 151 
 
 their entrenchments. The black troops from 
 Morocco, in what had seemed an invincible rush, 
 had tried once, and failed. Now Peguy's company 
 starts in skirmishing order; the German batteries 
 are quiet, but when our men reach the ridge they 
 are greeted by a storm of bullets. The ground is 
 covered with tangled, down-trodden oats that 
 catch the feet; and in front, just on a level with 
 their heads, that burst of fire. Peguy's voice, 
 ringing and glad, commands the assault : " Feu ! 
 En avant ! . . . 
 
 ' Ah ! cette fois c'est fini de rire. Escaladant le 
 talus et rasant le sol, courbes en deux, pour offrir 
 moins de prise aux baUes, nous courons a I'assaut. 
 . . . Le capitaine Guerin, M. de la Cornilliere, sont 
 tues raides, " Couchez-vous (hurle Peguy) et feu 
 a volonte ! " mais lui-m^me reste debout, la lor- 
 gnette a la main, dirigeant notre tir, heroique dans 
 I'enfer. 
 
 ' Nous tirons comme des enrages, noirs de poudre, 
 le fusil nous brulant les doigts. . . . Peguy est 
 toujours debout, malgre nos cris de " Couchez- 
 vous," glorieux fou dans sa bravoure. Le plupart 
 d'entre nous n'ont plus de sac, perdu lors de la 
 retraite, et le sac, en ce moment, est un pr^cieux 
 abri. Et la voix du heutenant crie toujours : 
 " Tirez ! Tirez ! Nom de Dieu ! " D'aucuns se 
 plaignent : " Nous n'avons plus de sac, mon 
 lieutenant, nous aliens tous y passer ! " " Qa ne 
 fait rien ! (crie Peguy dans la temp^te qui siffle). 
 Moi non plus ! Je n'en ai pas, vous voyez. Tirez 
 
152 CHARLES PEGUY 
 
 tou jours ! " Et il se dresse comme un d^fi a la 
 mitraille, semblant appeler cette mort qu'il glorifiait 
 dans ses vers. Au m^me instant, une balle meur- 
 triere fracasse la tfite de ce heros, brise ce front 
 genereux et noble. II est tombe, sans un cri, 
 ayant eu I'ultime vision de la victoire proche; et 
 quand, cent metres plus loin, bondissant comme un 
 forcen6, je jette derriere moi un rapide coup d'oeil 
 alarme, j'apergois la-bas, comme une tache noire 
 au milieu de tant d'autres, le corps de ce brave, 
 de notre cher lieutenant.' 
 
 And here for a threnody let me quote that noble 
 psalm, now familiar to the soldiers of France, 
 which, until P^guy's death, lay hidden in that vast 
 storehouse of lumber and treasure, the poem of 
 Eve. Be sure it wiU remain for ever among the 
 ultimate residue — ^the pure regulus — of all that has 
 been written on the war. And these stanzas were 
 written before the battle was declared, since Peguy 
 (and therein hes his true grandeur) was a prophet 
 rather than a poet. 
 
 'Heureux ceux qui sont morts pour la terre 
 
 charnelle, 
 Mais pourvu que ce fiit dans une juste 
 
 guerre; 
 Heureux ceux qui sont morts pour quatre coins 
 
 de terre, 
 Heureux ceux qui sont morts d'une mort 
 
 solennelle. 
 
CHARLES PEGUY 153 
 
 'Heureux ceux qui sont morts dans les grandes 
 
 batailles. 
 Couches dessus le sol k la face de Dieu; 
 Heureux ceux qui sont morts sur un dernier 
 
 haut lieu 
 Parmi tout I'appareil des grandes fun6railles. 
 
 'Heureiix ceux qui sont morts pour des cit^s 
 
 charneUes, 
 Car elles sont le corps de la cit^ de Dieu; 
 Heureux ceux qui sont morts pour leur atre et 
 
 leur feu 
 Et les pauvres honneurs des maisons paternelles. 
 
 'Heureux ceux qui sont morts, car ils sont 
 
 retoumes 
 Dans la premiere argile et la premiere terre; 
 Heureux ceux qui sont morts dans une juste 
 
 guerre; 
 Heureux les 6pis murs et les hl6s moissonn6s ! ' 
 
 'Qtii Dieu mette avec eux dans le juste plateau 
 Ce qu'ils ont tant aime : quelques grammes de 
 
 terre; 
 Un peu de cette vigne, un peu de ce coteau, 
 Un peu de ce ravin sauvage et solitaire. 
 
 ' Mere, voici vos fils qui se sont tant battus ! 
 Qu'ils ne soient pas peses comme Dieu pdse un 
 
 ange : 
 Que Dieu mette avec eux un peu de cette f ange 
 Qu'ils ^taient en principe et sont redevenus. ... 
 F.w. ^ 
 
154 CHARLES PEGUY 
 
 And, as we say a collect after singing an anthem, 
 let us conclude, in memory of all those heroic com- 
 rades that fell with Peguy in the battle, with a noble 
 passage from his Mystery of the Holy Innocents : — 
 
 'Une gdn^ration d'hommes (dit Dieu). 
 
 'Une promotion, c'est comme une belle longue 
 vague qui s'avance d'un bout a I'autre sur un 
 mfeme front et qui d'un seul coup d'un bout a 
 I'autre. 
 
 'Toute ensemble deferle sur le rivage de la mer. 
 
 'Ainsi une generation, une promotion, est une 
 vague d'hommes. 
 
 'Tout ensemble elle s'avance sur un meme front. 
 
 'Et toute ensemble elle s'^croule comme une 
 muraille d'eau quand elle touche au rivage eternal. 
 
 Thus P^guy died with the generation that he 
 led to victory.^ 
 
 - 1 refer those of my readers, who wish to learn more of 
 P6guy, to my friend Daniel HaUvy's volume : Charles Piguy 
 et les Cahiers de la Quinzaine, Payot et Cie, Paris, 1919. 
 
ERNEST PSICHARI 
 
 I THINK that P6guy never learned the death of his 
 young friend, Ernest Psichari; for the retreat of 
 Charleroi was, after all, such a Httle while before 
 the battle of the Marne, and news in those difficult 
 days travelled so slowly. . . . One of Peguy's 
 last preoccupations was the hope of meeting Ernest 
 on the road to battle, and in fact they must have 
 been in Lorraine together, but no chance encounter 
 by road or rail set the two friends face to face. 
 They both started for the front in the same mood 
 of heroic exaltation : — 
 
 'Si je tombe (said Peguy), ne me pleurez pas. 
 Ce que je vais faire vaut trente ans de travail.' 
 
 But the first to fall was Ernest Psichari. I 
 knew him root and branch — knew his parents and 
 grandparents before him, and the earUest image 
 that I preserve of him (since the first of aU are 
 forgotten) is of a Httle lad between eight and nine 
 years of age, unaware of my presence in his grand- 
 mother's drawing-room, as he talks to his little 
 brother in the twiHght : 'When I am grown up 
 (says Ernest) I shall be a great man ! Et j'aurai 
 ma statue sur tons les marches de France ! ' And 
 the little one of seven ripples with laughter at 
 Ernest's having so satisfactorily 'gone one better' : 
 'II y a du chemin a faire, mon fr^re ! (says he). 
 
 155 
 
156 ERNEST PSICHARI 
 
 II y a bien de chemin a f aire ! ' Whereat I too 
 laughed and broke the spell, the two httle boys 
 informing me that, while waiting for their vioUn- 
 lesson, 'on s'amusait a raconter des blagues.' 
 
 Even in Ernest's fun there was a desire of 
 greatness; that, and an intense sensibility, a rare 
 faculty of moral imagination, were what I chiefly 
 noticed in the child, of whom I saw less and less 
 as his studies absorbed him more and more : 
 youths between twelve and twenty have little 
 time for their mother's friends. A quiet young 
 man, with charming, Hving eyes, and in his whole 
 aspect something ardent, firm, and grave : that 
 is all that Ernest Psichari was to me. 
 
 And then came a bolt from the blue. It was 
 on the morrow of the Dreyius case when France 
 was divided into two camps, and each faction 
 feverishly counted its men and the great families 
 which centraUsed these men on either side. As 
 Daniel Hal6vy wrote, in a passage already cele- 
 brated : ' Paris a ses families conmie Florence eut 
 les siennes, et ses maisons, non couronnees de tours, 
 n'en abritent pas moins des factions guerriferes.' 
 Ernest was born into one of these houses — one of 
 the most important to the Liberals— for those 
 grandparents of his (both dead before that shock 
 of schism shook France to her foundations), those 
 grandparents of whom I have written, were Ernest 
 Renan and his wife. And his father was Jean 
 Psichari, a Greek philologist of most 'advanced' 
 opinions. It came, therefore, almost as a defection. 
 
ERNEST PSICHARI 157 
 
 an apostasy, when the rumour spread in the ruffled 
 circles of the Dreyfusards that Ernest Psichari 
 had gone into the Army— that Renan's grandson, 
 at nineteen, had enhsted as a volunteer in the 
 Colonial Artillery. 
 
 Although myself a Dreyfusard with the best of 
 them, I could not feel hurt by this change of front, 
 which seemed to me just the counterpart of Renan's 
 own conversion. Given a young man with a passion 
 for justice, the more you treat him as a partisan, 
 the more his mind, by some dim process of uncon- 
 scious cerebration, will conjure up the arguments 
 for the other side. Besides Renan, although he 
 gave his casting vote to the Liberals, exhaled 
 often an exquisite regret in his vision of the other 
 side. He finally voted for Caliban; but few writers 
 have set forth more nobly the arguments for the 
 aristocratic ideal. Renan's mind was singularly 
 full. Imagine a pair of scales, either balance 
 heaped high, — even the hghter of them was fiUed 
 with more reasons to believe, to rule, and to con- 
 quer than many a fanatic could furnish forth; it 
 is true the reasons for doubting turned the scale. 
 The man who sacrificed everything to Truth and 
 Liberty was just the man to understand the young 
 apostle of Force and Faith; he too had felt the 
 spell of Force and Faith ! Ernest Psichari — grave, 
 straightforward, active, patient — ^represented the 
 France of to-day in its modern cult of sacrifice and 
 duty, even as the grandsire stood for his own 
 generation. The sjnnbols are different, but the 
 
158 ERNEST PSICHARI 
 
 character is much the same — ^a Uke curiosity, an 
 equal contempt for worldly goods and mundane 
 honours, a conviction that Ufe is worth living only 
 when employed in some vast impersonal service. The 
 wise Merlin of the Nineteenth Century would have 
 smiled : ' ah ! cher enfant, combien vous avez raison ! ' 
 
 'Le fils a pris le parti de ses peres contre son 
 pfere'; so Ernest himself defined the situation in 
 his Appel des Armes. Just as his Breton ancestors, 
 curious of the vast world on the other side the seas, 
 most incurious of worldly advancement, would 
 sail the world over in the Service of the State, 
 before the mast, seamen content with the salt air 
 and their duty, so this grandson of theirs spent five 
 years with his cannon in the Congo, a non-com- 
 missioned officer. When at twenty-four years oi 
 age he returned to Paris, he could scarcely under- 
 stand why his friends pressed him to enter a school 
 for of&cers. ' One can serve the country as well in the 
 ranks; one is perhaps more useful ! ' But he yielded 
 to his mother — ^to her, indeed, he always jdelded. 
 
 How I regret that during those eighteen months 
 which the young soldier spent at Versailles, in 
 order to obtain his brevet of second-lieutenant, I 
 remained unaware of his presence in France ! 
 P^guy has left an eloquent description of his friend 
 and young alumnus, telling how he Hved hke a 
 king in the palace of the Ecole MUitaire, but a 
 step from the dome of the Invalides whither in the 
 summer mornings, in the freshness of the dawn, 
 he used to escort his slender little three-inch cannon 
 
ERNEST PSICHARI 159 
 
 — 'ses 75, ces petits jeunes gens de canons modernes, 
 ces gringalets de canons modernes, au corps 
 d'insecte, aux roues comme des pattes d'araignees' 
 — ^filing them off under the shadow of the mon- 
 strous historic artillery of the great Pensioners' 
 Hospital, the caimon of Fontenoy and Malplaquet, 
 bronze mastodons and leviathans of an earlier 
 age. I can imagine Ernest, 'I'homme au regard 
 pur' (as Peguy calls him); I can see him, a young 
 Hippolytus of the School of War, in my mind's eye 
 — but I did not see him in the world of facts. 
 Before I learned of his presence in my neighbour- 
 hood he had left — ^he and his battery — for the 
 deserts of Mauritania, and there, in the desolate 
 tropical country that hes between the burning 
 plains of Senegal and the sands of the Sahara, he 
 spent three happy years. He sent home a Httle 
 book — Terres de soleil et de sommeil — ^which marked 
 the awakening of his hterary gift; but the real 
 event of those three years, for Ernest, was his 
 ardent conversion to the Catholic Church. Ernest 
 was a mystic; the only hfe possible to his insatiable 
 heart was the spiritual hfe; and in the Sacraments 
 he sought that assurance of a world beyond our 
 own, in constant communication with our own, 
 which other minds may find by other means. His 
 fervour, his faith, was henceforth a remedy for 
 all his sins and all his sorrows; and, young as he was, 
 he had had his sorrows — doubtless, also, his sins. 
 
 It was, I think, in the end of 1912 that Ernest 
 left that immense and mortal splendour of the 
 
i6o ERNEST PSICHAM 
 
 Sahara and came back to France, bringing with 
 him a short miUtary novel, L'Appel des Armes, 
 which (coming after P6guy's elaborate psean) 
 received, on its publication in 1913, an honourable, 
 a more than honourable, welcome. ... I was one 
 of the welcomers. Few things are pleasanter to 
 the hoary critic than the eclosion of a fresh young 
 talent, and naturally all the more when that talent 
 flowers on a dear familiar stem. On this occasion 
 I renewed my long-interrupted friendship with the 
 young author, and we promised ourselves a more 
 frequent communication of our ideas. Fate how- 
 ever, decided otherwise. Ernest and his battery 
 were sent to the cliffs of Cherbourg. And, a year 
 later the great war began. . . . 
 
 Thus it happens that Ernest Psichari's fame must 
 rest on three small volumes, of which the finest by 
 far appeared after his death — that Voyage du 
 Centurion, which is the unforgettable record of a 
 mystic's conversion in the blazing African desert. 
 There is less genius and less force in this earlier, 
 tiny volume called I'Appel des Armes, so full of 
 inexperience, of an ardent evident parti-pris, but 
 also of a sincerity, a hving sensibihty, a moral 
 earnestness such that I would recommend it to the 
 English reader (and I am sure there are many 
 such) puzzled by the great spirit, the heroic stead- 
 fastness that the French have shown in this war, 
 for which he finds little warrant in the 'yellow- 
 backs' on his table. Among many others, this brief 
 record of the mind and conscience of a young 
 
ERNEST PSICHARI i6i 
 
 French officer is a document d, I'appui of no mean 
 value. It relates the story of a youth of twenty 
 who turns from the Radical, humanitarian views of 
 his father, the village schoolmaster, to find salvation 
 (for it is, in his case, really a sort of religious con- 
 version, a change of heart) as a soldier in Africa. And 
 the reader wiU remark here — as also in the last novels 
 of Emile NoUy — an almost mystical view of military 
 matters recalling the recent German theories. 
 
 ' " Croyez bien," r6pondait Nangds, " que la 
 force est toujours du cote du droit." 
 
 ' L'instituteur se recriait : — 
 
 ' " Mais certainement," expliquait Timothee. 
 " Qu'est-ce que la force? C'est I'inteUigence, la 
 tenacite, c'est la patience, c'est I'habilete, c'est 
 la courage, c'est la volonte. Voila, Vincent, les 
 facteurs de la force. Voila les fibres du tissu. . Ne 
 croyez-vous pas qu'avec toutes les vertus qui la 
 composent, la force n'a pas de grandes chance 
 d' avoir toujours le droit pour elle?" 
 
 ' Naturellement, Vincent ne comprenait pas.' 
 [L'Appel des Armes, p. 84.) 
 
 Alas, how soon were events to show our young 
 neophyte that intelligence, that tenacity— that 
 patience, ingenuity, courage, force of will — that 
 the most indisputable military qualities may be 
 associated with inhuman, with indeed a devilish 
 perversity ! But Ernest did not Uve long enough 
 to learn all the ripe iniquity of his enemy. He fell 
 
1 62 ERNEST PSICHARI 
 
 in the very beginning of the war, at Rossignol, on 
 the frontiers of Luxemboiirg, midway between 
 Virton and Montm^dy— quite close to Sedan, in 
 fact; and the Germans thought to make another 
 great haul there. . . . The fight at Rossignol was 
 a sort of southern branch of that terrible battle 
 of Charleroi which no hving European can ever 
 forget. The French Headquarters, perceiving the 
 ruse and danger of the enemy's plan, set on the 
 low hill of Rossignol some twelve thousand men, 
 with orders to hold the heights to the last man 
 and shield the road beneath where the French 
 troops were passing in one constant stream; and 
 the men who died there were not less heroic than 
 those of Thermopylae. Twelve thousand, they 
 were; and I am told that scarce one of them sur- 
 vived. ... A few are prisoners of war in Germany. 
 Picked men, famous regiments, the nearest thing 
 the French possessed to our time-hardened pro- 
 fessional soldiers, for they were the Colonial 
 Infantry and Artillery. The batteries were set 
 up, and then the storm began. They fought all 
 day — thirteen hours — against more than a hundred 
 thousand Germans, holding the passage (one cannot 
 call it a pass, for the hiUs there are too low), and, 
 towards evening, they saw on the horizon a moving 
 gray mass, and thought for a moment that this 
 meant reinforcements. Oh, despair ! they were 
 German reinforcements ! I say, despair ! for such 
 a feeling indeed fills my breast at reading of this 
 supreme deception; but the young officer who 
 
ERNEST PSICHARI 163 
 
 gave this account to Psichari's mother, affirms that 
 even then (feeUng how useful was the part they 
 played) not despair but a noble exhilaration was 
 the intimate feeling of those heroes on the hill. 
 At last the German army, creeping steadily nearer, 
 and distant now by no more than thirty metres, 
 prepared to take the last irreducible French 
 batteries by assault. At this moment Lieutenant X 
 saw Ernest Psichari lead his Captain, grievously 
 wounded, to the poste de secours, immediately 
 returning to face the enemy. He came on with 
 that quick half-racing, half-dancing step which 
 the soldiers call the 'pas gymnastique,' on his face 
 a bright excited smUe, and ran with this springing 
 gait to his battery, standing there a moment, still 
 smiling, as he watched the oncoming mass. And 
 then he fell right across his cannon — slipped heavily 
 to the ground; a baU in the temple had shattered 
 that young head, so full of dreams. 
 
 ' Pourtant, dans sa grande peine, une consolation 
 lui venait. Car il croyait que le sang des martyrs 
 etait utile. Sa conviction etait que rien n'est 
 perdu dans le monde, que tout se reporte et se 
 retrouve au total; ainsi tons les actes sublimes des 
 heros f ormaient pour lui une sorte de capital commun 
 dont les interfits se reversaient obscurement sur 
 des mUliers d'ames inconnues.' 
 
 {L'Appel des Artnes, pp. 295-296.) 
 
 And the blood of the martyrs is the seed of Faith. 
 
EMILE NOLLY 
 
 No man had welcomed the war with greater 
 enthusiasm than Captain D6tanger : he wrote 
 under the pseudonym of Emile Nolly. I was not 
 in Paris on that August morning when he left for 
 Lorraine, eager (he said) 'to water his horse in 
 the Rhine.' But I had laidden him good speed a 
 few years ago, when he set out for Morocco. Shall 
 I ever forget the transfiguration of that moody, 
 noble, saturnine face ? or the gleam in the great 
 light-gray eyes, so often sad, or even morose, and 
 now lit with a wild joy? or the tall, Hthe figure- 
 striding feverishly up and down my little drawing 
 room while, in a torrent of eloquence, the Captain 
 tried to explain to my languid feminine imagina- 
 tion (which can only look on, and listen, and gasp 
 in amazement) 'la joie du combat!' That cam- 
 paign in Morocco brought him chiefly fatigue and 
 disappointment, since he and his black troops 
 had httle fighting to do, and were chiefly employed 
 in convopng from sandy desert to sandy desert 
 the provisions and munitions needed on the front. 
 It brought him also, however, the material for a 
 fine book — a fine, bitter, disenchanted, weary yet 
 energetic book, eminently characteristic of its 
 writer — Gens de Guerre au Maroc. 
 One of his three fine books ! It was not those, 
 164 
 
EMILE NOLLY 165 
 
 however, which brought him the celebrity, almost 
 the fame, on which he was entering when he fell 
 in battle. The ardent soul of D^tanger had thrown 
 his talent overboard, as a wandering apostle might 
 fling from his waUet some useless bauble and go 
 on unencumbered save by his staff and scrip. His 
 last two books, the famous ones — Le Chemin de 
 la Victoire and Le Conquerant — ^have indeed httle 
 literary grace and no sort of style; they are like 
 those varnished Images d'Epinal in cut-out coloured 
 paper which bring to the humblest cottage a sort 
 of symbol of the wars of Napoleon, of the glories 
 of Turenne; or again, hke the Stations of the 
 Cross in some wayside church. They preach a 
 truth so august, and in the author's eyes so neces- 
 sary to salvation, that art is of httle consequence, 
 the one thing needful being to make the meaning 
 plain. That meaning was the same in each : the 
 saving grace of the 'Army, and the glorious fact 
 that any young ne'er-do-weU, any weak dilettante 
 creature even, so he be brave and willing to con- 
 sent to disciphne, may find a personal salvation 
 there, while building a bulwark of glory round his 
 country. 
 
 I never reaUy ventured to tell Emile Nolly what 
 I thought of those books, so I said nothing about 
 them — a language which he perfectly understood 
 and accepted with that grim, not untender smUe 
 of his. No one better than he knew the charm of 
 art and romance. And I imagine he felt a certain 
 fierce pleasure in flinging all that to the winds, 
 
i66 EMILE NOLLY 
 
 in order, as he thought, to be more useful, reach 
 a wider public, and influence it with the directness 
 of a popular sermon. What use, after all, was 
 there in his two stories of Indo-China, or in Gens 
 de Guerre au Maroc} They were incUned, if any- 
 thing, to inspire a morbid pessimism. On the 
 whole, it is the first of his novels which I shall most 
 often re-read — Hiin le Maboul, a book so poignant, 
 clear and mild in its sadness, that it haunts our 
 imagination for years after the last page is closed. 
 No one, perhaps, has so well expressed the peculiar 
 beauty of Tonquin. . . . When, after Egj^pt, Aden, 
 Ceylon, the Frenchman reaches the Delta, his first 
 instinctive expectation is of something stranger 
 still; are we not here at the end of the world? 
 
 ' XSovbs /J.ev H TTjXovpbv "^Kofiev ir^dov, 
 'iKiBriv ts oT/iOv, a^arov eU ifrqidav.' 
 
 But what is this gray land where the silvery 
 winter sunshine floats veiled by an imperceptible 
 haze? Is it Brittany? Or a misty March day in 
 the Landes, when the sun shines? And see, that 
 ruined tower set on the round breast of a hill, with 
 the far-off scaurs and peaks in the background — 
 is it Auvergne? Nor, in the character of the 
 conquered people, does there appear at first the 
 difference that separates the Frenchman from the 
 solemn Arab or the barbarous Kanak; the Annamite, 
 with his wide intelUgence, his keen and quizzical 
 wit, his love of hearth and home, his respect for 
 tradition and his religious indifference, appears at 
 
EMILE NOLLY 167 
 
 once a man and a brother. A certain aloofness 
 adds to his charm. . . . Such was the new and 
 yet half-famiUar world with which Emile NoUy 
 made us acquainted. HiSn le Maboul is a yellow 
 brother of Loti's Mon frere Yves. 
 
 And yet, on reopening the charming book (so 
 appeaUng in its tender hopelessness, its elegant 
 sobriety), I find, even here, the Pragmatist apostle 
 who wrote Nolly's later works ! For what is the 
 nexus of the novel? It is surely the despair of the 
 young French lieutenant when he finds himself 
 impotent to save the native tirailleur who, in an 
 hour of moral anguish, comes to ask his infallible 
 superior 'les paroles qui guerissent.' Alas, with 
 aU his science, the 'Ancestor with the two stripes' 
 does not know the words that save; his philosophy 
 affords him nothing but idle formulas void of faith 
 and healing. And thenceforth his whole system 
 of civiHsation seems to him wanting and inefficacious. 
 For Hito goes out in silence and hangs himself to 
 a banyan-tree. 
 
 Since then NoUy had learned the words that save. 
 He was, I think, no ardent Catholic, like Psichari 
 or Peguy; but his faith in the destinies of human 
 society, his conviction that the army of France 
 is indeed a Salvation Army, not only for Frenchmen, 
 but for his dear Senegalese, for black, red, and 
 yellow — every shade of skin or soul — ^gave him the 
 persuasiveness of the men of Napoleon's army. 
 And he went out into the highways and the by-ways 
 and compelled them to come in. 
 
1 68 EMILE NOLLY 
 
 And now these young men — so much younger 
 than I, who sit by my lonely fire and remember 
 them — these young men with a futiore, as it seemed, 
 are all dead for their country and for the faith 
 that was in them. Their bodies lie in wayside 
 tombs, or in the middle of the fields, with a rough 
 cross over them, and a name traced in. ink that the 
 autumn rains efface. And that name, which was 
 beginning to shine in the literary record of their 
 nation, that name which they looked to biumsh 
 in the course of the next thirty years, can now 
 receive no further lustre. From the personal, 
 individualist point of view, their fame is sacrificed, 
 even as their lives are sacrificed. They are mulcted 
 in their works, as in their race, for, among them 
 all, only P6guy was a father. And, so far as they 
 knew, their immense suffering and sacrifice was in 
 vain. They lie, perhaps, among those dreadful 
 heaps which the shell at once agglomerates and 
 scatters, and from which all individual difference 
 is wiped out. So many of them ! 
 
 The saddest fate of aU, I think, was Emile 
 NoUy's — ^to die so slowly and so painfully of his 
 wounds, in hospital, while the fight in which he 
 longed to join was raging, still undecided 
 
HENRI BARBUSSE 
 
 Before the war, the name of Henri Barbusse was 
 practically unknown. And now he is, of all French 
 writers, the most widely read : he is the Prince of 
 Best-sellers. Bourget has his tens of thousands, 
 his scores of thousands; but Le Feu is in its 250th 
 thousand, L'Enfer in its 200th thousand, and Clartd 
 (pubHshed in January, 1919) had reached its fortieth 
 thousand by the beginning of March. And all 
 these novels have appeared in war time, despite 
 the endless difficulties of book-production. 
 
 What is the reason of this prodigious success? 
 How is it that Barbusse, who was an unknown young 
 poet in 1913, should satisfy to-day the souls of so 
 vast a public. One may say that he has inherited 
 the immense unsatisfied public left desolate since 
 the death of Zola. He has most of Zola's qualities, 
 imagination; a tragic realism that impresses an 
 image lastingly on the reader's brain; and a sort 
 of public passion, rather than public spirit, that 
 makes him feel other men's grievances and wrongs 
 more keenly than his own. Moreover, he has all 
 Zola's faults — and they are of a kind that do not 
 prejudice the sale of a book — ^he has Zola's filth, 
 his sexual obsession; Zola's anarchism, and his 
 Utopias; Zola's abuse of horror in the evocation 
 of physical torture. . 
 
 F.W. 169 N 
 
I70 HENRI BARBUSSE 
 
 L'Enfer, M. Barbusse's first great success, is a 
 really bad book ! a far worse book, I think, than 
 Pot-bouille, with which it invites comparison. 
 Zola showed us an ordinary Paris mansion, or 
 system of 'flats,' and, taking off the roof Asmodeus- 
 wise, revealed on every floor the iniquities it con- 
 tained, and by so doing the novelist sought to 
 demonstrate the corruption of society in its actual 
 form. His earnestness to some extent redeemed 
 his foulness. And the same holds good of Barbusse. 
 But how miserable is his treatment of the theme. 
 He imagines a respectable boarding-house a kind 
 of Maison Vauquer of a less dilapidated sort. The 
 narrator is one of the boarders. In his wall, a cleft 
 or crevice in a panel puts his bedroom into unsus- 
 pected communication with the chamber on the 
 other side. He looks and listens; and what goes 
 on under his spyhole is the unsavoury theme of 
 the volume tersely called : Hell. Debauch, despair, 
 adultery, death, birth; at one moment the consulta- 
 tion of two doctors on a case of cancer; at another, 
 the vigil beside a corpse; such are the things 
 discovered by the peephole of an undreamed-of 
 witness. They are described with a luxury of 
 nastiness which suggests some medical student 
 afflicted with erotomania. He spies upon lust; 
 he prys into the last spasms of pain; his mind is 
 unbalanced. And we imagine him saying to him- 
 self, 'Oh, I'll make your flesh creep and your blood 
 run cold ! ' When he leaves description for theory, 
 he is an Anarchist. Above all, he is a cad, (We 
 
HENRI BARBUSSE 171 
 
 are speaking, of course, of the fictitious narrator, 
 and not of M. Henri Barbusse.) But we must 
 admit that he is a gifted and sensitive cad. That 
 is why, although we devote the book to the flames, 
 we read it first. . . . 
 
 We have heard how Gautama, brought up until 
 adolescence amid the false enchantments of a 
 sequestered palace, one day crossed the threshold 
 and met, ere he had taken twenty steps, a corpse, 
 a leper, and an old man bent double and blind in 
 his decreptitude : Death — Disease — Old Age — and 
 was told it was the common lot. Whereupon 
 Gautama forsook the world and henceforth his 
 conversation was in Heaven. 
 
 M. Barbusse also has met the three spectres, 
 and with them their attendant spirits. Lust and 
 Cruelty. But pity has turned in his heart, not to 
 prayer, but to a passionate anger, a violent reaction 
 against civiUsation as it stands. On every page 
 of this first book he shouts 'FoUow your instincts ! 
 Eat, drink, and make merry, for to-morrow you 
 die ! ' And sotto voce he seems to add : ' Destroy ! 
 lest ye be destroyed ! ' 
 
 The popularity of Barbusse is therefore a dis- 
 quieting symptom, but aU his novels are not as 
 outrageous as L'Enfer. In Le Feu he discovered a 
 theme exactly suited to his genius. Le Feu is 
 perhaps the only war book which really gives a 
 living image of the war. It is unique and unforget- 
 table. L'Enfer, as I have said, is a bad book; 
 but Le Feu, with all its faults, is a masterpiece. 
 
172 HENRI BARBUSSE 
 
 It is the journal of a squad — ^fifteen or a dozen 
 common soldiers in the trenches; their infinite 
 pettiness, their infinite grandeur; the horrors they 
 succumb to or surmount. The first page shows 
 the strange moats or Uving weUs of the trenches 
 — and the strange creatures (huge bears, no doubt) 
 who growl and waddle and stumble therein — 'des 
 espfeces d'ours qui pataugent et grognent. C'est 
 nous.' 
 
 The book is a series of episodes rather than a 
 novel. Strange how this form— which the French 
 call the ' Chest-of-Drawers,' the roman-d-tiroirs, 
 comprising a set of independent though sequestered 
 events contained in a solid framework — ^has taken 
 possession of French literature. M. Duhamel also 
 employs it. Jean-Christophe was a roman-d-tiroirs. 
 Most popular during the Middle Ages and Renais- 
 sance (both the Divine Comedy and Don Quixote 
 are on this model), the Nineteenth Century preferred 
 the firm organic contexture of the novel of character. 
 La Cousine Bette or Madame Bovary, The Mill on 
 the Floss, Vanity Fair, The Old Curiosity Shop, 
 appeared to us of the Nineteenth Century, a finer 
 development, an evolution. But the world goes 
 round ! 
 
 Some of these episodes, once read, are fixed in 
 the memory for ever; and of these the finest, I 
 think, is Le Portique. Who can forget the death 
 of Poterloo in the explosion of the obus, as he rises 
 from the earth, bolt upright, black, his two arms 
 stretched full length as on a cross, and a flame on 
 
HENRI BARBUSSE 173 
 
 his shoulders in place of the shattered head? We 
 cannot banish that terrible image if we would. 
 There are pages of Le Feu, which, just glanced at, 
 imprint themselves on our consciousness — like the 
 death of the horse, Trompette, in the mine of 
 Germinal, for we are always brought back to our 
 initial comparison of M. Barbusse with Zola. And 
 those who appreciate what I can but caU the epic 
 grandeur of Germinal or L'Assomoir, wiU do well 
 to read Le Feu; while those who cannot endure 
 the foul images, the filthy realism, the coarse slang, 
 the haH-mad enthusiasms and indignations of 
 Zola, will be wise in avoiding any book by Henri 
 Barbusse. 
 
 For M. Barbusse, like Zola, is an apostle and 
 writes inspired by the energy of his social revolt. 
 Like Peguy — although he is so different from Peguy 
 — ^he longs to fly to the rescue. There was a 
 medieval saint and poetess, Mechtild of Magdeburg, 
 who sang in one of her lyric prayers, 'O Christ 
 on the Cross, lend me Thine arms to save a suffering 
 world ! ' That is the prayer of M. Barbusse, only 
 he addresses it to Socialism — or rather, if I under- 
 stand him aright, to Bolshevism. He would save 
 the dumb dwellers in that dark underworld which, 
 in the present state of things, appears to have no 
 issue. 'And he went down into HeU.' More than 
 once the line has slid into my mind in reading 
 his unedif5dng pages, and I understood that here, 
 too, was a sort of Gospel — the most modern of the 
 apocrjrpha. 
 
174 HENRI BARBUSSE 
 
 One may doubt of the wisdom of a social theory 
 which, seeing the stain on our vesture, would 
 simply turn it wrong side out. The stain may go 
 right through. The worid may prove no stronger 
 and no saner if you set it upside down. I am not 
 M. Barbusse's poUtical convert. But I admire 
 him for his reaction, his revolt against that which 
 most of us so readily accept — ^the sufferings of the 
 unknown mass. It is well that there should be 
 writers who rouse and reveal, though their trumpet 
 notes be harsh and unmodulated — ^weU there 
 should be those who shake the sleepers from their 
 sloth and bid them save their neighbours and 
 themselves, building anew, lest the pillars of the 
 temple fall and crush us aU in their ruin. 
 
 In Clarte the ideas of M. Barbusse are explained 
 at full length : abolition of inheritance, universal 
 disarmament, universal equality, universal Republic 
 in the Federation of the World. In this book (which 
 concerns the life of a clerk in the office of a factory, 
 who marries, goes to the war, and returns to look 
 at his wife and society, with not unkindly but 
 disenchanted eyes) — M. Barbusse has lost his 
 coarseness, but also that biting acid which im- 
 printed on our remembrance the scenes of Le Feu. 
 In his feminine characters — in the old aunt, in 
 Marie, the wife, in the little bUnd girl whom every 
 one pities and for whom no one cares — ^he shows a 
 new quahty of tenderness. 
 
 What will he give us to-morrow? 
 
GEORGES DUHAMEL 
 
 Like Henri Barbusse, M. Georges Duhamel has 
 found his great opportunity in the events of the 
 war. Before 1914 we knew him as a young writer 
 of promise in only too many directions. He had 
 written a play, A I'Ombre de Statues, which Antoine 
 produced at the Odeon Theatre, and which was 
 (with Marie Leneru's Affranchis) the chief success 
 of Antoine's heroic voyage of discovery in the 
 perilous tracts of unknown youthful genius. M. 
 Duhamel was also just coming into notice as a 
 poet and especially as a critic of poetry in the 
 columns of the Mercure de France. We liked his 
 young uncompromising voice and the deliberate 
 way in which he said that he was proud to be born 
 in the century which produced a Paul Claudel. 
 He had as yet published no novel. But the 
 mobilisation revealed his capacity as a doctor, and 
 it was as an army-surgeon that he joined the 
 forces. 
 
 His Vie des Martyrs (which Mr Heinemann has 
 published in English as the New Book of Martyrs) 
 revealed a considerable writer, with that rare gift 
 of insight, of recognition, which pierces at a glance 
 to the core of things. Tenderness, infinite pity, 
 regret, a sense of the helplessness of science, a sense 
 of the hopelessness of so-called progress which ends 
 
 175 
 
176 GEORGES DUHAMEL 
 
 in such an explosion of organised disorder — ^it is 
 these feelings that inspire the good physician as 
 he bends above the murdered youths, the martyrs, 
 whom it is his destiny always to torture and some- 
 times to cure or to relieve. La Vie des Martyrs is 
 a set of brief sketches of the lives and deaths of 
 wounded soldiers in hospital on the front. 
 
 With a brief, sure touch (which comes, I think, 
 from his famiUarity with the writing of verse), 
 M. Duhamel indicates the few essential outlines 
 which bring into living relief the poor lads to 
 whom he ministers : the Zouave who thought 
 himself so strong when his spine was touched with 
 paralysis; Leglise, of whom his country claimed 
 the double sacrifice of his two legs and who yet 
 found life worth living; Boucheutore — ^but why 
 enumerate the cases? It is not the cases that 
 matter, it is the souls that animate these tortured 
 and shattered bodies, which M. Duhamel knows 
 how to make, as it were, transparent to our gaze. 
 There is in these -studies (as there was in the eyes 
 of Beal) 'une lumiere, une douceur une tristesse 
 extremes.' We have heard of the religion of human 
 suffering — and here it wells from a deep and loving 
 nature, full of spiritual richness, and yet totally 
 devoid of mysticism or piety. 
 
 I like La Vie des Martyrs better than Civilisation 
 which followed it in 1918 and was awarded the 
 Prix Goncourt last December. This latter book 
 inclines to the theories of M. Barbusse : Oh, 
 Civilisation, what crimes are committed in thy name ! 
 
GEORGES DXJHAMEL 177 
 
 The setting is the same; the personages are still 
 the wounded soldiers, but also the M.O.'s and great 
 visiting Surgeons, sanitary inspectors, and in these 
 latter sketches M. Duhamel reveals an admirable 
 talent for caricature. There is something ot 
 Daumier's biting wit in his portraits of medical 
 'big-wigs.' 
 
 Here is a writer with great gifts, a master of 
 tears and laughter. His sketches are admirable. 
 But has he the gift of organic construction? Will 
 he (as the draughtsman Boz became the painter 
 Dickens) go on from strength to strength? 
 
 Time will show. 
 
THE COUNTESS DE NOAILLES 
 
 Years and years ago — ^five-and-twenty years ago — 
 I used sometimes to spend my Thursday afternoons 
 with a Russian friend; more than once on these 
 occasions our pleasure was heightened by the musical 
 talent of her Uttle cousins, the young daughters of 
 the Princess Brancovan. In my mind's eye I stiU 
 see the two children seated on the long piano-stool; 
 I contemplate their fervent shoulders, their four 
 thick dark plaits, bobbing from side to side, and 
 the small eager right hand of one, and the left 
 hand of her sister, fl5dng up and down the keyboard 
 as they interpret, four-handed, some difficult page 
 of Beethoven. 
 
 My friend died; years passed; I saw no more of 
 the young musicians. They grew up; they married. 
 And then one day, in 1901, a new book of poems 
 burst — ^yes, literally burst — ^upon the world of 
 letters; and I learnt with pleasure and curiosity 
 that its author, the Countess Mathieu de NoaiUes, 
 was the Princess Anna de Brancovan. Like all 
 Paris, I read her poems. 
 
 Have you ever seen, in Switzerland or in Auvergne 
 (in some mountain country), the spring meadows, 
 at Eastertime, when the young foals, the lambs, 
 and especially the Uttle calves (born in the dusk of 
 the stable in February) make their first irruption 
 
 178 
 
COUNTESS DE NOAILLES 179 
 
 into a world of sunshine, of tender and fresh green 
 grass stretching inimitably in all directions? If 
 not, and if you would none the less realise the 
 extreme of joy, of young delight in mere existence, 
 take down from the shelf Le Ccbw Innomhrahle, or 
 indeed any of the early poems of Madame de 
 NoaUles. 
 
 Madame de Noailles resembles no Uving poet 
 or poetess. There is none among them who gives 
 us so absolutely the sense of inspiration — the poet's 
 frenzy with its flights and its fervours — and also 
 the flagging, drifting laxness of the verse when 
 suddenly that inspiration fail. Yet, even in 
 that wandering dehriuni, we feel (as in the diviner 
 poetry of SheUey) no less than the poet's weakness, 
 the strength and the ardour of the afiflatus. On 
 the frontispiece of her second book {Les Eblouisse- 
 ments, 1907), Mme de Noailles has inscribed a 
 sentence from Plato's Banquet : ' My heart beats 
 more tumultuously than the pulse of the priests 
 of Cybele.' And indeed the dance, the extravagant 
 fury, the Kopv^avTiafffi^s, of the Phrygian festival are 
 echoed in the strophes of this daughter of Hellas, 
 married into the house of Noailles. But the young 
 Maenad (strayed from Parnassus into France) is 
 never more to my liking than when suddenly she 
 interrupts her corybantic song to idle in her walled 
 fruit-garden, making friends with her pears and 
 apples, praising the brave, bright splashes of red on 
 the ranks of her scarlet-runners, or counting the 
 gathered peaches ranged among straw on the shelves 
 
i8o COUNTESS DE NOAILLES 
 
 of the fragrant f ruitery, while a wasp whizzes out his 
 soul of rage against the dusty window-pane :— 
 
 'O peuple parfume des fruits, 
 Vous que le chaud et6 compose 
 De cieux bleus et de terre rose, 
 Vous, sfeve dense, sucre mol, 
 Nes des jeux de i'air et du sol, 
 Vous qui vivez dans une creche, 
 Petits dieux de la paiUe fraiche, 
 Compagnons de I'arrosoir vert. 
 Des hottes, des bSches, de fer, 
 Gardez-moi dans la douce ronde 
 Que forme votre odeur prof onde ! ' 
 
 There is in Madame de NoaiUes something of 
 Pindar — ^and something of Herrick. I like her best 
 in Herrick's vein, singing the homely things we 
 know with a penetrating, new, and yet familiar 
 sweetness : — 
 
 'Bien plus que pour Bagdad dont le seul nom 
 
 6tonne, 
 Que pour Constantinople, ineffable Houri, 
 Je m'6meus quand je vois dans un matin 
 
 d'automne 
 Le clocher de Corbeil ou de Chiteau-Thierry.' 
 
 But that other self of hers— the Phrygian pythoness 
 — ^is no less worthy of our attention. Every page 
 of this volume bears the imprint of her image, ardent, 
 wasted, joyous, excited, full of a mingled asperity 
 
COUNTESS DE NOAILLES i8i 
 
 and sweetness. Her voice rings out intoxicated 
 with the wonder of the universe, the mystery of 
 life, the terror of death. None of the poets of our 
 generation has expressed so keenly the mortal 
 pang caused by the impact of a beauty which is 
 eternal on a system of nerves which is the cobweb 
 of an hour : — 
 
 'Je n'ai fait resonner que mes nerfs sur ma lyre.' 
 
 It is true there is httle of deep emotion and httle 
 of pure thought in these earlier poems of Madame 
 de NoaiUes; but all that the sense can receive of 
 the outer world is exquisitely rendered. So alive 
 is the poetess to the magic and glory of the visible 
 world that she is jealous of that inner, personal 
 realm which engrosses us so much. Constantly 
 she regrets those years of childhood, which were 
 objective, calm, free from the tumult of the heart : — 
 
 'Enfants, regardez bien toutes les plaines rondes. 
 La capucine avec ses abeiUes autour, 
 Regardez bien I'etang, les champs, avant 
 I'amour; — 
 Car apres Ton ne voit plus jamais rien du monde. 
 
 ' Apres Ton ne voit plus que son coeur devant soi. 
 On ne voit plus qu'un peu de flamme sur 
 
 sa route. 
 On n'entend rien, on ne salt rien, et Ton 
 ^coute 
 Les pieds du triste Amour qui court ou qui 
 s'assoit.' 
 
i82 COUNTESS DE NOAILLES 
 
 But passion is not the only power which contends 
 with our faculty for absorbing the imperishable 
 quality of the Cosmos. There is another, yet more 
 terrible, which splits the glass in our hands, even 
 as we raise it to our lips : — 
 
 'O beaut6 de toute la terre. 
 Visage innombrable des jours, 
 Voyez avec quel sombre amour 
 Mon coeur en vous se d^salt^re. 
 
 'Et pourtant il faudra nous en aller d'ici 
 Quitter les jours luisants, les jardins ou nous 
 
 sommes. 
 Cesser d'etre du sang, des yeux, des mains, 
 
 des hommes, 
 Descendre dans la nuit avec un front noirci. 
 
 'Descendre par I'etroite, I'horizontale porte. 
 Oil Ton passe dtendu, voile, silencieux; 
 Ne plus jamais vous voir, O Lumiere des cieux ! 
 H61as ! je n'etais pas faite pour ^tre morte.' 
 
 These verses, and many others no less beautiful — 
 for one of the characteristics of Madame de NoaUles 
 is her abundance — could \eave no doubt on my 
 mind of the quality of the poetess, and I remember 
 writing, when her second book appeared : — 
 
 'There are four lyric poets — there are at least 
 four lyric poets — ^writing to-day in France. If we 
 glance over the land in a sort of bird's eye view, 
 we see, down by the river, like a faun in the reeds 
 
COUNTESS DE NOAILLES 183 
 
 and rushes, M. Francis Jammes piping on his 
 Pan's pipe a sweet irregular and broken music. 
 His is an elfin spirit, familiar with green things and 
 shy wild animal life; his patrons are St Francis 
 and Ariel. Where the bee sucks, there lurks he; 
 and yet he is not wholly natural. Something 
 quaint, furtive, and precious in his style reminds 
 us of a constant artifice in his simplicity. 
 
 'Let us now lift our gaze towards the busier 
 haunts of men; there, in an inspired attitude, 
 stands M. Fernand Gregh, his hand Ufted towards 
 the visionary lyre of Victor Hugo, which, Uke the 
 dagger of Macbeth, hovers before him, just out of 
 reach; yet, though he never wholly grasps it, 
 sometimes the poet snatches a fine strain of music 
 from the strings. A Httle higher, among the ruins 
 of antiquity, meditates in music M. Henri de 
 Regnier. But who is this who rushes past (her 
 eye in a fine frenzy rolling), singing in an incoherent 
 passion of dehght, Uke the wild shepherdess — La 
 Ravie de I' Amour de Dieu — ^in the Queen of Navarre's 
 delightful pastoral, soaring sunwards in a cory- 
 bantic ecstasy — ^who is this lyric muse, half siren 
 and half bird? 
 
 " And all a wonder and a wild desire." ' 
 
 (In those days I had not read the odes of M. Paul 
 Claudel. And, after aU, can one call a poet 'lyric,' 
 if he choose to write his rhapsodies in prose?) 
 
 A year or two later, our poetess gave us, one 
 after the other, three books in prose — a strange 
 
1 84 COUNTESS DE NOAILLES 
 
 beautiful Oriental prose, charged with colour as 
 the draperies of a Russian ballet, full of a crude 
 barbarian charm. First she produced (I think her 
 best prose book) La Nouvelle Espdrance. 
 
 The novels of Madame de Noailles all tell more 
 or less the same story. They show us a woman cA 
 passionate and eager temperament, a soul of suffer- 
 ing ardour, fevered with a sort of avid languor, 
 of fierce tenderness whose cold fit is a sudden 
 revolt of indifference or pride : a woman who 
 reminds us sometimes of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse 
 and sometimes of Phaedra ! Need we say that this 
 self-centred and sensual being is unhappy? Yet 
 she is full of poetry, of passion, of charm, half a 
 spoiled child, half an inspired Muse. But she seeks 
 in sentiment and in sensation an Absolute which 
 does not exist on earth. Thus, imprisoned in the 
 tyrannous circle of her own personality, she turns 
 round upon herself, like a squirrel in its cage. So 
 at least we see her in this first novel and in the 
 last : La Domination. 
 
 Between the two the poetess has placed a sort 
 of pastel, a sort of fairy-tale, exquisite in its refine- 
 ment and impossible grace, Le Visage Emerveilld, 
 where, if the features are the same, the colour and 
 the Ughting are so softened that we greet with a 
 smUe what, in the other volumes seemed, in all 
 cruel sincerity, the terrible image of hysterical 
 passion. 
 
 And then, in the summer of 1913, she 
 produced, after so long a silence of the Muse, 
 
COUNTESS DE NOAILLES 185 
 
 her finest poems. Ah ! here she is her real self- 
 she whom Melchior de Vogue used to caU, briefly, 
 emphatically, 'le grand poete,' distinguishing her 
 thus among her contemporaries. The Countess de 
 Noailles is really a. great poet— the greatest that 
 the Twentieth Century has as yet produced in 
 France, perhaps in Europe. In her the romantic 
 Nineteenth Century has its last echo : her ardent 
 magnificence, her sense of the wild beauty of natural 
 things, her lyric cries, her vast horizons magically 
 evoked, her summits and her tempests, and then 
 her sudden bursts of simple, friendly homeliness, 
 recall the genius of Victor Hugo. 
 
 But in this new volume the Bacchante, the 
 Undine, of her earlier poems comes back to us in 
 tears. Like Prince Gautama when he left his 
 palace, she has encountered love and sickness and 
 death. She has learned that to live is to suffer; 
 she has discovered that man (and especially woman) 
 has a heart to feel, as well as eyes to see with; 
 that our destiny is always mysterious and generally 
 sad. This is no longer the vine-crowned Bacchante, 
 irresponsible as a young and graceful tiger-cub, 
 whose sole desire was to satisfy her instinct. This 
 is not she who, in her tamer moments, tuned her 
 flute in the sunny kitchen-garden under the warm 
 south wall, hung with espahers, smihng as she 
 sang : ' Yon ripe pear is my heart ! ' 
 
 People will read those earher poems as long as 
 they love gardens and the frisky joy of flocks, 
 and the swift upsoaring flight of the eagle above 
 
 F.W. O 
 
1 86 COUNTESS DE NOAILLES 
 
 the mountain-tops, and all the innumerable many- 
 twinkling smile of Nature. For so I should have 
 called her first volume : not the Innumerable 
 Heart (she had not yet grown a heart) but the 
 Innumerable Smile, 'anjpie/iop yeXaafw.. That something 
 mad, and fierce, and glad, and Uving, can never 
 come again, nor that heroic impatience of mortality 
 — and morality. Our Muse is no longer twenty. 
 Like Thekla she has 'geliebt und gelebet'; she has 
 discovered that inner universe which has no common 
 measure with the material world; she has loved 
 and parted; she has loved and lost; she has looked 
 on the icy face of Death and trembled; she has 
 stood on the pale verge of the unknown abyss. 
 
 As we read these lyrics for their splendid music 
 we gradually perceive the motives of the symphony. 
 There is more here than beauty. There is a secret 
 story intricately involved, as in Shakespeare's 
 sonnets or EHzabeth Browning's. The first poems 
 confess the end of a passion, still deep, and quick, 
 but full of quarrels and combats; we feel the 
 inevitable rupture close at hand, and the disenchant- 
 ment which notes the death of a sentiment that our 
 muse had believed immortal : — 
 
 ' Te souviens-tu du temps ou, les regards tendus 
 Vers I'espace, ma main entre tes mains gisante, 
 J'exigeai de r^gner sur la mer de L^pante, 
 Dans quelque bale heureuse, aux parfums 
 
 suspendus, 
 Ou I'orgueil et I'amour halcettent confundus? 
 
COUNTESS DE NOAILLES 187 
 
 'A present, 6puisee, immobile ou errante, 
 J'abdique sans effort le destin qui m'est dii. 
 Quel faste comblerait une ame indifferente? 
 
 ' Je n'ai besoin de rien puisque je t'ai perdu.' 
 
 The lovers separate. The meeting had seemed a 
 prodigy. But the Muse, in a cloud of poetry, has 
 declared to her votaress her jealousy of a mortal 
 lover : — 
 
 ' On n'est pas a la f ois enivree et heureuse, 
 L'univers dans vos bras n'aura pas de rival.' 
 
 and the great poet (who has also the misfortune 
 to be a young and beautiful woman) bids her lover 
 farewell, much as the immortal Diana may have 
 dismissed Endymion : — 
 
 'Allez vers votre simple et calme destinee; 
 Et, comme la lueur d'un phare diligent 
 Suit longtemps sur la mer les barques etonnees, 
 Je verserai sur vous ma lumiere d'argent.' 
 
 In vain he protests and begs her to consider how 
 void and out of shape her days will hang, bereft 
 of the substance of so rare an affection. A dreary 
 isolation, a self-centred ambition, are surely less 
 propitious to poetry than a sympathy communi- 
 cated, not only between two hearts, but between 
 two minds? (The man's part of the dialogue we 
 must more or less supply.) The fact is, she is 
 
i88 COUNTESS DE NOAILLES 
 
 tired of him, or rather of the storm and stress of 
 passion, and she rephes with an absent look : — 
 
 'Je n'avais plus besoin de vous pour vous 
 aimer ..." 
 
 'Mon amour, je ne puis t'aimer ! Le jour 
 
 6clate 
 Comme un blanc incendie, au mont des 
 
 aromates ! 
 Le gazon, telle une eau, frdchit au fond des 
 
 bois; 
 Un d^lire sacr6 m'emtraine loin de toi.' 
 
 She is relentless, and all the more relentless 
 that she forgets nothing of their old delights. 
 Since Sappho has any woman uttered such a 
 burst of passion as she pours out in shameless 
 reminiscence in the marvellous lyric entitled 'T'aimer. 
 Et quand le jour timide . . .? ' (the day may enjoy 
 as much timidity as it pleases; the poetess leaves 
 all her share untouched). Here are the accents of 
 desire, the voice of nature naked and unashamed; 
 but it is the evocation of a love consumed and 
 finished. The remembered flame is now a handful 
 of ashes : — 
 
 'O cher pitre, inquiet et d&ormais terni, 
 J'ai v6cvL pour cela, qui est d6]k fini ! 
 
 Is there any happiness to equal our anticipation 
 of happiness? Only in listening to music can the 
 
COUNTESS DE NOAILLES 189 
 
 wearied beauty still believe : 'Qu'il existe un bon- 
 heur qui ressemble au d&ir,' and then the melody 
 of Schumann seems to ring with a reproach, a 
 warning, a presentiment, a final certainty : — 
 
 'Je vois, la-bas, dans I'ombre depouillee 
 Du jardin ou le vent d'automne vient gemir, 
 Les trahisons, les pleurs, les ames tenaiUees, 
 Le vieiUesse, la mort, la terre entre-baillee.' 
 
 At this point we lose the clue, and wander a while 
 in the Pindaric labyrinth of l5n-ics. A new love, 
 fresh, kind, and young, appears (we think) on the 
 horizon. Mindful of her ancient rigours, our muse 
 hesitates : — 
 
 'Je porte un vague amour, plus grave et plus 
 
 ancien. 
 Qui t'avait pr6c6de et ne pent pas te suivre.' 
 
 Yet she does follow her mortal lover. And 
 again she feels that Nature rejects her, thrusts her, 
 with a flaming sword, forth from her Paradise 
 into a disordered world of souls and bodies : — 
 
 'Tu n'es plus cette enfant, libre comme la 
 
 flamme. 
 Qui montait comme un jet de bourgeons et 
 d'odeurs.' 
 
 This new love is of a different sort, turned towards 
 eternity, and sometimes, as in the song called Un 
 
190 COUNTESS DE NOAILLES 
 
 Abondant Amour and also Je ne puis pas comprendre, 
 encore que tu sois nd, we feel that it is perhaps the 
 love for a child. In any case, her passion is for 
 some creature still innocent and tender. And this 
 new f eeUng — the point of departure for the eternal 
 life — does really estrange the poetegs from her 
 frenzied pantheism. 
 
 'Je ne regarde plus 
 
 Avec la mSme ardeur un monde qui m'a plu. 
 
 Mon esprit tient captifs des oiseaux 6temels. . . . 
 
 Je songe au noble 6clat des nuits platoniciennes.' 
 
 But Fate intervenes to separate the two lovers. 
 A lyrical intermezzo drags the pageant of a broken 
 heart through all the miracles of Italy. The universe 
 has avenged itself upon the woman; she is no 
 longer the child of the sun, the sister of the winds, 
 but an unhappy mortal everywhere estranged. 
 And in this desolation, this fast in the desert, 
 there dawns upon her the mystic apprehension of 
 the spiritual world. A series of poems, entitled 
 Les tUvations, enshrines, this experience of our 
 eternity : — 
 
 'Men Dieu, je ne sais rien, mais je sais que je 
 
 souffre 
 Au delk de I'appui et du secours humain, 
 Et puisque tons les ponts sont rompus sur le 
 
 gouffre, 
 Je vous nommerai Dieu, et je vous tends la 
 
 main. . . . 
 
COUNTESS DE NOAILLES 191 
 
 ' Les lumineux climats d'ou sont venus mes peres 
 Ne me pr^paraient pas a m'approcher de vous, 
 Mais on est votre enfant d6s que Ton d&espere 
 Et quand Tintelligence a plier se resout. . . . 
 
 'Comme vous accablez vos preferes, Seigneur 
 II semble que votre ample et salubre courage 
 Veuille assainir en nous quelque obscur marecage, 
 Tant vous nous arrachez, par des sueurs de sang, 
 L'acre ferment vivant, orgueUleux et puissant. 
 On pense qu'on mourra du mal que vous nous 
 
 faites, 
 Et puis, c'est tout a coup la fin de la tempete.' 
 
 But once again a flaming sword waves before her 
 eyes and drives her forth from the common experi- 
 ence of humanity; even as Nature and genius 
 banished her from love, so the cold hand of death 
 shuts her out from reHgion. Her beloved dies; 
 and she has looked on his waxen face, and seen 
 the leaden coffin go down into the grave. 
 
 This terrible moment — ^which has driven many 
 in a panic of anguish from the despair of this world 
 to the desperate hope of a Beyond, as a stag harried 
 and hunted to the extreme edge of a cUff will 
 spring into the sea — this ' sombre accident quotidien 
 de la mort' immures our poetess in the prison of 
 a stoical grief, where sometimes (but very rarely) 
 rustle the wings of that angel who led Peter out 
 of his captivity. In that austere infrangible house 
 of mourning she remains, aloof from life and Nature, 
 
iga COUNTESS DE NOAILLES 
 
 choosing this hving death rather than the treason • 
 of a Ufe renewed and fruitful, though bereaved. 
 There she sits still, forgetting the spring and the 
 summer, and looks in a white agony upon the face 
 of Truth. And in verse as firm and fuU as that 
 of Emily Bronte, she recites the sterile lesson she 
 has learned : — 
 
 'Je m'emplis d'une vaste et rude connaissance. 
 Que i'acquiers d'heure en heure, ainsi qu'un 
 
 noir tr6sor. 
 Qui me dispense une apre et totale science; 
 Je sais que tu es mort.' 
 
MADAME COLETTE 
 
 Imagine a young girl in the country, very young, 
 very fresh, sensitive to the finest degree, upright, 
 credulous, and doubtless dainty as a daisy; imagine 
 her in the flower of her youth married and carried 
 off to Paris — ^to the decadent Paris of the nineties 
 — ^by a man of the world, who is also a man of 
 letters and a man of science, intelligent, corrupt, 
 and cynical as Mephistopheles himself. No, I 
 am not telling you over again the story of 
 'Madeleine Jeune femme'; I am telling the 
 history of Madame Colette, and it ends _ differ- 
 ently. 
 
 There is, it seems, an amusement in elaborating 
 the sentimental education of a young bride, in 
 complicating it with excursions into vice and into 
 art; brief, the gifted and immoral author who 
 chooses to be known as 'Willy' was pleased to 
 make over his wife in his own image. She was an 
 artist to the ends of her finger-tips, and they wrote 
 books together — ^the famous series of Claudine — 
 hailed with dehght by all that is least strait-laced 
 in Paris (and, in those days especially, there was 
 very Httle screwing about the moral waist of one 
 sort of Paris !). For Colette WiUy reaUsed a per- 
 sonage, always charming to the man about town 
 in its candid perversity, that of the innocent 
 
 193 
 
194 MADAME COLETTE 
 
 wanton, or (to quote the title of one of her stories) 
 L'Ingdnue Libertine. 
 
 One day I bought one of these Claudine books; 
 it was called Claudine en Minage. I opened it 
 and thought it delightful. What an admirable 
 style, firm and free, full of nature, full of grace, 
 and the character of the girl, at once shrewd and 
 naive, pleased me immensely . . . and then I 
 began to wonder. . . . And then I did not know 
 what to do with the book ! I would not place it 
 on my shelf, I could not leave it l57ing on the table. 
 Finally, remembering a certain lyric of Robert 
 Browning's, I took it out into the forest and dropped 
 it deep in the hollow trunk of a tree. There, among 
 the pale wood-lice, and the centipedes, and the 
 fungus, Claudine in her seclusion, finds audience 
 fit though few. 
 
 One day it must have dawned on Madame Colette 
 Willy that all men were not made on the same 
 pattern — ^that there was fresh air somewhere in the 
 world even for a married woman — ^that a man might 
 be a support, and a comfort, and an example — or 
 perhaps, more simply, that one might do without 
 one altogether. Anyhow, Madame Colette WiUy 
 became Madame Colette; she divorced her collabor- 
 ator and began her ascent out of Avemus. She 
 was, in these new conditions, obliged to earn her 
 living, and, mindful of the prices paid for even a 
 successful book, she complicated her profession 
 as woman of letters with the career of a Variety 
 Artist. 
 
MADAME COLETTE 195 
 
 That is to say, she went on the music hall stage 
 and was immensely applauded; and I am sure she 
 is a splendid variety artist — just as I am sure that 
 Marguerite Audoux must have had a lovely 'cut' 
 — just as I know (and as any one who goes to the 
 Place des Vosges can see) that a great cabinet- 
 maker was spoiled in Victor Hugo. . . . The music 
 hall feeds its flock. After a few years Madame 
 Colette returned to literature — ^returned, I mean, 
 to the exclusive practice of literature, which she 
 had never really abandoned — thenceforth inde- 
 pendent. 
 
 A Paris music hall may appear a strange place 
 of purification, but it all depends on what one is 
 used to. The courage, the indefatigable industry, 
 the gentleness, the charity and kiadliness of her 
 new companions impressed Madame Colette; and 
 she admired the relative pureness of their lives. 
 We see her, in our fancy (hke Roumanille when he 
 contemplated the lambs frisking in the meadows), 
 gazing on the clowns, and the quick-change artists, 
 and the circus-riders, and the dancers, and the 
 leaders of performing dogs, as she murmurs ; — 
 
 ' Coume fan ben tout 90 que fan ! 
 Et I'innoucengo, coum es bello I ' 
 
 And gradually her novels showed the influence 
 of a healthier environment. It is true that at first 
 she wrote Les Vrilles de la Vigne. But her last 
 three volumes possess (with rare literary beauty) 
 
T96 MADAME COLETTE 
 
 a freedom of soul and a sensitiveness which (at 
 least, to my thinking, go far to compensate a little 
 colour-blindness as to morality. Experience has 
 rendered her wise and sad, indulgent and serene; 
 it has shown her how to organise her impressions, 
 so that her art — simple as it is and apparently 
 facile — ^has some of the qualities of a philosophy. 
 In the terms of a metaphor dear to Mr Henry 
 James, her novels henceforth are, not a slice of 
 life, but an extract, an eUxir. 
 
 Not that her last three volumes — La Vagabonde, 
 L'Envers du Music Hall, and L'Entrave — ^are to be 
 recommended without precaution. They are very 
 free; they describe a world beyond the precincts 
 of conventional morality, and they are also very 
 Pagan. There is mighty little ianer life in the 
 world of Colette Willy ! But those who read Mr 
 Compton Mackenzie or Mr Maxwell will, after all, 
 find nothing more alarming in La Vagabonde, or 
 even in L'Entrave. And they will admire a natural 
 and yet exquisite faculty of expression — ^it is difficult 
 to write with a more delicate exactness than Madame 
 Colette— and also a psychology, and a sort of dis- 
 enchanted mansuetude, that go hand in hand with 
 a love of youth, a sense of youth, quite extra- 
 ordinary. For my part, I find the lady very taking; 
 but I do not recommend her to the more serious 
 admirers of Paul Claudel. 
 
 In La Vagabonde, we see her as a music hall 
 star, dropped from the sphere of the woman of 
 the world, and all the happier in her new orbit, 
 
MADAME COLETTE xg; 
 
 although aware she is a stranger there. Men, of 
 course, pay her court, and one of them, Maxime 
 Dufferein-Chautel (whose tender, bourgeois, authori- 
 tative nature is admirably depicted) comes very 
 near to being her lover, and proposes to make her 
 his wife. But Max, good, soUd, faithful, is the least 
 subtle of lovers — a great, affectionate Newfound- 
 land dog of a man. And Renee N6r6, the vagabond, 
 who has borne so resentfully the yoke of her first 
 husband's heart, fears to suffer as much from the 
 narrowness of a second husband's brain. She cannot 
 resign her liberty to an inferior, and, on the eve 
 of their marriage, she sends him a cruel little 
 letter :— 
 
 'Max, mon cheri, je m'en vais,' 
 
 and is off with her troupe on a tour to the New 
 World. 
 
 On the first page of L'Entrave, she has met 
 again with this old lover, or rather, herself unrecog- 
 nised, she has seen him pass, one day at Nice, on 
 the Promenade des Anglais, he, his young wife, and 
 his little child. He has not mourned her long ! 
 And Ren^e feels oddly dispossessed : no one, nothing, 
 belongs to her; she has no place in the world for 
 she is no longer a star of the stage. A convenient 
 inheritance has given her the means of hberty— 
 that hberty she coveted of old— and she strays 
 from hotel to hotel on the Riviera mixing with 
 theatrical visitors, frequenting the better sort 
 
igS MADAME COLETTE 
 
 (which, I suppose, means the wealthier sort?) of 
 demi-monde, yet oddly out of place among these 
 amiable barbarians who have neither an idea nor 
 an ideal. 
 
 The most barbarian of all is little May, a young 
 hetaira cl la mode, fresh, fair, and five-and-twenty. 
 Ren^e is a dozen years older and ought to know 
 better; but she steals poor May's lover away from 
 her; and she shackles herself with this uncultivated 
 young man for Ufe, because she loves him; and 
 it is the first time that she has loved. Ah, she 
 no longer asks herself: is he her equal? . . . 
 Madame Colette, like her heroine, has consented 
 to the hobble, to the shackle, to L'Entrave. She, 
 too, has married, has found for herself again A. 
 place in organised society, has seen open out before 
 her unsuspected interior horizons, and mm-murs 
 perhaps, like Ren^e Nere : — 
 
 'Se peut-il, Beaute, que je te pref^re I'ame qui 
 t'habite?' 
 
 And I await her next novel with almost a tremulous 
 expectation. 
 
MADAME MARCELLE TINAYRE 
 
 When Madame Tinayre published her Maison dti 
 Pdche, we thought in France that we had discovered 
 our George EUot. We pitched our hopes too high; 
 Madame Tina5a-e is not even a George Sand. But 
 she is a very interesting and gifted noveUst. If 
 that first book was of a new and veritable beauty, 
 superior to any which has as yet followed it — 
 but Madame Tinayre is young — ^it is because the 
 conception of the story entailed a certain simplicity 
 and order of composition, an art of opposition and 
 construction, a severity of style even — ^in fact, the 
 qualities in which our novelist is generally lacking. 
 Her talent in her subsequent works is no less rich 
 and imaginative; but there is the difference between 
 a rose-tree covered with flowers trained over an 
 espalier, and the same lovely crimson rambler 
 left without support, and dropping half its fragrant 
 burden in the dust. 
 
 Madame Tinayre, hke most women writers, is 
 endowed with an exact and attentive faculty of 
 observation; like very few women writers, she has 
 a sort of magic, similar to colour or melody, which 
 often disguises the poverty of her compositions; 
 her art aspires to the condition of music; she, too, 
 might say with Saint Hildegard, 'Symphoniahs 
 est anima.' She knows how to project, from her 
 
 199 
 
200 MADAME TINAYRE 
 
 mind into ours, a violent, an incomparable 
 sentiment, as the waters in the marble foun- 
 tains of VersaiUes overlap and drop from one 
 basin into another. And she has the culture of 
 a man. 
 
 These are great gifts, sometimes impaired by a 
 certain warmth and coarseness in the treatment of 
 love, — an offence rare in male writers, however 
 libertine, but which hurts ovir taste occasionally 
 even in a Mrs Browning (for instance, in Aurora 
 Leigh); and sometimes her fault is a lack of 
 measure and order which lets her books meander 
 in a perpetual fiux, branching hither and thither, 
 instead of moulding and rounding them into the 
 fore-established harmony of a perfect sphere. In 
 brief, Madame Tina5;re is a romantic. But just 
 once, as it were by accident, she consented to the 
 classic discipline. And nothing in literature is so 
 charming, so touching, so delightful, as a romantic 
 who submits to be a classic. 
 
 That 'once' was, of course, when she wrote 
 La Maison du Pdche. Her art, so often too literal, 
 and, as it were, photographed from reaHty without 
 arrangement (as in the greater part of La Rebelle), 
 at other moments excessive and satiating in its 
 l5n:ism, found on that occasion the exact middle 
 path between experience and imagination. There 
 is not only passion in the book and beauty, but 
 solidity, balance, meditation, reason; there is not 
 only spontaneity and grace, but a large and firm 
 knowledge of life, a perspicacity, a sincerity beyond 
 
MADAME TINAYRE 201 
 
 praise. It has the quahties of poetry and the 
 virtues of prose. 
 
 In this novel, Madame Tinayre shows us the 
 clash and the conflict, the attraction and the repul- 
 sion, which cause a continual contest between the 
 two halves of France, equally important and 
 irreducibly different. Bom into one of these 
 spheres, married into the other, Madame Tinayre 
 is at home in either. Her Augustin, so pure and 
 grave and true, so narrow, so weak, so passionate, 
 is the brother of M. Rolland's Antoinette, is the 
 great-nephew of Pascal. He is a type which has 
 always existed in France, admirable but dangerous, 
 for he is incapable of understanding his contrary. 
 Among French Protestants, Jansenists, strict pro- 
 verbial Catholics, in certain austere university 
 circles, there are many variations on the type 
 of Augustin. And Fanny, the charming Bohemian, 
 light-hearted Fanny, an artist to the tips of her 
 fingers but only very dimly conscious of being 
 an immortal soul (a pretension which Augustin 
 never abandons for an hour), is not Fanny the very 
 flower of a different, a more frivolous, a lighter, 
 brighter France? 
 
 The contact and the conflict of these two natures, 
 their iU-starred, impossible love, is all the story 
 of La Maison du P6cM : one of the most moving 
 stories of our times. There are readers, there are 
 even critics, who prefer Madame Tinayre's subse- 
 quent novel. La Rebelle. I have some difficulty, 
 I admit, in catching their point of view. I prefer 
 
 F.W. P 
 
202 MADAME TINAYRE 
 
 not only La Maison du PSchd, but even that 
 exquisite piece of still-life, Frangois Barbazanges, 
 which some have condemned on the ground that, 
 though it was art, it was not Ufe. La Rebelle is 
 much more life than art. The background, a 
 fresco of popular Paris, is vast, living, and exact; 
 indeed it is too vast, too living, too exact, for it 
 distracts our attention from the rather ordinary 
 characters who occupy the foreground. 
 
 And yet there is a great charm in the drawing of 
 Josanne Valentin, the brave young woman-worker 
 married to a neurasthenic invalid — ^that charm of 
 poignant sincerity which sometimes, in a woman's 
 work, makes the reader's heart beat quicker, as 
 though he had suddenly stumbled on a private 
 confession. Josanne is so courageous, so tender, 
 so kind, that we forgive her conjugal infidelity, 
 and chiefly regret that her lover should be so 
 obviously unworthy of her. 
 
 He abandons her — we knew it ! — and how 
 pathetic is the scene of their parting — out of 
 doors, in the street, poor Josanne encumbered 
 with the filet— ih.& net— in which she is carrying 
 home the materials for the family dinner. That 
 parting scene is unlike any other in fiction in its 
 heart-piercing realism ! But Josanne is young, 
 and when the morphino-maniac of a husband 
 (tenderly nursed to the last) departs this life; when 
 Josanne falls in with a high-minded radical philan- 
 thropist of the most advanced views, we murmur, 
 much relieved : ' Tout s'arrange.' 
 
MADAME TINAYRE 203 
 
 For Noel Delysle and Josanne Valentin are alike 
 apostles of a magnanimous democracy : he, a 
 social reformer, author of that notable work. La 
 Travailleuse; she, herself a woman-worker, the 
 feminist reporter of a ladies' newspaper, in constant 
 contact with the poor in need of help, and the 
 fevered, fussy world of philanthropy. Self-sub- 
 sisting, 'generous' in the wide sense which Descartes 
 gives to the word, Noel Delysle and Josanne 
 Valentin alike reject the t37rannous old dictum of 
 Amolphe : — 
 
 'Bien qu'on soit deux moities de la society 
 Ces deux moities pourtant n'ont pas d'^galite.' 
 
 For them, the woman-worker, self-supporting, 
 independent, has attained a moral and social 
 equality with man, and should be judged by the 
 standard of what Mr Shaw, we believe, has called 
 the New Morality. 
 
 They both possess that 'vraie gen^rosite' which 
 consists in self-reUance, strength of will, endurance, 
 contempt for opinion, and respect for the Hberty 
 of others. Descartes thought nothing more useful 
 than to foster a race of such generous individuals, 
 'sachant subsister par soi-mSme . . . pour ce qu'ils 
 n'estiment rien de plus grand que de faire du 
 bien aux autres et de mepriser son propre interdt.' 
 And, despite one secret blemish in her past, Josanne 
 feels herself a member of this Mite, a factor of 
 progress. Nor does she attach any great importance 
 
204 MADAME TINAYRE 
 
 to a back-sliding which is not esteemed too damn- 
 able by the men and the women of the New 
 Morality. She makes her confession to Noel 
 Delysle in much the same spirit as Tess of the 
 D'Urbervilles unbosoms herself to Angel Clare. 
 
 For reformers are prompt to forget that what 
 was human nature in the past, what may be human 
 nature in the future (should they and others persist 
 in their modem ideal), is not human nature now. 
 The mind of man has modified all things around 
 him and within. From the seeding-grasses in the 
 hay he has produced the varieties of com; from 
 the small and acid crab-fruit in the hedge, the 
 rennet and the Ribston pippin; and from the poison- 
 ous roots of foreign forests our daily domestic 
 potato. Our morality is another product; we may 
 modify it yet further; such as it is, at present it 
 remains our staff of life. And the staimchest 
 feminist in the world, if he be a man and in love, 
 will expect his wife to be tender, chaste, and 
 faithful, and care Uttle enough whether or no she 
 be self-reliant, generous, and brave. 
 
 Noel Delysle is a stronger man than Angel 
 Clare, and proportionately less hard and dour; 
 but he receives the shock of Josanne's confession 
 with Uttle less dismay. He learns then that the 
 little stepson who will share their home— the child, 
 he imagined naturally, of the unfortunate Valentin 
 — ^is in reahty the son of Josanne's lover. In 
 treating such a situation, Madame Tinayre is at 
 her best. The central fact of all her novels is the 
 
MADAME TINAYRE 205 
 
 struggle between nature and nurture, between 
 instinct and convention. Deep, deep below the 
 intellectual superstructure, the primitive man, the 
 primitive woman, stir in her heroes. His virtues 
 and tolerances fall from Noel Delysle, leaving him 
 jealous and passionate; her valour and self-reliance 
 fade in Madame Valentin, and Josanne, the rebel, 
 becomes the merest woman. 
 
 La Rebelle is an interesting book, but how much 
 do I prefer (though its faults he thick upon it) 
 L'Ombre de V Amour ! ^ The tale rambles on as it 
 pleases, independent of design or composition, 
 poorly constructed enough with its two long parallel 
 lines, as monotonous, if as impressive, as those 
 low, even chffs which enclose between their grassy 
 walls some Limousin or Gascon valley. 
 
 Bis repetita placent is a good motto if we wish 
 to amuse; for (as Bergson has pointed out) there 
 is something comic in reiteration, in a repeated 
 misadventure, and especially in a double fall — 
 every clown knows that ! In spite of the rare 
 beauty and sincerity of the character-drawing, this 
 tale of two pure girls stumbhng, one after the other, 
 in the same secret shp, does produce an effect of 
 painful ludicrousness. 
 
 The defilement of a young girl in her innocence 
 is the most pathetic of themes, but it is its singu- 
 larity alone that makes it touching. Mephistopheles, 
 in his cleverness, degrades the misery of poor 
 Gretchen when he observes : ' Sie ist nicht die 
 
 1 Translated into English under the title ; The Shadow of Love. 
 
2o6 MADAME TINAYRE 
 
 Erste.' We must imagine no angel ever tripped 
 before; we must have very present in our sight 
 the state of irmocence from which she is thrust 
 out. So the wise Walter Scott places beside his 
 sad Efhe the peerless Jeanie Deans. So George 
 EUot reUeves the abasement of Hetty by the pure 
 brilliance of Dinah. But in this novel of Madame 
 Tinajnre's, there are but two young girls, and, by 
 an inconceivable error, she involves them both 
 in the same miserable mystery. Involuntarily we 
 protest. I, for my part, protested, and the noveHst 
 replied : — 
 
 'II me semble que votre principale objection porte 
 sur le double effet d'une double aventure, qui vous 
 parait un artifice Utt^raire. Mais, dans ma pensee, 
 il fallait que Fortunade completat Denise, que la 
 pitie spiritueUe pour le maudit aboutit au mSme 
 echec que la piti6 plus physique pour le malade. 
 Fortunade, c'est, en tout petit, Eloa. Je crois 
 que ces 'doubles' ne sont pas sans exemples dans 
 les grandes oeuvres de la Utterature, et que de 
 glorieux precedents auraient pu m'enhardir, si 
 j'avais hesit^. Dans la reahte m^me on voit des 
 ames de nifeme nature se deviner et se rapprocher.' 
 
 The Uterary doubles of which our author speaks 
 are a charming device when the noveUst treats 
 of what is normal, salutary, or pleasant : we love 
 to see Rosahnd by the side of CeUa, or the Two 
 Gentlemen of Verona; but we should not care to 
 look at two Quilps, or two Deformed Transformed, 
 
MADAME TINAYRE 207 
 
 or two Gretchens, or even two dumb girls of Portici. 
 The abnormal does not suffer repetition. 
 
 So I persist in my protestation, and aU the more 
 because I love and admire the two sweet girls, so 
 pure, so devoted; ruined and debased, the one by 
 pity for a man's bodily sufferings, the other by 
 compassion for his moral state. For Madame 
 Tinayre, following the theories of Spinoza and 
 Nietzsche, looks on pity as a debilitating emotion, 
 relaxing the fibres of the soul and predisposing to 
 an ignoble self-surrender. 
 
 But how charming is the first half of this novel; 
 the opening scene in the country doctor's dining- 
 room, with the two girls seated in the red-paved 
 parlour that smeUs of damp bricks and freshly- 
 washed linen and ripe apples. Denise, the young 
 lady of the house, is the soul of a home : — 
 
 'A perfect woman, nobly planned 
 To warn, to comfort, and command ' 
 
 a large human type, as easily imagined in England 
 or Scotland as in Central France. But the girl 
 who sews at her side is essentially Limousine, her 
 very name, Fortunade, recalls the pathetic head 
 of the girl-saint of the Correze whom she resembles 
 — pensive and slim, with the pursed, plaintive 
 mouth, the suffering grace of her profile, and the 
 something dreamy, sweet, yet almost sullen that 
 makes her appear half a Gothic angel and half a 
 scolded child. 
 
2o8 MADAME TINAYRE 
 
 Fortunade Brandou is only a little peasant, the 
 daughter of the village innkeeper, who goes out 
 sewing by the day to the few gentlemen's houses 
 in the countryside. But all the dreams, all the 
 visions, all the missionary fervours and super- 
 stitious fears of a Celtic race are locked beneath 
 the smooth black braids of her roundly projecting 
 brow. Her longing is not to be happy, but to 
 expiate, to redeem, to fly to the rescue of the 
 oppressed. She must up and grapple with sin and 
 sorrow. She cannot let the evil-doer perish before 
 her eyes. Fortunade, with her feeble body full of 
 suffering grace, her dolefiol smile, her plaintive 
 voice, has the soul of Comeille's Pauline, destroying 
 the idols of the Temple and braving the Proconsul; 
 has the faith and the fervour of a Joan of Arc, 
 letting slip her shepherd's crook to grasp an 
 enchanted sword. 
 
 And, even as she must suffer and struggle for 
 the moral welfare of her fellow-mortals, so Dr 
 Cayrol must needs overcome and stamp out disease. 
 Each of these personages is a type — complete, 
 rare, and living — animated with an extraordinary 
 racial truth. In describing the peasants and the 
 mountain of Correze, Madame Tina37re puts us in 
 contact with her own familiar country. There 
 are few more beautiful in France as scenery; none 
 more noble as a focus of human character. 
 
 Those who have studied the deep wave of moral 
 feeling which broke over France between the fall 
 of the First and the rise of the Second Empire — 
 
MADAME TINAYRE 209 
 
 students of the Saint-Simonians, historians of '48 
 — ^have always been struck by the great proportion 
 of men from the southern centre — ^from Auvergne 
 and Corr^ze — ^generous, philanthropic, active sons 
 of Utopia, brusque and kind, avid for justice as 
 the prophets of Israel. These minds, less intellec- 
 tually or theoretically great than large and magnani- 
 mous, form one of the finest categories of the French 
 character. 
 
 In no novel have we come across so adequate a 
 presentment of them as in the village doctor — 
 worthy confrere of Mrs Gaskell's country surgeon 
 and of Balzac's mddecin de campagne — the rustic 
 savant, interested in the scientific and social move- 
 ment of his times yet homely in his private tastes 
 and standards of life; parsimonious in pence, 
 and liberal with his rare gold pieces; distrustful 
 of all strangers, yet quick to harbour a fresh chimera; 
 prompt to anger; to aU appearance just a son of 
 the SOU, a hearty meat-fed man, fond of his glass, 
 fond of his pipe, fond of his gun, striding at ease 
 in his strong soUd shoes and his old country clothes 
 — ^but a sage for all that, and nearly a saint; a 
 man, at least, in the best sense of the word, with 
 the root of the matter in him. Such a man, choleric, 
 proud, and kind, is £tienne Ca5nrol, at once the 
 hero and the father of the heroine in L'Ombre de 
 I' Amour. 
 
 We recognise him at once and love him from 
 his very entrance on the twelfth page, when he 
 comes in, out of the mud, and the dark, whistling 
 
210 MADAME TINAYRE 
 
 the air of a coimtry reel, and greeting, with kind, 
 quizzical observant eyes, the two young girls 
 mending the hnen in his parlour. 
 
 'II avait un visage de vieux chef gaulois, colore, 
 couperose aux pommettes, les cheveux gris, I'oeil 
 bleu saiUant, le nez aquillin, la machoire solide 
 sous une longue moustache d^doree. Comme il 
 inclinait la t^te, on voyait I'attache puissante du 
 cou, et cette forme du crane qui s'unit a la nuque 
 par une Ugne droite, caracteristique chez les gens 
 du Plateau central. Les epaules etaient carrees, 
 le torse trapu; les jambes un peu arquees devaient 
 peser lourd sur le sol. Toute la personne — sans 
 finesse mais non pas sans noblesse — d'fitienne 
 Cayrol, r^v^lait I'origine paysanne. Elle exprimait 
 la force, une force stable, lente, reflechie, sure 
 d'elle m^me.' 
 
 And yet (an observation admirably in accordance 
 with the history of the type) some secret defect 
 of judgment condemns the dearest schemes of the 
 doctor (so well considered, so unselfish in their 
 working out, so noble and yet practical in their 
 aim), but destined none the less, to miscarry and 
 ■gang aft agley.' His unfinished sanatorium scars 
 the hill-top with the mean unsightly ruins of un- 
 completed work; and the consumptive youth, 
 whom he takes into his own home to nurse back 
 to health, not only dies, but seduces the doctor's 
 only daughter : the girl who was the pride of his 
 
MADAME TINAYRE 211 
 
 heart, as the sanatorium was the dream of his 
 mind. 
 
 Denise Cayrol is a noble creature, strong, kind, 
 and pure. At twenty-seven years of age she no 
 longer thinks of herself as a young girl; she is not 
 concerned with love and marriage, and it is rather 
 with a half-maternal, half-sisterly devotion that 
 she tends the young consumptive, a few years 
 younger than herself, who is so eager to live, so 
 ardent in loving, and whom her clear, reasonable 
 judgment and pitiful heart see from the first as 
 marked with the signs of his doom. Denise attracts 
 the hapless Jean with all the force and promise of 
 her health. When the doctor suspects the secret 
 engagement that binds his daughter to his patient, 
 he is both jealous and indignant (for he cannot 
 conceive how a woman can love a consumptive), 
 and he sends Jean away into a sanatorium. But 
 Jean falls ill; Denise rushes to his death-bed, and 
 then and there (in a wUd pitiful desire to pour 
 out all the best of life, in one moment, while there 
 is time) she yields to his fevered desire; she 
 succumbs. 
 
 There were two girls seated in the red-paved 
 parlour, that smelt of damp bricks and freshly- 
 washed linen and ripe apples, when the doctor 
 strode in from the dark night outside, on the 
 winterly evening which opens the novel. The second 
 is Fortunade Brandon, the little village dressmaker, 
 the mystic; an ill-judged pity lures her, too, to her 
 undoing. When Veydrenne, the poacher, the 
 
212 MADAME TINAYRE 
 
 outlaw, breaks his leg, Fortimade tends the village 
 miscreant in his illness and strives to save his 
 soul : — 
 
 'Ce serait si beau de sauver cette ime !' 
 
 Alas, when did the wolf listen to the voice of 
 Little Red Riding Hood? The sweet, the mystical, 
 the charitable Fortunade fell prey to a wUd beast, 
 and the deep gorges of the mountain torrent 
 received the soiled, childish body that dared no 
 longer affront the light of the sun. 
 
 ' Morte, morte ! non par le hasard d'un faux pas, 
 non par un chagrin d'amour, elle n'avait jamais 
 aime que Dieu, la chaste iille : Dieu et ses pauvres ! 
 morte pour ^tre all^e vers celui que tous haissaient; 
 morte pour avoir tentd I'enterprise foUe de sauver 
 une ame perdue ! . . . Perdue eUe-mfeme sans doute, 
 brutalemente outrag6e, deux fois victime, elle 
 avait pay6 de sa pudeur et de sa vie I'imprudence 
 sublime de sa pitie.' 
 
 These characters are conceived with the sure 
 and intimate reality that comes of kinship; we 
 feel that Madame Tinayre is of their race and their 
 habitation. Here, her foot is on her native heath, 
 and she compels our interest far more powerfully 
 than when she writes of Paris (her Paris is always 
 a little too 'Rive gauche'); when she pictures her 
 Corr^ze, when she evokes the mountain scenery 
 
MADAME TINAYRE 213 
 
 round Brives or Tulle, I think no French novelist 
 since George Sand has possessed so masterly a 
 touch in peopling a living landscape with living 
 beings. Indeed, remembering the pastoral novels 
 of Our Lady of Nohant, recalling 'Marie Claire,' 
 comparing them and this book of Madame Tinayre's 
 with The Mill on the Floss and Adam Bede, it seems 
 to me possible that one of the greatest gifts of 
 woman as a novelist may lie in her singular power 
 of rendering country life in all the variety of its 
 personages, its customs, and its natural back- 
 ground. 
 
MLLE MARIE LEN^RU 
 
 A LINE from one of the essays of Suares might 
 serve as a motto for all the plays of Mile Leneru : 
 'La conscience malade, voila le theatre de la 
 fatalite moderne.' A sick conscience, a soul diseased 
 — in other words, the problem of evil; or, in more 
 modern phrase, the war between an over-developed 
 personality and the rights of others; such is the 
 theme which her genius, at once lucid and sombre, 
 ardent and logical, treats with a penetrating passion, 
 with almost, as it were, a sort of introspection, as 
 though, in face of some grave derogation from 
 current morality, she had said : How did a nature, 
 apparently excellent, arrive at such a pass? How 
 should I, in his place, have fallen and yet have 
 remained consequent with all that I was up to the 
 moment of failure? So that the dramas of Mile 
 Leneru have the gravity and the spiritual ardour 
 of an examination of conscience. They seem to 
 radiate from an inner self fuU of revolt, passion, 
 and implacable reason. 
 
 Not that Mile Leneru is religious. In writing 
 this Uttle book, it is borne in upon me very clearly 
 that man, not woman, is really the rehgious animal. 
 But Mile Leneru is not the usual free-thinker; 
 she is, so to speak, a theologian turned inside out. 
 There is about her something of the unfrocked 
 
 214 
 
MLLE MARIE LENERU 215 
 
 priest who, whatever his present opinions, feels 
 himself always a priest, entrusted with the souls 
 of others and responsible for their eternal fate. She 
 no longer accepts the promises and the command- 
 ments of revealed religion; but nothing else appears 
 to her of really great importance. 
 
 In all she writes we recognise the conflict of 
 a proud and ardent character, a passionate and 
 avid sensibility, with a soul enamoured of honour, 
 order, discipline, self-immolation; so that we never 
 know which is the real Marie Len^ru : the impas- 
 sioned anarchist convinced that the one important 
 thing in life is for each individual to become the 
 most perfect example possible of his own pecuhar 
 tjrpe; or the ascetic, eager to sacrifice the visible 
 and natural life to a Kfe invisible and supernatural. 
 
 It is this double nature, doubtless, which gives 
 so much substance to the plays of this young 
 writer. She conceals in her heart a romantic 
 who died young — or rather he is not dead, only 
 buried in a perpetual in pace, whence his voice 
 sometimes issues in revolt or appeal; but her mind 
 is given over to the rule of a bitter and splendid 
 reason which assures her that neither the State, nor 
 the family, nor any constituted form of society, 
 based on a firm tradition, needs genius so much 
 as order, passion so much as discipline, grandeur 
 so much as happiness; and indeed in all her plays 
 she sacrifices (as Brutus sacrificed his sons) the 
 first of these catagories to the second. 
 
 Her sensibility remains imbued with those ideals 
 
2i6 MLLE MARIE LENERU 
 
 of individualism and ambition which reigned in 
 France throughout the nineties : she was bom 
 under the Consulate of Nietzsche and of Ibsen; 
 but experience and reflection have shown her the 
 disasters of a moral anarchy which still engages 
 her sympathy though she augurs no happy issue 
 for it. On the frontispiece of her first book, Les 
 Affranchis, she has written a couplet from Racine's 
 Titus et Bdrinice, expressing this antagonism between 
 the individual and his environment : two Unes in 
 which the Jewish Queen, sacrificed by her royal 
 lover to reasons of state {invitus invitam), reminds 
 him of his duty to himself — and to her : — 
 
 'Rome a ses droits. Seigneur, n'avez-vous pas 
 
 les votres? 
 Ses int^rfits sont-ils plus sacrfe que -les notres? ' 
 
 And this question resumes a theme which never 
 ceases to occupy her tragic sense of passion and 
 her strong intellectual curiosity. 
 
 Her first play is the history of a grand passion 
 in two undiscipUned yet superior natures — ^two 
 super-mortals — despite society, and law, and 
 order. Phihppe and Helene are (as Gobineau 
 would say) 'Children of the King,' morally and 
 intellectually a head and shoulders above the 
 people. By what process of reflection are they 
 induced to sacrifice a miraculous possibility of 
 happiness, a draught such as they alone might 
 quaff, to rights and duties which they do not 
 
MLLE MARIE LENERU 217 
 
 acknowledge? Why, being giants, do they submit 
 to the bonds of the pygmies? Are they right, are 
 they wrong in the renunciation? Is there only one 
 right and one wrong? Such are the questions raised 
 by the history of her Affranchis — ^her Free Souls, thus 
 most ironically named, since, in fact, none of us is 
 free, and we act, not as we would, nor as we should, 
 but as we can. 
 
 Philippe Alquier is a philosopher, a great pro- 
 fessor, a pioneer of ideas, an idol of the young : in 
 fact, a sort of Bergson, a sort of Barres — ^the Barr^s 
 of yesterday. He believes neither in duty, nor in 
 the moral law, nor in any Absolute, nor in any 
 certitude; and he discerns, in the floating relativity 
 of things, but one obligation, that of augmenting 
 to its utmost his personahty. He is married to a 
 pleasant, pretty wife, whose irritating mediocrity 
 is, so to speak, the hall-mark of her virtue : it 
 is impossible to be more respectable than Marthe. 
 In the early Twentieth Century, at the dissolution 
 of French monasteries, Alquier, the philosophic 
 anarchist, receives under his roof his wife's 
 sister, Mother-General of the order of Reformed 
 Cistercians, Abbess of Fontevrault. 
 
 Under his roof — or rather under her roof, for 
 the Abbess of Fontevrault is co-heiress with her 
 married sister in the properties which the Alquiers 
 inhabit, both in Paris and in the country. But 
 necessity in this case is doubled by no disapproba- 
 tion : Philippe Alquier naturally beUeves in the 
 rights of minorities. Although politically of the 
 
 F.W. 
 
2i8 MLLE MARIE LENERU 
 
 extreme left, he would in this affair have voted 
 with the extreme right (as did many Dreyfusards 
 some twenty years ago, who opposed the banish- 
 ment of their pohtical enemies, the Jesuits), and 
 thus, in the opening scene, the author establishes 
 her hero's refusal to allow the tyranny of the 
 greatest number. 
 
 The abbess brings with her a postulate of her 
 order, secularised like herself, but (in the case of 
 the girl) before she had pronounced her vows. 
 H61toe Schlumberger, young, beautiful, intelligent, 
 and rich, is naturally the heroine of the piece. Her 
 mind, the fresher that hitherto it has been restricted 
 to the skyey sphere of theology and ethics, revels 
 in the wide and indiscriminate culture with which 
 Alquier delights to enrich it. Nietzsche, Bergson, 
 Anatole France, she absorbs all without a protest. 
 Naturally, history repeats itself, and Abelard falls 
 in love with H61oise, and H^loise still deeper in 
 love with Abelard. 
 
 What, in this conjuncture, is the duty of a free 
 soul? Shall Philippe Alquier divorce his faithful, 
 admirable, uninspiring wife? Shall he keep a 
 virtuous young lady as his secret mistress? He 
 makes both these proposals, but he makes them 
 as one who feels how impossible they are. For we 
 act, not in accordance with what we actually think 
 and beheve, but as persons still inspired by what 
 we used to think and have long been in the habit 
 of believing : when Alquier proposes a divorce to 
 the girl he has educated in the ideas of Nietzsche, 
 
MLLE MARIE LENERU 219 
 
 her first instinctive cry is : Et les autres P She is 
 an altruist still, and a Christian, in spite of herself, 
 and acts according to an impetus given years ago, 
 perhaps before her birth. 
 
 Helene in the convent to which, unbelieving, 
 she retires, is happier, probably, than she would 
 have been as Alquier's concubine (setting society 
 at defiance) or as his wife, Hagar enthroned, having 
 sent out the lawful Sarah into the wilderness. In 
 the convent at least she finds, if not a faith, a rule 
 of life. A discipline and an ideal are things more 
 intimately necessary to her soul, such as the ages 
 have formed it, than the happiest passion, if 
 satisfied in their despite. And Alquier, too, wiU 
 acquiesce. When he threatens the abbess with 
 political reprisals, with the ruin of her order, she 
 smiles : — 
 
 'Vous ne ferez rien de tout cela, Philippe, et 
 vous me donnerez votre fille a Clever.' 
 
 In her second play, Le Redoubtable (produced at 
 the Odeon Theatre in January, 1912, and with- 
 drawn by the author after three representations). 
 Mile Leneru shows still more forcibly the monstrous, 
 the almost cancerous growth that a too exasperated 
 personality may become in an organised community 
 of mediocrities. 
 
 Georges Malte is the most brilUant naval officer 
 of his promotion; aU that an individuality can 
 acquire and possess in one generation, he has 
 
220 MLLE MARIE LENERU 
 
 acquired, he possesses. But nothing else, neither 
 traditions, nor inherited breeding, nor the instincts 
 of a gentleman, nor even fortune; Malte is the son 
 of an Italian pastrycook, and no more French by 
 birth than Napoleon, or Zola, or Gambetta — ^who, 
 after all, were pretty tolerable Frenchmen. And 
 his soul is devoured with ambition for the refine- 
 ments he does not inherit; and his mind is con- 
 sumed by the desire to be first, by that amor 
 dominandi which is, in certain natures, the strongest 
 passion of all. 
 
 And his heart is whoUy occupied by the mistress 
 he adores, who is, most simply and most naturally, 
 all that he can never be : the child of a ruling race. 
 Laurence Villaret is the daughter of one admiral, 
 the wife of another. For six years she and her 
 lover have belonged to each other in secret, and 
 at length the time comes when Malte (who in his 
 love of supremacy has affected the rich man) feels 
 his creditors close upon him and disgrace near at 
 hand. Money he must have or farewell to his 
 career, good-bye to the love of his life. 
 
 Unfortunately, a brilliant of&cer has always at 
 his disposal one means of raising funds— if he listen 
 to temptation. And Malte listens. He communi- 
 cates to a foreign power certain secrets, and the 
 good ship Redoubtable is rendered worthless- 
 just as the Affranchis were not free; just as La 
 Triomphairice will be shown to be an unloved, 
 broken-hearted, solitary woman. All Mile Leneru's 
 titles are epigrams of irony ! Yet, in Le Redoubtable. 
 
MLLE MARIE LENERU 221 
 
 Mile Len6ru has given us the reductio ad absurdum 
 of her former theme. If, at the close of the 
 Affmnchis, we doubted whether the lovers were 
 wise in sacrificing their utmost joy ' au bon gouverne- 
 ment du monde' (and such is the contagious force 
 of passion that we had left the theatre happier 
 after seeing them elope to some undreamed of 
 isle), we doubt no longer when we have seen Le 
 Redoutable. 
 
 Although we may admit that the moral law is 
 in process of evolution, though we may look 
 forward to a day when a new vital order shall 
 supplant our established order, yet, meanwhile, 
 we must observe the rules of the game, even though 
 they mean no more to us than the rules of a game ! 
 In fact, however we choose to think, there is but 
 one profitable way of living : that which consists 
 in treating as fundamentally true those truths alone 
 which have weathered the experience of genera- 
 tions. Foris ut moris, intus ut libet. Or as Pascal 
 puts it : 'II faut dire comme les autres, mais ne 
 pas penser comme eux.' 
 
 And so Mile Leneru, one of the rare individualists 
 of the younger generation, MUe Leneru, so romantic, 
 with her love for the noble, the exceptional, with 
 her revolt against platitude and mediocrity, repeats, 
 in a mood of revolt and irony, the refrain of Jules 
 Romains : — 
 
 ' Nous cessons d'etre nous pour que la Ville dise : 
 MOII' 
 
222 MLLE MARIE LENERU 
 
 This young writer, so extraordinary by reason 
 of her depth of naeditation, and the strange Pas- 
 calian vigour and beauty of her language, was the 
 more surprising (and yet perhaps the more 
 exphcable) because of a singular infirmity : she 
 Hved immured in an interior world. If, indeed, 
 her short-sighted vision perceived a vague image of 
 our earth and its inhabitants, the noisiest city 
 left her undisturbed to her reflections. Mile 
 Leneru was absolutely deaf. She heard no echo 
 of the applause which greeted the Affranchis. 
 In 191 8 when the comedians of the Theatre 
 Fran9ais read and accepted 'a I'lmanimite,' her 
 new play. La Triomphatrice, she alone remained 
 immoved. The blindness of Milton, the paralysis 
 of Heine, the deafness of Beethoven, have accus- 
 tomed us to these ironies, or compensations, of a 
 mysterious fate. 
 
 The humble ferment which produces alcohol 
 when its development is checked and interrupted, 
 flourishes as an unproductive mildew if its organism 
 find all that it requires. An obstacle is often the 
 stimulus of genius. But when genius has made at 
 last a pearl of the wound, a ruby of the fissure, 
 and turned starvation into rapture, how cruel 
 appears the sudden fate that snatches the hard- 
 earned prize from its grasp ! Marie Len6ru died 
 of the grippe on the 23rd of September, 191 8. 
 
THE PASTORAL NOVEL 
 
 There has always been a pastoral novel in France, 
 because France is an agricultural country. Except 
 mUk, meat, and a little bread, England draws too 
 little of her nourishment from her own resources; 
 her plenty is a cheap import; and even the beauty 
 of much of her landscape suggests an indifference 
 to agriculture. We have known a French admirer, 
 confronted with a marvellous panorama of wild 
 Sussex heath — ^wood, grassy links, and gorse- 
 covered common — contemplate the scene and sigh, 
 ' Rien, rien, rien, a se mettre sous la dent ! ' 
 
 France, on the other hand, is self-sufficing, 
 almost self-supporting, and always has been so. 
 If we consider the Duke of Berry's Book of Hours 
 we realise that in many parts of France the business 
 of life has continued almost unchanged since the 
 Fourteenth Century. From the pruning of the 
 vine in February (our month of March) to the 
 fattening of the swine in the oakwoods in November, 
 while the wood-cutters mark the trees for felling, 
 here are just such scenes as the dweUer in rural France 
 has constantly before his eyes to-day, unaltered 
 — ^scenes which the accmnulated associations of 
 countless generations have invested with a human 
 interest more poignant, more intimate, than any 
 which mere landscape can afford. And we admire 
 
 223 
 
224 THE PASTORAL NOVEL 
 
 the French peasant; his frugality, his industry, 
 his endurance are indeed beyond all praise; his 
 economy is marvellous, and such is his good humour 
 that he makes a pleasure of his self-denial; miser- 
 ably lodged, poorly fed, he is conscious of no 
 inferiority; he knows himself to be the backbone 
 of France. 
 
 The peasant and the landscape for ages have 
 remained unchanged. France is so large a country, 
 with so great a variety of soil and climate, that 
 there are all sorts of French peasants : materialistic, 
 clean, bright, and gay, in Touraine and the Char- 
 entes; superstitious, poverty-stricken, imaginative, 
 in Vendue and Brittany; good-hiunoured, ambitious, 
 and positive in Auvergne — and so on through all 
 the nations of France. When you knew the place, 
 you knew the peasant — ^until quite lately. The 
 'regionalist' (the provincial) novel has come into 
 being just when the field labourer himself has 
 ceased to be regionalist, or provincial; for military 
 service is a wonderful leveller and unifier. 
 
 UntU the middle of the last century (until, that 
 is to say, the days of George EUot in England and 
 the latter days of George Sand in France), a 
 Fourteenth-Century peasant might have revisited 
 his country parish almost anjAvhere in France, and 
 have noted little alteration to mark the flight of 
 time. The last fifty years have made more differ- 
 ence in rural matters than the five centuries that 
 went before them. The dairy farms of Normandy 
 with their patent separators, their ferments for 
 
THE PASTORAL NOVEL 225 
 
 cheese flavours, sent down in neat little tubes 
 from the Pasteur Institute; the arable lands with 
 their great red, throbbing mechanical sowers, 
 reapers, binders, automatic ploughs, threshing 
 machines, etc.; the network of roads with their 
 motor-cars and bicycles ; the train whirling past 
 in a white puff of smoke behind the screen of poplars; 
 such homely sights of our everyday Twentieth 
 Century would cause a mediaeval husbandman to 
 open his eyes considerably. 
 
 He would have to seek the depths of Brittany, 
 the heart of the Cantal, the wastes of the Loz^re, 
 to find some faint image of the world he knew. 
 There, indeed, save for the frequent crops of 
 potatoes and buckwheat, which he would not 
 recognise, he would find little changed; the one- 
 toothed wooden plough still scores its furrow on 
 the steep hillside; the thud of the flails is loud in 
 the dusk of autumn evenings; in the fields the 
 women stoop and gather the buckwheat into 
 stooks and bind it standing, even as the reapers 
 cut the stalks from the ground; the old pastoral 
 life continues, not greatly changed for better or 
 for worse. But even here the century-old country 
 hfe of France is menaced, and that threat hanging 
 over it renders it more dear, and almost sacred, 
 that the rural novel in France is at once more 
 exact and more tender in its record than it was 
 in the century gone by. 
 
 When I came to hve in France in 1888, there 
 was a pastoral novel of course — there has always 
 
226 THE PASTORAL NOVEL 
 
 been a pastoral novel in France, as I said — ^but it 
 was of a most calumniatory and reviling sort. 
 Great was my surprise, when I spent my summers 
 in the country, to find that the old gaffers on the 
 farms were not left to die of hunger and neglect 
 when they could no longer work, but, on the other 
 hand, were treated with the utmost honour and 
 consideration, given invariably the best seat on 
 the settle, the best wine, expensive tonics from the 
 doctor's shop, and aU that filial kindness could 
 devise. Maupassant's wonderful stories, Zola's La 
 Terre, must evidently have some foundation in 
 fact. But my personal experience has not corrobor- 
 ated their pessimism. 
 
 Then, after the pastoral novel genre rosse, came, 
 with the very last years of the Nineteenth Century, 
 the reign of the social novel; and, as a matter of 
 course, the pastoral novel followed smt. The best 
 stories of those times, I think, are Rene Bazin's, 
 especially that most picturesque and touching 
 idyll of a farm in Vendee gradually destroyed by 
 the rural exodus, La Terre qui Meurt. In Donatienne, 
 the same writer paints the poverty of a Breton 
 village, and the temptation — almost the dire neces- 
 sity — ^which induces the young mother to quit 
 home and children in order to earn the large wages, 
 and hve the facile days of a wet-nurse in Paris. 
 And, naturally, he shows the moral (and finally 
 the material) ruin which foUow on that ill-judged 
 step. 
 
 In Le Ble qui Ldve (The Growing Com), Ren6 
 
THE PASTORAL NOVEL 227 
 
 Bazin describes the life of the woodland labourers 
 — the foresters, wood-cutters, charcoal-burners, and 
 so on — who form an important part of the rural 
 population in France; and he shows them ravaged 
 by strikes, S3mdicates, etc.; for M. Bazin is nothing 
 if not Catholic and Conservative. 
 
 Yet the tone of his novels — ^though in my brief 
 account the stories sound melancholy enough — is 
 as far removed as possible from the roman rosse 
 of the Eighties; M. Bazin is full of faith and hope 
 and charity; he is, in spite of human maUce, so 
 convinced of the final triumph of God that we might 
 write on all his books the refrain of ^schylus : — 
 
 ' Sing alas ! and say alas ! But the Good shall 
 come to its own ! ' 
 
 AiXii'o;', AiXivoK eiTre, to S'iv inKara. 
 
 In those last years of the Nineteenth — in those 
 first years of the Twentieth — Century, while Rene 
 Bazin's angeMc voice was welling up in treble 
 ecstasies, the pastoral novel in France had other 
 notes which held, as it were, the bass — deep, 
 strange notes — ^brief, compHcated, syncopated 
 phrasing. In other words, Jules Renard and Charles- 
 Louis Philippe were giving their sense, too, of the 
 life of woods and fields. 
 
 I wrote once that Jules Renard was the Hokusai 
 of French literature. He just glances at an object, 
 sees its essential character, fixes that and neglects 
 the rest; a bird, a flower, a little boy with carroty 
 
228 THE PASTORAL NOVEL 
 
 hair and sensitive, eager eyes, a scolding house- 
 wife, best of all, perhaps, an old, old country-woman, 
 who cannot read or write, but who is full of the 
 knowledge of things. I would give even Poil-de- 
 Carotie for Ragotie ! The quarrel of Ragotte and 
 her son, 'le Paul,' moistens one's eyes with the 
 tenderest pity; and yet it is told with a dry, almost 
 a hard precision, a concise sobriety; not a word 
 superfluous. The thing happened so, and a pity 
 'tis 'twas so; there's no more to be said. But 
 underneath this real compassion there is a sad 
 certitude of the end of all things, a melancholy 
 nihilism, a hopeless irony. 
 
 Few books are sadder reading than Jules Renard's 
 Bucolics. This harsh, terse, impassible writer 
 breaks our heart by his choice of a subject : an 
 ill-treated child, a helpless, infirm old woman. If 
 we smile at anything that he evokes, it is seldom 
 a happy thought, a hopeful suggestion, but some 
 quaint image or touch of character, for Jules Renard 
 enjoyed the gift of an incomparable visual imagina- 
 tion : he makes us see the bushy-tailed squirrel 
 flitting through the autrnnn woods and lighting 
 up all the dead leaves with his bright brush as he 
 passes; or old Mother La Chalude, knitting as she 
 walks, who has threaded on her apron string the 
 pierced kernel of an apricot and placed it at her 
 waist, a little to the left, to support the end of 
 one of her knitting needles; or older Honorine, 
 coming across the field-path, bent double, so that 
 she appears a headless woman, while her stick, 
 
THE PASTORAL NOVEL 229 
 
 on which her rugged hands stand out Uke knots, 
 is higher than her cap. 
 
 This keen appreciation of the beauty and 
 character of Nature, combined with a tragic sense 
 of the aimlessness and incertitude of human destiny, 
 are the pecuUar quaUty, I think, of the closing 
 Nineteenth Century : a minghng of enchant- 
 ment and disenchantment. Nowhere, of course, is 
 it so remarkable as in Pierre Loti, but he is out of 
 our perspective — ^which only concerns the Twentieth 
 Century. We have noticed it in Jules Renard, only 
 lately dead (1864-1909). We shall find it again, with 
 less artistry and a more poignant pity, in another 
 writer, ten years younger, who died about the 
 same time, Charles-Louis Philippe; as we found it 
 in Madame Colette. 
 
 Jules Renard was one of the rare French authors 
 of our time who do not scorn to love their calling; 
 who are men of letters from the bottom of their 
 soul, and not principally apostles, or disciples, or 
 reformers, or philosophers; — ^who are as happy as 
 Flaubert when at last they enclose an aspect of 
 reality, however humble, in some perfect phrase 
 as pure as the amber which preserves a fly. Renard 
 had ideas and passionate convictions of his own; 
 to resume, let us say that they were the exact 
 opposite of the ideas and passionate convictions 
 of a Paul Claudel; but he did not usually write 
 to express or to expound his peculiar theory of anti- 
 clericahsm or democracy. If these opinions came 
 into the picture, he noted them with his customary 
 
230 THE PASTORAL NOVEL 
 
 poignant exactitude, no more. Only once did he 
 think of writing a play with a purpose. His great, 
 his scrupulous endeavour was to represent reality 
 as he saw it, just as it struck his shrewd, short- 
 sighted gimlet-glance, his Japanese or Alexandrian 
 sense of detail; but an endless patience — ^the 
 patience of the sportsman and the painter — enabled 
 him to track an impression down to its most secret 
 touch. And then he fixed it in one perfect phrase 
 — sometimes just marred by too tense an effort 
 to seize an evanescent reality. Jules Renard, in 
 fine, was an artist. 
 
 He looked at Nature, not as so many do, from 
 the fourth fioor of a Paris boulevard, but from 
 the village street or from the field that slopes away 
 beyond the orchard hedge. He was mayor of the 
 Uttle commune in the department of the Ni^vre 
 where he spent so much of his time — and a mayor 
 passionately absorbed in his municipal affairs; 
 but when he turned homewards and sat down to 
 his writing-table, Chitry-les Mines and Chaumont 
 lost their magic; the man, the mayor, gave place 
 to the patient artist — surely the most scrupulous 
 of our time — carving his cherry-stone, polishing 
 his bead of amber, where some chance insect lives 
 for ever in a pellucid incorruptibility. 
 
 This love of detail, this desire to reproduce a 
 landscape, an object or a personage in its individual, 
 intimate truth, are points of contact between Renard 
 and another novelist from the same centre of 
 France : Charles-Louis Philippe. But Philippe's 
 
THE PASTORAL NOVEL 231 
 
 eyes were less keen and his heart was far more 
 tender : PhiUppe was, as it were, steeped in the 
 Russian pity of a Dostoieffsky. And he knew the 
 poor and the miseries of the poor, not as an artist 
 knows them, mingled with romance, but as the 
 child of poor people who has felt such things at 
 first hand. 
 
 He was born in 1874 at C6rilly, a little town of 
 the department of the AUier, where his father was 
 a maker of wooden shoes. A pupil of the board 
 school, his rare abilities promised a prosperous 
 future, and, gifted for mathematics, he studied 
 for the school of engineering — ^for 'Polytechnique.' 
 But his frail health and tiny size rendered him 
 inapt for that profession, and his livelihood seemed 
 a problem too difficult to solve when Maurice Barr^s, 
 a Deputy for Paris, recommended him for a small 
 post in the pay of the town council at the Hotel- 
 de-VUle. Phihppe was thenceforth an inspector 
 of stalls and shop-fronts — and his kind protector 
 chose for him the VII. arondissement of Paris, 
 the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where stalls are few. 
 In return for his nine guineas a month (230 francs) 
 Phihppe had but to stroU about the quiet, almost 
 provincial streets of the old-fashioned courtly 
 quarter and reap the harvest of a quiet eye. But 
 Philippe's vision was chiefly interior. In the 
 noble Rue de Varenne and the historical Rue Saint- 
 Dominique he contemplated that abyss of misery, 
 that sUppery Avernus of women's lazy wiles and 
 young men's dangerous desire, which he has revealed 
 
232 THE PASTORAL NOVEL 
 
 to us in Bubu de Montparnasse and Marie Donadieu : 
 tragic idylls of the distant Latin quarter. 
 
 Here we seem as far as may be from the pastoral 
 novel ! But Philippe, in Paris, saw rise upon his 
 inner eye the C6rilly of his childhood; the one- 
 storied house, opposite his father's shop, where the 
 PSre Perdrix lived with his old wife; and the lonely 
 cottage, capped with thatch, where little Charles 
 Blanchard Uved alone with his mother, the widowed 
 charwoman, and where the poor, dull, dreamy, 
 ill-nourished lad died at nine years old — of "old 
 age.' And he saw his own house and his childish 
 self, and his adorable clever mother, and all the 
 poem of their love. And he wrote Le Pere Perdrix, 
 and La M^re et I'Enfant, and he began Charles 
 Blanchard. And then, at five-and-thirty years of 
 age, he died. 
 
 He cannot be said to have Mved in vain, for 
 the young inspector of stalls left behind him, not 
 only a great name to a little clan — a clan which 
 included Barrfe, Andre Gide, Daniel Halevy, 
 Val6ry Larbaud, Andre Beaunier; that is to say, 
 whatever is most delicately critical in France — 
 but also a school. The chief names in that school 
 are Smile GuiUaumin and Marguerite Audoux, 
 both of them, like Phihppe, natives of the Bour- 
 bonnais. 
 
 There are, in the literary world of Paris, those 
 who do not scruple to assert that Madame Audoux's 
 great pastoral novel, Marie-Claire, was in reality 
 written by Charles-Louis Phihppe. I wonder if 
 
THE PASTORAL NOVEL 233 
 
 those inconsiderate critics can have read either 
 author ! It is as though one should accuse Baudelaire 
 of having written the country novels of George 
 Sand; as though one should say that Thomas 
 Hardy really wrote Tennyson's Idylls of the King. 
 The incomparable simplicity and serenity of Marie- 
 Claire are as different as may be from the difficult 
 harmony, the obscure, subtle, poignant intuitions 
 of PhUippe. It is true that Philippe was gaining 
 in simpUcity (perhaps from his contact with 
 Madame Audoux?) when he died. And no doubt 
 he was prodigal of counsel, aid, and precept to 
 the little dressmaker who was his pupil in letters : 
 he showed her, perhaps, in a novel, how to "cut 
 out.' But their genius, their experience, their 
 character, and even their view of life is quite 
 distinct : the one infinitely minute, tormented, 
 tragic; the other large, quiet, and serene; either 
 equally sincere. 
 
 It was Madame Audoux who called the friends 
 — ^the ardent, devoted friends — of Philippe to the 
 nursing home in the Rue de la Chaise, where he lay 
 djTing of t5^hoid fever; it was she, with his mother, 
 summoned from CeriUy, who received his dying 
 breath; and he had often spoken in his circle of 
 the noble imagination, the just and luminous 
 elegance of mind which distinguish Marie-Claire. 
 So that when the book appeared there were friends 
 to greet it — the friends of poor PhUippe, dead in 
 his grave. 
 
 But the book did not need these protectors, for 
 F,w. R 
 
234 THE PASTORAL NOVEL 
 
 its success was immediate, popular, immense, and 
 by no means purely literary; readers, who had 
 barely heard of PhUippe himself, of Andr6 Gide, 
 of any of Madame Audoux's literary clan, opened 
 her volume in their thousands. The story has been 
 translated into several languages — ^into English, 
 I think. No doubt it owed something to Mirbeau's 
 eloquent preface, reveahng the author's personality. 
 The public is sentimental; it was touched by the 
 picture of the poor Uttle dressmaker — not a princess 
 of tape and scissors, but one of those Httle snips 
 who go out to ladies' houses, working for half a 
 crown a day. The account of this poor woman, 
 no longer quite young, suddenly threatened with 
 bhndness if she pursue her trade; turning then, 
 for a consolation, as much as for a means of liveli- 
 hood, to literature, and with her first venture 
 discovering herself a great artist; this poignant 
 history seemed to the public a novel before the 
 novel began. 
 
 Will Marguerite Audoux, intimidated by this 
 rare success, remain the woman of one book? I 
 hope not ! If she dare not again attack the pastoral 
 novel, let her write the touching life of her friend 
 and master, Philippe. Or let her turn from the 
 fields of France to the moving story of a woman 
 alone in Paris, earning the right to hve as she 
 draws an interminable thread. 
 
 Marie Claire is the history of an orphan girl, 
 brought up in an orphanage, placed out at thirteen 
 years of age as little shepherdess on a farm ; some 
 
THE PASTORAL NOVEL 235 
 
 five years later — after the merest sketch of a 
 love-story with her mistress's brother — dismissed; 
 again received at the orphanage as cook or kitchen- 
 maid, until, on the last page of all — not yet twenty 
 years of age, she takes the train for Paris. Can 
 one imagine anything flatter, staler, more unprofit- 
 able? Such stories must be written by the thousand 
 in the simple annals of the poor. And yet Marie- 
 Claire is a sequence of images of unforgettable 
 loveliness. 
 
 The story is divided into three parts; and if the 
 beginning and the end — the convent and the love- 
 story — ^have their rare merits, the middle section, 
 the life of the little shepherdess on the farm, seems 
 to me in all sincerity equal to the loveliest pastoral 
 novels of George Sand — to Frangois le Champi or 
 Le petite Fadette. The shepherdess and her flock 
 lost in the mist, and that winter scene, when a 
 ■great yeUow dog' pounces on a sheep and drags 
 it away while the coUie howls plaintively, crouching 
 at the shepherdess's feet : — 
 
 "Aussitot je devinai que c'etait un loup. II 
 emportait le mouton a pleine gueule, par le milieu 
 du corps. II grimpa sans effort sur le talus et 
 quand il sauta le large fosse qui le separait du bois, 
 ses pattes de derriere me firent penser a des ailes. 
 A ce moment je n'aurais pas trouve extraordinaire 
 qu'il se fut envole pardessus les arbres.' 
 
 And the personages of the farm : Maitre Sylvain, 
 
236 THE PASTORAL NOVEL 
 
 the kind Pauline, the friendly deUcate-minded 
 Eugene, are drawn not only with an artist's sense 
 of beauty, but with a marvellous and mysterious 
 sense of life. In France to-day there are many 
 women writers of great talent and success : Madame 
 Marcelle Tinayre, with her Maison du Pdchi; 
 Madame de Noailles, with her wonderful poems; 
 Mile Marie Leneru, with her plays; I admire them 
 all with my heart, but I think I would as soon 
 have written Marie-Claire ! 
 
 Madame Audoux is not the only pupil of Charles- 
 Louis Philippe : EmUe Gmllaumin is also of his 
 following, or at least he resembles him in his birth- 
 place and his profession. Guillaumin is a farmer 
 who hves on his farm, about ten miles from C^rilly; 
 he works the land with his brother; and, in the 
 intervals of seedtime and harvest he, too, writes 
 pastoral novels about the pleasant country round 
 the AUier river. 
 
 But seek not there for the keen, anxious psycho- 
 logy of Philippe, nor for the large poetry of 
 Madame Audoux; nothing could be more matter- 
 of-fact, more terre-d,-terre (as we say in France), 
 than La Vie d'un Simple or Rose et sa Parisienne. 
 For that very reason these books, and others from 
 the same pen, are valuable to the inquirer who 
 desires to know, without any aUoy of poetry, the 
 real conditions of the farmer's and field-labourer's 
 life in France; but they are not admirable to the 
 artist hke the novels of Jules Renard or Marguerite 
 Audoux. Obstinate, precise, Guillaumin delves 
 
THE PASTORAL NOVEL 237 
 
 his style as a peasant tills his land — not (like 
 Philippe or Madame Audoux, who are equally 
 fastidious and minute) in order to produce a certain 
 effect of beauty or impression of sensibility, but 
 in the effort to render a just, exact account of 
 what he has seen. 
 
 His best book is La Vie d'un Simple. Regarded 
 as art it is duU, monotonous, and bare; and yet, 
 considered as life, it is singularly touching and 
 ample, like one of those vast plains of France, 
 traversed by interminable, poplar-bordered roads, 
 whose great sweeping lines melt, far off, into long, 
 low horizons. 
 
 La Vie d'un Simple is the life of a peasant from 
 the time when, a child of seven years old, he 
 pastures his sheep among the stubble and the heather 
 until, an old, bent man, too feeble to work on the 
 land, he again minds the herds at pasture, as they 
 use in France. Tiennou has Uved all his life in 
 front of the same horizon; he has no book-learning; 
 he knows nothing but the land; but he knows 
 it well. Like his father before him, he has been 
 a mitayer, that is to say, a tenant-farmer who 
 combines with the landlord to stock a farm, tills 
 it, and manages the live-stock, and pays his rent 
 on a system of half-profits. 
 
 The system is very common in France, and in 
 theory is admirable. It appears a means of uniting 
 capital and labour in the cultivation of the soil. 
 But, if the tenant has no capital behind him, in 
 bad seasons he has to borrow at usurious interest. 
 
238 THE PASTORAL NOVEL 
 
 And then, if the cart-horse break his neck, or the 
 cow die of anthrax, on the top of a bad harvest, 
 his pHght is poor indeed; for the landlord has a 
 right to exact that stock and tools shall always 
 correspond to the inventory drawn up when the 
 tenant entered into possession. And too often, 
 if he improves his farm, the owner makes that an 
 occasion for increasing his own pretensions. Such 
 is the fate of Tiennou, who, having spent the better 
 part of his hfe on bettering his land, in the end 
 receives notice to quit. 
 
 Unless he be (as he so often is) a peasant-pro- 
 prietor, the lot of the French husbandman is 
 austere. In a little pamphlet, En Bourbonnais, 
 M. GuUlaumin has added up the yearly receipts 
 of a day-labourer in good work, turn by turn 
 haymaker, harvester, thresher, wood-cutter, and 
 so on. His annual earnings amount, in English 
 coin, to £21 I2S. Though he be fed abundantly 
 at the farms where he works all summer long, still 
 his family must hve; and he must feed himself 
 all winter-time. And bread is dear in France; 
 out of his twenty guineas a year, the day-labourer 
 must reckon fifteen or sixteen for bread alone. The 
 rent of the cottage will cost another £4; and there 
 remains about 30s. for school expenses, shoes, 
 clothing, fuel, doctoring, wine, tobacco — all the 
 pleasures and luxuries of hfe. No doubt he sells 
 his pig, and his kids and his poultry, and anjd;hing 
 he can, to increase his slender revenues; for, in 
 the valley of the Allier, the peasant is too poor to 
 
THE PASTORAL NOVEL 239 
 
 put a fowl in his pot on Sundays, or enjoy a rasher 
 of his own bacon by his own fireside. 
 
 Farther south, among the hills and high valleys 
 of the Cantal, another peasant-farmer, Antonin 
 Dusserre, offers us, in his Jean et Louise, another 
 image of pastoral France : the rich yeomanry, 
 the Couarrous and Couarros, who compose the 
 notable society of those isolated villages, where 
 the chateau is empty four-fifths of the year or 
 more. The Couarros (rich grazing-farmers, intelli- 
 gent, tenacious, positive, active, and money-loving) 
 compose a rustic middle-class far wealthier than 
 their simple hves would lead us to suppose, proud 
 of their flocks and herds, and their balance at the 
 bankers. M. Dusserre, I believe, is bhnd; but 
 before that misfortune fell upon him, he has looked 
 long and lovingly at the high-lying heather, the 
 cUffs capped with basalt, the gentian-starred moun- 
 tain-pastvires, and the green glens and trohers of 
 his native land. The landscapes and the types of 
 the Cantal Hve on in his inner eye. 
 
 Much farther west, on the borders of Anjou 
 and Vendee, a village schoolmaster, M. Perochon, 
 has recently given us a picture of peasant Hfe in 
 the style of GuiUaumin and Dusserre, in Les Creux- 
 de-Maisons. A creux-de-maison is not, as one might 
 expect, one of those cave-dwellings hewn out of 
 the chalky banks of the Indre or the Loire, which 
 look so primitive but which are said to be dry and 
 cosy, possessing the local reputation of keeping 
 off rheumatism; no, a creux-de-maison is a sort of 
 
240 THE PASTORAL NOVEL 
 
 cabin about seven feet high, built of mud or of 
 rough stone cemented with clay, single-roomed, 
 thatch-roofed, with a pane for a window and an 
 earthen floor. 
 
 'C6tait une cabane bossue et lepreuse, a peine 
 plus haute qu'un homme; on descendait a I'interi- 
 eur par deux marches de granit; il y faisait tres 
 sombre, car le jour n'entrait que par une lucarne 
 a deux petits carreaux; I'hiver il y avait de I'eau 
 partout, et cela faisait de la boue qui ne finissait 
 de secher, sous les Uts surtout; U y avait des trous 
 qui empSchaient les tabourets de tenir debout; 
 on les bouchait de temps en temps avec de la 
 terre apportde du jardin.' 
 
 Such are the creux-de-maisons, stUl not infrequent 
 round Bressuire in Vendee, though happily rarer 
 every year, as the spread of creameries and 
 co-operatives brings the sense and the means of 
 comfort into the Ireland of France. M. Perochon 
 is perhaps a httle unfair in taking no notice of 
 this clearing of the horizon : he will not allow us a 
 gleam of consolation ; Zola himself was never 
 more resolutely lugubrious. His book is con- 
 ceived in a low tone, a minor key, by a 
 deliberate purpose, and we must accept the artist's 
 postulate. 
 
 His theme is the Ufe of a day-labourer from 
 the day he leaves the regiment till the time when, 
 at forty-eight years of age, having buried wife 
 
THE PASTORAL NOVEL 241 
 
 and child, he owns that life has been too much 
 for him. He has had his romance, has married 
 the miller's lovely daughter, and has seen her 
 die of want in the horrible creux-de-maison. He 
 has watched the children grow thinner month by 
 month. 
 
 'Depuis le Mardi-Gras, mes pauvres petits n'ont 
 mange ni lard, ni ceufs, ni lait . . . quatre Mvres 
 de beurre en tout depuis quatre mois. . . . Je 
 suis fatiguee de n'avoir rien a faire manger aux 
 petits; des haricots et des pommes de terre, des 
 pommes de terre et des haricots ! Pas moyen 
 seulement d'elever des poules ! ' 
 
 And indeed in the poorer parts of frugal France, 
 so royally fertile, there are many districts where 
 the married labourer in winter used to have little 
 more in his larder; where a sack of potatoes, a 
 sack of chestnuts, and a sack of buck-wheat 
 suppHed the chief of his diet, or at least of his 
 children's diet if he be fed at the farm. I speak 
 in the past tense, but I fear it is so to-day in many 
 a village of Lozere or Brittany, where the food of 
 the agricultural poor is as much worse than it is 
 in England, as it is better and more varied in 
 Normandy or Anjou or Touraine. And this 
 constant strife between hunger and love, between 
 natures naturally tender, gay, and brave, and 
 circumstances continually depressing — ^has resulted 
 in a stampede towards the towns, a rural exodus, 
 
242 THE PASTORAL NOVEL 
 
 which is the great problem of the day in the poorer 
 provinces of France. 
 
 The war has singularly respected the writers of 
 Pastoral novels. It has even added to their ranks 
 a new name, that of M. Henri Bachelin, whose 
 village tales, Le Serviteur, in 1918, Le Village, in 
 1919, are direct and living sketches of rural France 
 in the minute and finely-stippled taste of Emile 
 GuiUaumin. 
 
THE NOVEL OF CHILDHOOD 
 
 Edmond Jaloux, Andr^: Lafon, G. des Voisins, 
 Marcel Proust, etc. 
 
 Two of the pastoral novels we have just con- 
 sidered, Charles Blanchard and Marie-Claire, are 
 novels of childhood; and the first two volumes (the 
 most beautiful) of Jean-Christophe come into the 
 same category; when we examined the works of 
 Rene Boylesve, we found that the hero of two of 
 his most touching stories is a little boy; Anatole 
 France is even now writing the history of 'Petit 
 Pierre'; Francis Jammes has consecrated a whole 
 volume to the observation of his baby daughter; 
 and there is Maeterlinck's exquisite Oiseau Bleu. 
 And here are. several other writers who, in the 
 last half-dozen years, have written novels of 
 conspicuous beauty and reputation concerned 
 with Uttle children. 
 
 When I came to Hve in France, some thirty 
 years ago, the novel of childhood was supposed to 
 be a product of EngUsh manufacture, almost 
 exclusively. It was much admired, for the French 
 are a nation of child-lovers and a people of psycholo- 
 gists; but it was generally supposed that Anglo- 
 Saxon blood was needed to relate the youth of a 
 Maggie Tulliver or a David Copperfield. In those 
 
 243 
 
244 NOVEL OF CHILDHOOD 
 
 days the French yellowback, in six cases out of 
 ten, was a love story; in the other four it was a 
 social novel. 
 
 Is it the philosophy of Bergson, liis glorification 
 of instinct, sensibility, intuition, that has changed 
 all that? The novel of childhood is now one of 
 the most frequent, the most admired of French 
 romances. Not the mere observation of childhood; 
 not the sole charm of reminiscence, always popular 
 because it aureoles our faded foreheads with the 
 light of other days : 'Ah ! so I used to think ! 
 Even so was I ! ' It is rather a careful reconstruc- 
 tion of the point of view of a young boy — except 
 Marie-Claire, I remember no girls in the novel of 
 childhood ! — and his first impressions of the mysteries 
 of hfe : love, sin, pain, madness, death. These 
 novels of childhood are, in fact, studies in psychology. 
 
 Dickens perhaps began it — Dickens always so 
 beloved in France. Yet Oliver Twist, David 
 Copperfield, Little Nell, if they suffer from the 
 world's oppression, suffer rather than reflect or 
 observe. The theme was really inaugurated, I 
 think, by Mr Henry James, some fifteen years ago, 
 in What Maisie Knew, the impression made on a 
 child by the mysterious iniquity of its elders. 
 
 M. Ren6 Boylesve was the first : L'Enfant d la 
 Balustrade appeared, if I remember right, in 1903. 
 We have considered in another chapter the pro- 
 vincial studies of this exquisite author; here I 
 will only draw attention to his childish hero. 
 Riquet Nadaud, the narrator of La BecquSe and 
 
NOVEL OF CHILDHOOD 245 
 
 L'Enfant d la Balustrade,^ is a little boy who has 
 been sent, on the death of his mother, to live with 
 his maternal grandparents in their old-fashioned 
 house in the country near La Haye-Descartes. 
 How charming his descriptions of the child's 
 walks in the fields with brusque and capable Tante 
 Felicie I have had occasion to declare elsewhere. 
 For the moment my concern is with little Nadaud 
 when, after his father's re-marriage, he goes back 
 to hve with his parents at Loches. 
 
 The stepmother is a gentle, languid, gracious 
 creature, bom in America though French by race, 
 a beautiful Creole from Louisiana. Needless to 
 say, she is bored to death at Loches — not quite at 
 first, when her young loveliness, her position as 
 bride, her gift for music, ensure her a certain 
 social importance and consideration. But her 
 husband, the notary, cribbed and confined in his 
 narrow house — mindful, too, that his first wife's 
 death had been in some degree attributed to that 
 house's sunlessness — secures the reversion of the 
 handsomest building in the town, after the actual 
 owner's death. Unfortunately, M. Nadaud was 
 not the only man who had set his heart on that 
 comely residence ! Soon the town is up in arms 
 against the lawyer for stealing his march on others, 
 and poor Tantine, the foreign wife, is left alone 
 in her duU parlour with Riquet for her sole society. 
 
 Riquet — ^and young Dr Troufleau, faithful to 
 
 1 Translated into English under the title of The House on 
 the Hill. David Watt, 1904. 
 
246 NOVEL OF CHILDHOOD 
 
 his friends. Excellent Troufleau, awkwardest, 
 honestest of men ! Charming Tantine, without 
 an evil thought in her feather-head ! Alas, oppor- 
 tunity, thy guilt is great ! Out of sheer boredom 
 on her part and simple pity on his, they are drawn 
 quite close to the edge of the abyss — close enough 
 to feel its attraction, its dizzy, strange, reluctant 
 fascination — ^under the sensitive eyes of the child 
 who knows nothing of passion or of sin. Doubtless 
 that innocent presence it is that saves them; they 
 recoil in time. 
 
 M. Nadaud at last realises that his wife is being 
 enervated by solitude, demorahsed by idleness, 
 deprived of energy to resist the simplest tempta- 
 tions. She needs social intercourse. A few visitors, 
 a little appreciation of her music and her beauty, 
 and Troufleau would soon occupy his proper place 
 in her regard — ^that of a kind, friendly young man, 
 smothered in an absurd frock-coat and honestly 
 in love with another woman. 
 
 So the husband puts his pride in his pocket, and 
 reconciles himself with his neighbours; and things 
 soon right themselves. Only a child has apprehended 
 that which does not belong to the world of a child, 
 only a boy's lofty pure-minded ideal has been 
 injured by contact with the hard realities of hfe. 
 
 Madame Tinayre, in a volume of stories, L' Amour 
 Pleure (1908), took up the tale a few years later. 
 Robert Marie is a lad of fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, 
 regarded as a ward by the notary of Beaugency 
 and his wife, Uncle Bon and Aunt Belle. He has 
 
NOVEL OF CHILDHOOD 247 
 
 no relations, only his godfather and godmother, 
 M. and Mme Cheverny, who Uve in Paris, and who 
 from time to time come down to see him. Robert 
 can remember a time, long distant, when there 
 was no uncle Bon, no Aunt BeUe, but, so far back 
 as his mind can carry, there have always been a 
 M. and Mme Cheverny, and always they have 
 come to see him together. 
 
 He knows there is a mystery about his real 
 parents; and the different suppositions he makes 
 concerning them, the gradual growth of his desire 
 to know who he really is, are the substance of this 
 haunting story; but not for a moment does he 
 suppose that M. and Mme Cheverny (who seem 
 the sole links between him, poor waif, and those 
 other boys who have a place in the world, parents, 
 a name) are not really M. and Mme Cheverny, 
 are not married : they whom he has not ever seen 
 apart ! — are each of them married to another. 
 And he is their son, brought up by stealth, visited 
 in mystery. The contrast between the passion 
 of these uiihappy, charming parents and the robust 
 indignant iimocence of their unconscious son is 
 told with a sincerity and a romantic realism 
 pecuhar, I think, to the work of Madame Tinayre. 
 
 About the same time — a year later, I think — 
 in 1909, a young writer from Marseilles, M. Edmond 
 Jaloux, published his Le Reste est Silence, which 
 obtained the Prix Vie Heureuse for that year. 
 There are many points of contact between this 
 novel and L'Enfant 4 la Balustrade; but M. Jaloux 
 
248 NOVEL OF CHILDHOOD 
 
 has not the more than feminine delicacy, the 
 subtle moral tenderness of M. Boylesye. He, too, 
 tells the story of a smaU boy, the surprised, half- 
 unconscious involuntary witness of the growth of 
 an unlawful love. Madame Meisserel is a less 
 innocent, less charming Tantine, and here, too, 
 there is a dull, awkward, not unpathetic husband. 
 
 The delicate sky, the gracious landscape of 
 Touraine are replaced by the busy brilhance of 
 Marseilles; the key is higher, the sonority is louder; 
 and it is well that this is so; we need a dose of 
 southern brutality — or at least callousness — to 
 enable us to digest the supposition that it is the 
 son of Madame Meisserel (now grown up) who 
 revives in reminiscence the history of his dead 
 mother's guilty passion, as he witnessed it in his 
 seventh year. How wise was M. Boylesve to make 
 his little boy a stepson, and the charming step- 
 mother almost innocent — a little frivolous at worst. 
 We suspect Madame Meisserel of having gone to 
 greater lengths and yet we scarce forgive her son 
 his tone of superiority. 
 
 The same theme, in 1912, furnished M. Gilbert 
 des Voisins with the matter of L'Enfant qui prit 
 Peur. Here the plot is pushed to a tragedy; the 
 child, aghast to find the serpent rampant in his 
 little Eden, and his father's friend his mother's 
 lover, commits suicide. We are stUl further here 
 from M. Boylesve's exquisite moral delicacy. 
 
 We neighbour it again in L'Eleve Gilles, the 
 first novel of a young schoolmaster which, in 
 
NOVEL OF CHILDHOOD 249 
 
 1912, obtained the new great prize of the French 
 Academy — ^the prize of £400, as yet only twice 
 bestowed : once on Jean-Christophe and once on 
 the too-slender but charming book before us. (I 
 mention all these prizes to show the undoubted popu- 
 larity of the theme, and may add that M. des Voisins' 
 book very nearly obtained a Prix Vie Heureuse.) 
 
 Gilles is a Uttle boy suddenly sent from home 
 to live with an old aunt in the country because 
 his father is stiffering from neurasthenia and needs 
 a complete rest : no noise, no movement about 
 him. The child's mother takes him and leaves 
 him with her aunt and the old servant, Segonde, 
 whose portrait is one of the charms of the volume; 
 and though the lad is happy enough with them, 
 we feel there is something poignant behind — some- 
 thing we do not know, and that the child does not 
 even suspect. He is sent to the grammar school 
 of the little town near his aunt's property, and 
 we feel that the shadow — the unsuspected shadow — 
 hangs over him, there, too, increasingly evident to 
 those about him, though still invisible to the child 
 narrator. 
 
 Little by little, by a word here, a silence ther^ 
 by the sensitive temperament of the child himself, 
 by the strangeness of the father (who has come 
 for rest and change to the quiet country house) we 
 leam the truth : the man is mad. Gilles never 
 knows it; but if he is so quiet, so sensitive, and so 
 soHtary, it is because the whole little world around 
 him marks him for the madman's child; a being 
 
 F.W. s 
 
250 NOVEL OF CHILDHOOD 
 
 to be spared, respected, but not played with like 
 another boy. He is a child apart. 
 
 No chapter in my book has a more delightful 
 choice of reading than is offered by these Novels 
 of Childhood. And among the most enchanting 
 of all I would place Le Grand Meaulnes. Henri 
 Alain-Fournier leapt into being (from a Uterary 
 point of view) in 1913 with this strange romantic 
 little novel. The book is not of our time in the 
 least, though without any affectation of archaism. 
 It appears related far more nearly to George Sand's 
 Petite Fadette, or to some tale of Musset's, or to 
 G6rard de Nerval's Sylvie, than to any Twentieth 
 Century production; and I think the closest we 
 can get to it in our own times would be one of the 
 more poetical of Hardy's Wessex novels, before 
 he fell into the tragic pessimism of Tess or Jude. 
 The poetry, the fantasy, is all in the author's 
 imagination; for what, I ask you, could be less 
 romantic than the setting of his tale — ^a Training 
 College for Primary Education, or rather a large 
 village Board-School, with a class reserved for 
 future teachers, — even though it be situate in 
 the very heart of Berry? And yet over every 
 page of Le Grand Meaidnes there slips and trembles 
 the light that never was on sea or land. The 
 heroes are two lads of fifteen and seventeen; and 
 rarely has any author rendered more dehcately 
 the prestige of the big boy for the little boy, and 
 the chivalrous half-mystic hero-worship in which 
 he walks enveloped. The mj^tery, the beauty, 
 
NOVEL OF CHILDHOOD 251 
 
 the wonderfulness of the poet's world transfigure 
 the homely story, which is merely that of a school- 
 boy of fifteen who runs away from school, who 
 misses his way and gets caught up in the whirl of 
 a large country wedding at a quaint half-ruined 
 manor-house whose name he does not know. 
 Never again can the lad find that manor or that 
 beautiful girl who was the bridegroom's sister, 
 with whom he has fallen in love. And at last 
 his boy friend, 'le grand Meaulnes' discovers her, 
 but keeps her for himself; the capricious, fascinating 
 Meaulnes marries that fairy Princess and deserts 
 her on the morrow, leaving her for all companion- 
 ship and consolation the adoring devotion of the 
 humble friend, who tells the story. 
 
 Those first rays of fame, which are brighter than 
 the rising sun, slipped over the young author's 
 fresh horizon. And then the war broke out. Henri 
 Alain-Fournier set out for Lorraine, a Lieutenant 
 in the Reserve; on September 22, 1914, he was 
 reported missing. For many months, for nearly 
 a year, the hope that dazzles so many tearful eyes 
 — the hope that he was retained by the Germans a 
 prisoner in the invaded provinces, from which no 
 communication was allowed with France — sus- 
 tained his family and friends and that portion of 
 the pubhc who, like myself, watched his career 
 with S5mipathy. And then, one day last summer, 
 I heard tlxe sad story. 
 
 A young lieutenant, fresh from the Polytechnique, 
 the son of one of my friends, fell in with Alain- 
 
252 NOVEL OF CHILDHOOD 
 
 Fournier during those months of victory and. 
 retreat on tlie frontier of Lorraine. The two young 
 men, no less ardent in their intellectual energy 
 than in their mihtary theories, recognised each 
 other as kindred spirits; with a third (a young 
 pastor, I think, or the son of a Protestant pastor) 
 they used to meet o' nights, their day's work done, 
 in a broken-down military motor car, wrecked by 
 the side of the road. I like to think of the three 
 young officers, on those August nights — ^the immense 
 French camp asleep all round them — ^as they sat 
 till the dawn broke, like gipsies in their van, eagerly 
 talking de omni re scibili. In the daytime they 
 generally saw little of each other; but, on August 22, 
 one of the two others, marching to the front, met 
 Alain-Fournier and his men going in a contrary 
 direction. 'Ordered to the rear! (he called out); 
 no luck ! Au revoir ! '; and he passed on. It 
 chanced that that day's engagement was a par- 
 ticularly murderous one, but the two friends when 
 they met at night felt no anxiety about the third 
 of their accustomed party, deeming him safe. 
 And yet, when the dead were counted and buried, 
 there was one figure, the head bashed in, whose 
 limbs and hands bore so great a resemblance to 
 their friend that the young men felt a chill presenti- 
 ment. They looked for the badge of identity; a 
 wicked bayonet-thrust had driven it into the 
 breast. So haunting was their surmise that they 
 cut it out; but they could not decipher the 
 number on the battered, bloodstained plaque. 
 
NOVEL OF CHILDHOOD 253 
 
 Since then, unbroken silence : Alain-Fournier is 
 among the 'missing.' 
 
 Of all these books — save, perhaps, Alain-Fournier 's, 
 for which I have, I own, a peculiar weakness; of 
 all these novels of childhood — ^unless I except 
 M. Boylesve's, and Marie-Claire, and Jean-Christophe 
 (for so many of them, when you come to think 
 of it, are reaUy quite first-rate) — ^the most deUcate, 
 the most pregnant with a sensibiUty extraordin- 
 arily rich, and ample, and yet sensitive as the 
 impressions of convalescence or the first images 
 of childhood, is an immense novel, published in 
 the winter of 1913-14 by M. Marcel Proust, under 
 the enigmatic title, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu : 
 Du Cote de chez Swann. The book with which it 
 is easiest to compare it, is Henry James's A Small 
 Boy, though that, indeed, is concise and simple 
 compared with M. Marcel" Proust's attempt at 
 reconstituting the vague shimmering impressions 
 of a young mind, the wonderment with which — 
 inexplicably to us — ^it regards places and people 
 which in our eyes possess no magic. M. Proust's 
 hero is a small boy hving in the bosom of the most 
 regular of families — one of those vast French families, 
 closely knit, whose tissue unites grandparents, 
 great-aunts, uncles, cousins in such quantity as to 
 limit the possible supply of outside acquaintance. 
 One most famiUar friend, however, there is, the 
 friend of the family, a 'hereditary friend,' as 
 Homer would say, M. Swann. He is a man of the 
 world, a member of the Jockey Club, a friend of 
 
254 NOVEL OF CHILDHOOD 
 
 the Prince of Wales, a comrade of the Comte de 
 Paris, a great collector; but for the small boy and 
 his family he is especially 'le fils Swann,' the son 
 of their old friend the member of the Stock Exchange 
 (' qui a bien du lui laisser quatre ou cinq millions ') who 
 has made a ridiculous marriage with a demi-mondaine 
 — a. case of all for love and the world well lost. 
 
 And the world is lost the more completely that 
 the impossible lady continues her adventures 
 unabashed and unabated after matrimony. She 
 therefore is not "received,' or indeed hardly men- 
 tioned, in the ample respectable home of the small 
 boy; so that Swann and this unlikely love of 
 Swann's, this beautiful wife of Swann's, and Swann's 
 remote, intangible, but not invisible httle girl, are 
 the constant objects of his romantic curiosity. 
 
 There are two walks at Combray : you may 
 set out in the direction of Guermantes or else go 
 round by Swann's : ' du c6t6 de chez Swann,' and 
 to the childish hero of the book these two walks 
 gradually accumulate round them the material for 
 two views of hfe — Swann standing for aU that is 
 brilliant, irregular, attractive, Guermantes repre- 
 senting an orderly and glorious tradition. This 
 long novel, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, sets 
 out to recover, in three volumes, a child's first 
 impressions in both sorts; but this instalment 
 records (in 500 closely printed pages) the earhest 
 images " du cote de chez Swann : images forgotten by 
 the intellect, mysteriously resuscitated by the 
 senses — by a tune sung in the street, or a whiff of 
 
NOVEL OF CHILDHOOD 255 
 
 thyme or mignonette, or (as in the case of our author) 
 by the flavour of a fragment of sponge-cake dipped 
 in tea; images in which matter and memory are 
 subtly combined in a sudden warm iiood of Ufe, re- 
 vived, without the intervention of the understanding. 
 
 In all this the influence of Bergson is evident. 
 But can we imagine the Twentieth Century in 
 France without Bergson? As well conceive the 
 Eighteenth Century without Rousseau. Such a 
 delicate excess of sensibihty does not exist without 
 disorder; such a need to fuse and unite the very depth 
 of the soul with the ambient world — such a sense of 
 the fluid, pregnant, moving flood of hfe — exceeds the 
 strict limits of a perfect art. Evidently M. Proust's 
 novel, by its faults as well as by its qualities, is admir- 
 ably adequate to the spirit of our age. Again, I repeat 
 that, while I read with delight the delicate, long- 
 winded masters of our times, I think sometimes with 
 regret of a Turgeneff , no less subtle, who, even as they, 
 wrote at tremendous length and recorded the minutest 
 shades of feeling, but, having finished, went through 
 his manuscript again, pen in hand, and reduced it to 
 about one-third of its original length. 
 
 In the case of M. Proust's novel, the result is 
 the more bewildering that the book is conceived, 
 as it were, on two planes; no sooner have we accus- 
 tomed ourselves to the sun-pierced mist of early 
 reminiscence than the light changes; we find our- 
 selves in glaring noon; the recollection becomes a 
 recital; the magic glory fades from M. Swann and 
 the fair, frail Odette de Crecy; we see them in 
 
256 NOVEL OF CHILDHOOD 
 
 their habit as they lived and moved among their 
 acquaintance; we smile at the evocation of an artistic 
 coterie under President Grevy, and suffer a sort of 
 gnawing under our ribs as we realise the poignant 
 jealousy of the unhappy Swann. And then the 
 light shifts again; we are back in childhood; and 
 Swann is again the mysterious idol of a dreamy, 
 chivalrous Httle boy : — 
 
 'II me semblait un Stre si extraordinaire que je 
 trouvais merveilleux que des personnes que je 
 frequentais le connussent aussi et que dans les 
 hasards d'une journ6e quelconque on peutStre 
 amene a le rencontrer. Et une fois ma mere, en 
 train de nous raconter comme chaque soir, a diner, 
 les courses qu'elle avait faites dans Tapres-niidi, 
 rien qu'en disant : " A ce propos, devinez qui j'ai 
 rencontre aux Trois Quartiers, au rayon des para- 
 pluies : Swann," fit ^clore au milieu de son recit, 
 fort aride pour moi, une fleur mysterieuse. Quelle 
 m61ancoUque volupte d'apprendre que cet apres- 
 midi-la, profilant dans la foule sa forme surnaturelle, 
 Swann avait 6t6 acheter un parapluie.' 
 
 Can I end better than with this brief and casual 
 quotation, which, better than my criticism, will 
 show the fresh and fine reality which these pages 
 mysteriously recover from the back of our con- 
 sciousness (where it exists in a warm penumbra of 
 its own) and exhale, as naturally as vapour from 
 a new-ploughed autumn furrow? Something older 
 and deeper than knowledge pervades the book. 
 
EPILOGUE 
 
 As we glance irom across the Channel at these 
 writers, so often consciously opposed, the charm 
 of distance blends the tints, harmonises the out- 
 hnes, and shows us in most of them a certain 
 similarity. They are children of Dionysos, not of 
 Apollo; they are mystics, not materialists; they 
 conceive existence as a great religious symphony 
 which you must experience and not seek to under- 
 stand. More than once, in reading the most liberal 
 and modern among them, the words of the Catholic, 
 Claudel, have risen to my lips : — 
 
 'II ne faut pas comprendre; il faut perdre 
 connaissance ! ' 
 
 They have, most of them, the intuition of a 
 state transcending reality — I mean objective reality. 
 Yet, notwithstanding this spiritual ideal, they set 
 a high value on action, on social energy. I have 
 just said that, as a rule the French writers of the 
 Twentieth Century are mystics, but they are not 
 ecstatics wrapt in a solitary trance; they are eager 
 to act on men and women, to bind them in associa- 
 tions — though, of course, their groups are different, 
 for some of them are Socialists, Mke our pastoral 
 noveUsts; many are Nationalists from points of 
 view as different as Rostand and Boylesve and 
 Barr^s; and to some the only vital bond is a religion 
 
 257 
 
358 EPILOGUE 
 
 (since they are French, naturally the Roman 
 CathoUc religion). 
 
 They are almost all IntuitionaHsts; and, in 
 almost all of them there is the same reaction from 
 the Individualism of the Nineteenth Century. 
 The influence of Bergson is evident, and also that 
 of the SymboUsts of the closing Nineteenth Century. 
 They are anti-rationahsts, almost to a man — or a 
 woman; for it is perhaps symptomatic that the 
 feminine writers should be so abundant and so 
 remarkable in the younger generation. 
 
 There is something primitive, elementary, spon- 
 taneous, romantic, in much of their art which will 
 often remind the middle-aged Enghsh reader of our 
 pre-RaphaeUtes of yesterday, but which is, really, 
 even more akin to the modern Irish revival, on the 
 one hand, and to the school of Dostoieffsky in 
 Russia. Although they are as national as they 
 are nationalist, these sjnnbolists and mystics do 
 not seem to us English easily recognisable as French, 
 because we do not remember that France is Celtic 
 as well as Latin, sentimental no less than witty, 
 a land of saints as well as a land of pleasant sinners; 
 and that Pascal and F6nelon, Vincent de Paul and 
 Joan of Arc, are no less characteristic of France 
 than are Montaigne or Voltaire. 
 
mM 
 
 -di^^m