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TWENTIETH CENTURY FRENCH WRITERS

Frontispiece

Mary 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 reflection, of the Twentieth Century in France, so far as it is shown in literature during the first fourteen years of its course. But my book is small, the subject is vast: an actual, living 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 illimitably: 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 movement 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 Bataille? Why give Madame de Noailles and say nothing of Fernand Gregh? Why gather up Boylesve and André Gide, neglecting Estaunie, and Sageret, and Paul Adam? If I have Marie Lenéru, why not Sacha Guitry? Choosing Madame Colette, what reason have I for eliminating Madame de Régnier 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 Kipling). Why have I not a line for Henry Daguerches, for Claude Farrère? 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 faithfully 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 rhythm 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), ‘Symphonialis 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 will 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 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 intellectuels. You may be illustrious in one group and barely heard of in the other. Those who adore Anatole France and praise Romain Rolland smile sarcastic at the name of Barrès, 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 approximate number, setting Boylesve over against Jules Renard, and Francis Jammes in front of Charles-Louis Philippe. If my reader discover that which 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 fauteuil’ 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 moralists, 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 Suarès, with his imaginative and morbid studies of great souls? Who forms the mind of a generation more plastically than the brilliant and perspicacious André Chevrillon? Who interprets human nature more intimately than André 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 Halévy, 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-AFTERWARDS

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 publisher 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 innumerable slim gray crosses that spring, like some strange new harvest, on the low hills 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 années de campagne comptent double.’ It was like opening an old bundle of photographs after a great lapse of time—the same mixture of 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 lines that we laid down and has turned out just the successful and useful servant of civilisation that we imagined.

In our case, So-and-so is Barrès. He has become all that we thought he might become. Public 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 sacrée,’ bringing into public affairs a largeness of outlook and sweetness of temper rare in politics,—especially in France. Few of these eloquent pages which day by day he has contributed to the Echo de Paris will remain as works of literature, 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 analysis exact. More and more, in these days of storm and stress, Barrès has ‘felt the need of merging himself in something larger and more durable than any individual existence’; ‘no longer the singular, the extraordinary attracts him;’ he finds something pleasant and satisfying in the alliance of courage and the spirit of adventure, ‘with a certain soldierly mediocrity of mind’—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, like his heroine, Colette, ‘Il se sent chargé d’une grande dignité, soulevé vers quelquechose de plus vaste, de plus haut, et de plus constant que sa personne’?

Yes, I can re-read the chapter on Barrès with a certain satisfaction.

But, when we come to Romain Rolland, what a falling-off was there! How is it that Romain Rolland, 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 Barrès? Always an aloof and solitary spirit, Rolland 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 attraction of Germany was too strong: ‘Jean Christophe’ continued to subjugate the delicate ‘Oliver.’ 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 Rolland: Renan, who, when his mind crossed the Rhine, ‘crut entrer dans un 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 Burgundian 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 Mêlée,’ in which he rubbed it into us so tactlessly 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 Rolland from the young Frenchmen of the war. 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 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 Mêlée’—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. Rolland’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 of internationalism and cosmopolitanism, M. Rolland had said to himself, ‘After all, I am neither a Jew nor a foreigner! If Péguy 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 Frau, which appeared about 1894, by Eugène le Roy, the author of Jacquou le Croquant. Here is the novel which M. Rolland has tried to write. It is just the life, day by day, of a miller in Périgord—a man of strong political feeling, a democrat and a philosopher on his way, like Colas Breugnon. But the miller of the Frau, though rustic and plain-spoken, is not coarse, for his author lived all his life amid the peasants of Périgord 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 cabinet-maker, besotted with his love of 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 liberty 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 boutade, 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 turned 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 predominantly the author of the Cinq Grandes 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; still 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 list, René 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 detachment 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 André Gide) we approach the name of Péguy. Péguy was killed 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 illumination of his death reveals the true meaning of much that was obscure and easy to misunderstand in his gift. I own that I have almost entirely rewritten the chapter I had given to Péguy. I did not—do not—fully like 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 Sophocles and Plato that these ultra-lyrical modern geniuses, with their wild reiterations, their violence, their volume, their hoarse abundance, more often shock or dazzle me than please.... Péguy, 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 Péguy and Claudel are the names which must be most profoundly considered in this little book, for they represent a generation. I have placed in Péguy’s train, as witnesses and mourners, his friend Ernest Psichari, his fellow-officer, Émile Nolly, 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 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 publishes 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-hall stage—Madame Tinayre 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 lyrics, like a handful of rose leaves and cypress-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 Lenéru 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 Fusiliers-Marins, she was the most martial of pacifists, but also the most passionate. While embroidering a flag, or tying 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, 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 Théâtre Français should produce it instead of La Triomphatrice. But the House of Molière wisely stuck to its bargain: La Paix was not a piece for war-time.

La Triomphatrice appeared at the Théâtre Français in January, 1918. It did not take the town by storm. The play is too exclusively concerned with the manners and morals of a literary 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 Lenéru thought not. One feels inclined to answer that it does not really matter: there are so few women of genius. But Marie Lenéru 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 full 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 Lenéru might feel her hour was come, or at least was at last tremblingly, exquisitely 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 centre of Paris; on Good Friday a church was shattered, with all its faithful in it; one night, at the Français, actors and audience had to take refuge in the cellars, fortunately spacious. The theatre was closed. The play was stopped in mid-career. Mademoiselle Lenéru herself retired to Brittany. After a long summer’s work and meditation, 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 23rd of September, 1918. Except Péguy, 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 footlights. 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 André Lafon, who died of his wounds in hospital early in the war. A shepherd—that is how I see André Lafon—a charming young shepherd strolling down Mount Olympus, to whom the Muse gave, half-smiling, a dew-bespangled branch of laurel; 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 André Lafon (though I have read and re-read L’Élève Gilles with singular sympathy, and love the too-slender, charming little book), but few things seem to me more romantic than the destiny of this young man. In the spring of 1912 a solitary, 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 Péguy), 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 laureate fills a hero’s grave. Had he a mother, still 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 André Lafon—as delicate 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 brilliant writers are not dead. He has certainly increased in value during the last five years. Two novels, published in 1918, but written on the eve of the war, L’Incertaine and Fumées dans la Campagne, prove him in full possession of his gift. His novels are exquisite impressions that somehow hauntingly convey the sense of something round the corner that might please us even more were it not just out of sight. Fumées 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 æsthetic 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 Cumæi venit jam carminis ætas
Magnus ab integro sæclorum nascitur ordo.

Now dawns the last age of the Sybil’s sooth.
And lo! the world, transformed, renews its youth!

Mary Duclaux.

Paris, April, 1919.

CONTENTS

MAURICE BARRÈS

I

Maurice Barrès is the oldest of all the personages of this little book, which deals emphatically with the young—with the writers of the Twentieth Century, and not with those already famous fifteen years ago. Still, every rule has its exceptions; and it is impossible to imagine the young literature 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 Barrès must be ranked among the middle-aged. Only the other day, he was that young Deputy, delightfully 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 Panthéon’—Jules Simon being at that moment comfortably seated in the Upper House. May it be long before the ashes of Maurice Barrès 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 Barrès is the Chateaubriand 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 Barrès stripped of his politics, nor even the literature of our time without the politics of Barrès. His Nationalism, his Regionalism fill and flood the literature of France as fully as Imperialism occupied the English 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 Barrès of the Nineteenth Century was less political. Like most of the masters of the present hour, he entered letters as a Symbolist, almost as a Decadent. Immersed in solitary introspection, he at first appeared as the Narcissus of the Inner Life, taking his stand somewhere between Bergson and Mæterlinck. In those days, he asked from politics merely an instigation, a fillip. 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.’ Politics 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 still seemed interesting and poignant.

Barrès was so weary of his own fastidious refinement 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 l’intelligence! Je les comprends; je n’en suis pas bouleversé. Ah! des choses qui puissent changer les âmes!’

Barrès 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 quality—a cheap chromo-lithograph 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 Boulanger was just the captain to re-conquer Alsace-Lorraine for the French.

But, all the same, Boulanger was more to the 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, something important remained deposited in the mind of Maurice Barrès: the idea of a party which should embrace all 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:—

οὐτoι συνέχθειν, ἀλλα συμφιλεῖν ἐφυν.

I live to share your loves and not your hates.

And through a maze of errors (for, in my opinion, the political adventures of Barrès were chiefly errors), this noble conception broadened and ripened, dignifying a patriotic traditionalism 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 Barrès of the Nineteenth Century from the Barrès of the Twentieth. We will not consider in this place that earlier author, the gifted egoist of Bérénice, the anarchist of L’Ennemi des Lois, the lonely mystic of L’Homme libre, 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, a man of a mingled race, with a strain of Teuton in him warring with the Celt, and a Rhenish sensibility 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 little town of Mur-en-Barrez; but his mother’s people all 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, Barrès had in his stock some Jewish or Marrana grandmother, who gave him his taste for speculation, 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, filled 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 crying: ‘À Berlin!’ as loudly as the soldiers. And then a few weeks later, the retreat: that day of stupefied astonishment 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 Barrès family, notable citizens of Charmes, were taken in hostage by the Prussians. The trains that ran the Prussian troops towards the front had a Barrès 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 Nationalism of Barrès 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 all that he owes to the romantic fancy of the Rhine, his real and fervent admiration for the noble genius of Gœthe, 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 fragility) of civilisation; a hate and a contempt for the ‘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.

Barrès 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, Mæterlinck, and (their Benjamin) René Boylesve. At nineteen years of age, Barrès 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 librarians 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 Barrès of the Twentieth Century, save inasmuch as the child is the father of the 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 development 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 Lachélier? Was he Renouvier?

For my present purpose—which is to examine the progress of Barrès, and especially his influence on recent literature, 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 l’œil 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 à penser solidairement,’ Barrès exclaimed, half ironically, in Les Déracinés. If we sink deep enough into our own souls, we fall into the general 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 living organism. It is this sense of Life and solidarity which distinguishes Barrès, the man of action, Barrès, the political leader, Barrès, the inventor of Nationalism, the apostle of decentralisation, from the delightful 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 unborn 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 Déracinés (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? What makes their diversity none the less organic? It is, I think, the sense of continuity, the desire to persist and to preserve. The Barrès of Les Déracinés has reached the further edge of youth: he is five-and-thirty years of age.

Many men, on the threshold of forty, find themselves 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 cliff that shines in the sun and masks the horizon. Now on that topmost rock they stand, and now the road slopes downward—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 Christianity 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 Barrès will one day write:—

‘J’ai confiance, pour atténuer certaines peines morales, dans un esprit fait de soumission à la terre natale, de fidélité aux morts, et de connaissance que tous nos actes entreront dans l’héritage social.’ (Amitiés Françaises, 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 corruption, his flesh dropping from his bones. But out of that appalling decomposition he lifts his heart intact—his living, his immortal heart—and he is reconciled to perish if that alone survive. So all of us, from the De Profundis of our accepted mortality, 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; something 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 Barrès 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, Barrès enters the sphere of Gœthe.

If the book please me greatly, it is less for its animated picture of the Boulangist fever, for its 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 heartrending) than for an interlude of some seven score pages, La Vallée 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 Barrès used to affect, has vanished here. A romantic sentiment is expressed with the ripe calm and in the pure language of a classic. Our Barrès 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 prolongs our Ego and assures the continuity of all that we inherit from our ancestors. A child, we may say, is the printed proof of our manuscript, safe henceforth, and no longer so unique or so important!

The volume which Barrès wrote for his little son of six years old is a sunlit exception in his writings, as a rule so profoundly melancholy. Les Amitiés Françaises 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, pura, 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 Barrès’ 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 gratitude. 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 années après que j’y serai—vingt années après 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 is a new lease of life; the child is a bath of renewal; new eyes wherewith to see things in the old forgotten glamour; new ears with which to hear delicate sounds that this long while have escaped the father’s thickening tissues; above all the child is an innocence, a freshness unspeakable:—

‘Tu vis chacune de mes heures. Avec toi je repasserai par mon humble sentier. Ô ma jeunesse, ma plus bête et jeune jeunesse, qui refleurit! Quand j’étais rassasié, voilà que, par cet enfant, je me retrouve à jeune devant le vaste univers.’

This pater-familias had been the most passionate of pilgrims. Under the correctness and irony of his style there had trembled an exasperated sensibility. Impassioned and methodical, enthusiastic and circumspect, chimerical and positive, two natures had warred in Barrès; 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 hills of Toledo, Barrès 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: ‘Hic 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 Sparte! (1906).

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 still. 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 acceptance of the inevitable which is more than resignation, which is serenity.

And one day, on the banks of the Eurotas, Barrès discovers a form of beauty novel to his soul, made of measure and ease and grace, without excess or rapture. ‘On y trouve des beautés que l’on peut aimer sans souffrir!’ The sense of the whole, the acceptance of the inevitable, the tranquilness of Art, ‘épuré de tous éléments de désespoir,’ these are conceptions which, if properly assimilated, are a liberal education for a Romantic. Barrès could not say, like Gautier, ‘La vue du Parthénon m’a guéri 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 bears away with him a counsel to ponder in his heart.

‘La déesse m’a donné, comme à tous ses pèlerins, le dégoût de l’enflure dans l’art. Il y avait une erreur dans ma manière d’interpréter ce que j’admirais; je cherchais un effet, je tournais autour des choses jusqu’à ce qu’elles parussent le fournir. Aujourd’hui j’aborde la vie avec plus de familiarité, et je désire la voir avec des yeux aussi peu faiseurs de complexités théâtrales que l’étaient des yeux grecs.’

In this new mood of simplicity and responsibility, Barrès conceived two short novels, companion pictures, lessons in civic virtue; one for a man, the other for a girl: Au Service de L’Allemagne (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 government. 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 Légion Étrangère? 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 Au Service de L’Allemagne is a young Alsatian, whose very name is a symbol: Ehrmann, the man of honour. He is the son of one of those 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 Barrès; and, afterwards, let him live his life 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 Ehrmann 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.

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 granddaughter, Colette. To eke out their narrow means, the two women do a little 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 Lycée (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—qualities 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 listens 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, little by little, Lorraine recreates the German tyrant in her own image:—

‘Il y a des petits villages, isolés au milieu des espaces ruraux, qui, le soir, à l’heure où l’on voit rentrer les bêtes et les gens, m’apparaissent comme des gaufriers; et je crois que tout être, fut il barbare prussien, soumis à leur action patiente et persistante, y deviendrait lentement Lorrain. Bien des générations reposent là, au cimetière, mais leur activité persiste; elle est devenue ce groupe de maisons, ce clocher, cet abreuvoir, cette école qu’entourent les champs bigarrés de couleurs et de formes; et si l’on entre dans cette communauté, on y vient nécessairement à se conduire et penser comme ont fait les prédécesseurs.’

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 Corneille, 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 chargée d’une grande dignité, soulevée vers quelque chose 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 épouser.’

Maurice Barrès also is like his heroic Colette. ‘Il se sent chargé d’une grande dignité, soulevé 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.

III

Or rather ‘La Terre et les Morts’ was his watchword, 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 nihilism of his earlier book on Toledo, Du Sang, de la Volupté et de la Mort (1895), his treatment of the same theme in his recent essay on Il 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 Barrès declared that the traveller entering Toledo tasted the same harsh and acrid pleasure that he derived from reading Pascal’s Pensées or from contemplating Michael-Angelo’s Penseroso: in three gulps, it is the same rough and heroic draught. The melancholy splendour 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 Barrès, to declare the secret of the city. They are singular words to adorn a Christian tomb: Hic 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 benjoin, 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 volupté dont j’ignore le nom, et quelque chose comme un péché se mêle à tout un passé d’amour, d’honneur et de religion. C’est le mystère de Tolède, et nous voudrions le saisir. Mais que donc pourrait nous guider? Toute société a fui de cette ruine impériale.’

A painter, long dead, a foreigner—Il 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 Barrès 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 life. The Cretan painted the serious, narrow faces, the bizarre, aristocratic, 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.

He loves to paint a double vision: on the lower half of his canvas Il 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 call it mad) a mystical world at any rate, of rushing spirits, of flooding light, of joy and fire (Joie! Joie! Joie! Pleurs de joie!), a world of adoration, bliss, eternal peace.

‘Et l’on a dit qu’il était fou!... Attention! Tout simplement, c’est un catholique espagnol.... Ses toiles complètent les traités de Sainte Thérèse et les poèmes de Saint Jean de la Croix. Elles initient à la vie intérieure des dignes Castillans. Aucun livre n’en donne une idée aussi complète, aussi neuve.’

The faults of Il Greco, his voluntary distortion of the figures that he represents, their flame-like fragility and aspiration, the lividness of the painter’s palette are not repugnant to our critic, who is always willing to permit a sacrifice of exterior truth in order to obtain a greater intensity of expression. The admirer of Ligier Richier may well be tender to the errors of Il Greco; fortunate errors, since they are perhaps a condition of the utterance of a certain spiritual state:—

‘De tels états ne semblent pas compatibles avec la grande civilisation et par exemple avec l’emploi de chef de gare. Mais ils laissent dans Tolède une atmosphere où plus d’un, qui ne s’en doute pas, gagnerait à fréquenter.’

More and more the consideration of these spiritual conditions will henceforth absorb the attention of Maurice Barrès. The indulgent historian of Bérénice, 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 Barrès. 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 Barrès and Pascal: both are sons of Auvergne, with something 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 Barrès; 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, 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-être rempli que par un objet infini et immuable, c’est à dire, par Dieu même.’ (Pensées, p. 425.)

Photo: Dormac To face p. 24

Maurice Barrès

Was it the memory of Pascal that inclined Barrès to collect the fragmentary legends and souvenirs, even the documents, of a humbler mystic, half saint and half schismatic, once famous in the region round Charmes, the little town where Barrès was born and where he still spends his summers?

Perhaps; but Barrès (whose singular temperament appears to combine the sense of order with a contempt for law) has always sought an axiom, a religion, a discipline, 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, Barrès 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 ἀ ςκητής means an athlete, one who has exercised himself and grown strong; and that which Barrès has always desired, in religion as in politics, is a perfecting and augmenting of his own personality.

That way lies heresy! And a heretic is the hero of Barrès’ last novel, La Colline Inspirée.

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-like poetry, all the native sap and strength of Celtic forests and high places. Chateaubriand, with his Velléda, 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 Barrès from his devotion to the Celtic divinities of wood and weald. In La Colline Inspirée he opposes Poetry and Dogma. On the one hand, the Church, with its venerated hierarchy, its discipline, its universality 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.

Léopold 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, 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 acropolis of Sainte Odile in the Vosges and the sanctuary of Sion-Vaudémont in Lorraine became the property of Léopold Baillard and his brothers, where they founded convents and hostelries, and instituted an Order of Begging Sisters, who travelled all over Europe collecting alms. (A happy touch is that which shows Léopold Baillard in the Imperial Palace at Vienna, asking a contribution from the Emperor of Austria as Count de Vaudémont in Lorraine.)

Their enterprise, their intrepid imagination, their financial audacities awakened the mistrust of a prudent bishop, who refused to confirm the miraculous 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 Baillards’ prosperity; it was the deliberate quashing of a new (but a less spiritual) Port Royal. The Baillards were obliged to sell 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 Léopold Baillard visit in Normandy a wonder-working visionary, Vintras, a prophet in his degree.

Baillard was a sort of romantic genius—the 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. Baillard returned from Normandy to Sion-Vaudémont 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, Abbé Léopold Baillard. His cure is taken from him, his doctrines are condemned, 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. Barrès, as he relates the downfall of the schismatic—his follies, his errors, his sufferings, his long martyrdom, his final reconciliation with the Church. Melius est ut pereat unus quam unitas. Yet if that one be Pascal, or Fénelon, or Father Tyrrell, or even an Abbé Léopold Baillard (so mere a peasant in his harsh materialism, so nearly a saint in his inspired spirituality), 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 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! À laquelle obéir? Et faut-il donc choisir entre elles? Ah! plutôt qu’elles puissent, ces deux forces antagonistes, s’éprouver éternellement, ne jamais se vaincre et s’amplifier par leur lutte même. Elles ne sauraient se passer l’une de l’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 nec ipse scit spiritus hominis qui in ipso est: there is more in man than the soul of man conceives. This line of Saint Augustine (which serves as an epigraph to La Colline Inspirée) might be inscribed above all Maurice Barrès’ 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 the keeping of God; before the same altar 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—Barrès 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 cultuelles, specially charged with the maintenance of the churches of France; but the Vatican, ever suspicious 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 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 mediæval carving, has awakened the cupidity of those who know too well how to dispose of such relics 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. Barrès 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 commune 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 civilisation; 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 France.

‘C’est à la civilisation qu’il faut s’intéresser, si l’on n’a pas le sens de Dieu et si l’on est rassasié du moi. Eh bien! la civilisation, où est-elle défendue aujourd’hui?’

‘Dans les conseils d’administration? Je ne suis pas de ceux qui le croient. Elle est défendue dans les laboratoires et dans les églises.’

It is perhaps a little difficult to formulate the intellectual position of Barrès. 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 religion. Indeed, I imagine that no reader would have more intimately vibrated to La Grande Pitié des Églises de France, than a certain old friend of mine, whom Barrès did not always understand, by name Ernest Renan—Renan who wrote (already in 1849):—

‘N’y aurait il quelque moyen d’être catholique sans croire au catholicisme?’

And who are the followers whom Barrès 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 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 Barrès convokes to defend the belfry and the altar are the younger generation in letters!

‘Je ne doute pas de leurs réponses.... Ces mêmes jeunes troupes désintéressées qui auraient à d’autres moments, combattu, rejeté un catholicisme oppressif ... se rassemblent d’instinct pour faire face à la Barbarie. Je voudrais tracer ici le tableau de la littérature nouvelle que je salue et d’où s’élève, plus ou moins haut, la grande flamme spirituelle que le Café 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, Suarès, 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 Suarès. 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 age. But he has written many other books. Romain 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 Rolland 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 Angelo, 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 Rolland 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 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 optimists. 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 æsthetics 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 a portrait of the past, and certain volumes—as a rule those we admired the most on their appearance: 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 ill-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 ‘Gemüthlichkeit’ than these early volumes of Jean-Christophe. But, as the hero grows older, he finds himself constantly hostile to the dreamy optimism of his environment. He hates the humbler forms of German idealism—that public and private Phariseeism which will not admit the world to be that which it is; the majestic sentimentality 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 Allemand,’ 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, cynical, 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 spares no class or type in his first revolt against his new environment: the squalor of the poor, the struggling ambition and snobbish meannesses of the world of art, the hollow ceremony of fashionable circles combine to make him hate Paris. Little by little he penetrates below the surface: his friend Olivier Jalin interprets to him the real France. The intellectuals and the æsthetes of twenty years ago, who so irritate Christophe on his first arrival, were but the foam on the face of a deep reality. ‘C’est curieux que vous soyez Française!’ says the musician to his friend’s sister, with her honest, girlish face, her round, full forehead, 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 disenchanted, 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 novelist who (annihilating time and space) can link the mind of Beethoven to the soul of Henriette Renan, and make two lovers happy.

It is true that Romain Rolland will not let them be happy: Antoinette dies; and Christophe embarks 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 Bâle! Give us rather the incoherence of German militarism mixed with German schwärmerei! Steep us in the intellectual and social extravagances of France! But keep us free from that death-in-life, the Phariseeism of Bâle! A rigid discipline never relaxed; a collective conscience 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 underneath the strict uniformity of its phylacteries, human passions more brutal than elsewhere, because never visited by the open air and sun. 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 political difficulties, takes refuge (and takes refuge in Bâle) with a friend who generously comes to his rescue; and in return the musician seduces the wife of his protector.

We know little of the Wesendonks, save that Frau Mathilde was a poetess; I imagine her very different from the wife of Doctor Braun. That kind, fussy little man was oddly mated with the stiff and silent spouse whose large, Michael-Angelesque type of beauty seemed almost ugly or ridiculous in her awkward provincial clothes. Anna is an uninteresting but perfectly virtuous woman until Jean-Christophe comes to stay in her house. And then music invades her with an incomprehensible passion, turning this sombre young Hausfrau 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 little treasure of honour and domestic happiness which was all that Dr Braun had known of life’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 understand, 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 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’était pas l’amour, et c’était mille fois plus que l’amour.

Thus in the Swiss town, in the Calvinist society, which glorified rationalism and made of Intellect the sole motive power of life, Christophe encountered, and was conquered by, that great irreducible Force which makes light 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 fragility, 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.

‘Il comprenait la vanité de son orgueil, la vanité de l’orgueil humain, sous le poing redoutable de la Force qui meut les mondes. Nul n’est maître de soi avec certitude. Il faut veiller. Car si l’on s’endort, la Force se rue en nous et nous emporte ... dans quels abîmes? Ou le torrent qui nous charrie se retire et nous laisse dans son lit à sec. Il ne suffit même pas de vouloir, pour lutter. Il faut s’humilier devant le Dieu inconnu qui fiat ubi vult, qui souffle quand il veut, où il veut: l’amour, la mort ou la vie. La volonté humaine ne peut rien sans la sienne. Une seconde lui suffit pour anéantir des années d’efforts. Et, s’il lui plait, il peut faire surgir l’éternel de la poussière 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 loneliness; 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 life is still meagre and sad; no wife, no child, no friend, no love, concentrates its elixir in one golden drop. And one day in the Alps he meets—as a middle-aged woman, a widow still charming in her tired grace and kind serenity,—that Countess Berény whom he had known as a girl in Paris, long ago. And Grazia Berény 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. 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 interesting, 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 Rolland?

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 Péguy has produced not only M. Romain Rolland, but himself. Now we know all 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 Péguy—defending his country—leading his men into battle on the Marne—Ah! 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. Rolland’s hero cannot be our hero.

A reader appreciative of the intentions of M. Rolland might have been sure than Jean-Christophe would 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.

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 full 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 living being must sooner or later dissolve, but the processes of Infinity will reassemble them again. ‘Un jour je renaîtrai pour de nouveaux combats!’ Meanwhile, caught in a rapture beyond the delusion of self, the dying musician feels his personality expand and vanish for a while in something vaster. He is lost in the One-and-All. ‘Tu renaîtras.... Repose. Tout n’est plus qu’un seul cœur.’

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 lie, to consent to no injustice, and to love his neighbour as himself. Here M. Rolland shows him in his puissant and solitary decline, 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—fresh, and frank, and admirably valiant, full of prompt physical courage and intellectual docility.

Jean-Christophe is perhaps the most remarkable work of contemporary fiction: a singular moral fervour, a rare imagination, an unequalled sensibility, a 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. Romain Rolland 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 composed 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 Héloise, or L’Astrée, 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 forefathers were no fools: what they loved in these books, which were 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 Sévigné’s on the interminable masterpiece of La Calprenède; the great lady, so delicate, so difficile, ‘blessée des méchants styles,’ can scarcely understand her own enthusiasm:—

‘Le style de La Calprenède est maudit en mille endroits; de grandes périodes de roman, de méchants mots—je sens tout cela ... et cependant je ne laisse pas de m’y prendre comme à de la glu; la beauté des sentiments, la violence des passions, la grandeur des événements tout cela m’entraîne comme une petite fille.’

And even as Mme de Sévigné was absorbed in Cléopatre we lose ourselves in Jean-Christophe. Romain Rolland is the great spectator of our times. Will this quality of moralising criticism, this tendency 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 life, a force of personality, 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 than their puppets. And we treasure their lessons. But do we often open The Rambler or La Nouvelle Héloise? 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. Romain Rolland in this great category of artists who were something more than artists? It is too soon to say. We are still lost in the multiplicity 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-Christophe.

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 Honoré d’Urfé and his great romance, Astrée, the young poet pleaded the cause of a form of art as far removed as possible from the Naturalist formulas which were still the fashion of the hour. And his praise appeared a programme; and the young apologist of Urfé discovered himself to be the apostle of an idealist and sentimental revival.

Despite his amusing originality, and notwithstanding the real nobility 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 like a brilliant display of fireworks, whose flowers and fusees, whose flashing greens, and blues, and carmines, 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. 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 nobility 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 mediæval 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 political and literary horizon.

‘Ungefähr sagt das der Pfarrer auch,
Nur mit ein Bisschen andern 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-Siècle. 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 their passion to the peace of mind of the dying Rudel:—

‘Oui, les grandes 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 peculiar 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 admirably he would have celebrated the Fêtes of Victory!

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 vengeance.

When in Victor Hugo’s La Forêt Mouillée 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 (bruyère):—

‘Bonjour,
La Bruyère! (à une branche d’arbre)
Bonjour, Rameau!
(à une corneille sur le rocher)
Bonjour, Corneille!
(au nénufar) 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 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 performed, for the first time in France, in the Rostands’ salon. In 1844, a Mademoiselle Victorine Rostand—a great-aunt of the poet’s—published 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 Eugène 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:—

‘Cette petite langue exquise,
Un vrai jargon de Paradis,
De mots qu’il façonne à sa guise.
De diminutifs inédits;
D’inimitables tours de phrases....’

At eight years of age the child, Edmond Rostand, was certainly the father of the man. As a schoolboy, at the lycée of Marseilles, his Quixotic, pathetic temperament—his characteristic preference for the unsuccessful—was already established. An old, drunken usher scorned by the masters, tormented by the boys, a dreamy Bardolph whom his pupils (on account of his shining nose) surnamed 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 aimé ... doux pochard ... Pif-Luisant.’

At one-and-twenty years of 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 Gérard in her nineteenth year, a vision of loveliness, 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 lyric as charming as herself. Madame Rostand has a talent of her own, sincere, simple, femininely sentimental. All the lovers in France know her Chanson éternelle:—

‘Car vois-tu chaque jour je t’aime davantage,
Aujourd’hui plus qu’hier, et bien moins que demain.’

Photo: Dormac To face p. 56

Edmond Rostand

This marriage with Mademoiselle Gérard, granddaughter 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 playwright in 1894, at the age of twenty-six, with a pretty little fanciful comedy, Les Romanesques. A year later, Sarah Bernhardt produced his Princesse Lointaine, playing 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 everybody knows, which are (with Kipling’s novels) the immense, the international, the universal success of our times; I cannot calmly plod through the plots of these familiar pieces with the patience I 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 handsome 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 frolic which make the piece a perfect Fountain of Jouvence. There is a heroic cheerfulness in Cyrano, a love of life, a generosity, an activity, a 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 Duc de Reichstadt, Napoleon’s heir, is drawn with a feeling 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 disinterestedness, 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 Rostand bids us mark that courage needs more to its making than mere temerity. He does not say, with Danton, ‘De l’audace, de l’audace, et toujours de l’audace.’ He says, ‘De l’audace, et puis du bon sens, et puis le sens de la vérité!’

This history of a poultry-yard has somewhat disconcerted the adorers of Cyrano. But Boileau and the big-wigs of the Court of Louis 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 reception 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 certainty 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 vibrations conveyed by solid bodies; flies, whose innumerable eyes discern the X-rays as a colour; 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 à moi, Madame, il y a bien longtemps
Qu’un râteau dans un coin, une fleur dans un vase.
M’ont fait tomber dans une inguérissable extase,
Et que j’ai contracté devant un liseron
Cet émerveillement dont mon œil 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 humour, 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 feelings have free play. Man is absent.

‘Malebranche dirait qu’il n’y a plus une âme;
Nous pensons humblement qu’il reste encore des cœurs.’

The Cock’s Hymn to the Sun is so devoid of all our cosmic ideas that I have heard more than one 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 dazzling 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 wonderful lustre the varnished earthenware crock in the farm-yard; thanks to the sun the hayrick has gold on his hat and the hive has gold on her hood:—

‘Gloire à toi sur les prés! Gloire à toi dans les vignes!
Sois béni parmi l’herbe et contre les portails!
Dans les yeux des lézards et sur l’aile des cygnes!
Ô toi qui fais les grandes lignes
Et qui fais les petits détails!

‘C’est toi qui, découpant la sœur jumelle et sombre
Qui se couche et s’allonge au pied de ce qui luit,
De tout ce qui nous charme as tu doubler le nombre,
À chaque objet donnant une ombre
Souvent plus charmante qui lui!

‘Je t’adore, Soleil! Tu mets dans l’air des roses,
Des flammes dans la source, un dieu dans le buisson!
Tu prends un arbre obscur et tu l’apothéoses!
Ô Soleil! toi sans qui les choses
Ne seraient que ce qu’elles sont!’

In this beautiful ode, Edmond Rostand really enriched French literature 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 l’apothéoses), 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 fervently, 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’idée de mon décor est ceci: donner la sensation qu’une petite allée de jardin est, pour les volailles, une voie immense, une Via Appia.’

They live no less than us in the middle of immensities, only, from their lower standpoint, they remark (even less than we do) the disproportion between the world they inhabit, and the unthinkable Infinity they leave unmodified.

‘Très peu de ciel dans ce décor; c’est important de donner l’impression qu’étant très bas, à hauteur de poule, on en voit moins.’

Knowing so little about it, Chantecler is convinced 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 delta 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 necessity of his existence.

So far at least the myth is charming in its quaint philosophy, the characters appear full of humour each of them as French as French can be; for why should not animals as well as human 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 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, like 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 military 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 criticism, his pitiless raillery, his pitiable blague, which is often merely,—

‘Une prudence, un art de rester vague,
Un élégant 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 intellectuel. He is the ‘Chat Noir,’ he is Montmartre; 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 fowl, ‘Fichez le Kant!’ (camp); when he interrupts, ‘C’est vieux œufs!’ (vieux jeu)—surely he outdistances the most trivial dialogues of Moth and Armado; and we answer with old Chaucer,—

‘Allas! conceytes 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 à 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 loveliness. 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 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 saying of Friar Trophime in La Princesse Lointaine: ‘La seule vertu, c’est l’enthousiasme.’ Like Maurice Barrès, 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 Intellectualist 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 Corneille and Racine (in the same year, if I remember right) each of them produce a Titus et Bérénice? 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 Kipling 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 explanation 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 personality, 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, extravagant; his plays are frequently no more than psychological dialogues between the dissociated 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 Il 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 Francis 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’Échange 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, ‘â, â, 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 Existence—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 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 donc, comme la religieuse Chaldée, nos yeux vers le ciel absolu où les astres, en un inextricable chiffre, ont dressé notre acte de naissance 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, complicated and obscure as is their substance, they are the same in Tête d’Or, composed in 1889 (when the poet was one-and-twenty years of age), and in L’Annonce Faite à Marie, played in Paris in 1912, of which a definitive version was published in 1914. 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 born not dreamers, but doers. Claudel himself is a traveller and a man of action. A native of Picardy (he was born in 1868 of a Vosgian stock,) he has lived of late years little in Paris and in the world of letters. A pupil of the Symbolists, Arthur Rimbaud and Mallarmé, 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 Whitman. 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 Tête d’Or; a hydraulic engineer in La Jeune Fille Violaine; an American merchant in L’Échange; a Consul in Partage de Midi; a political agitator in L’Otage; an architect in L’Annonce Faite à 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 sentiment is sterile and incoherent (the adventurous Louis Laine in L’Échange is the slave of the sentiment of the hour); that activity, even when it is evil activity, may bring forth a better future (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 Grâce!’

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, oversubtle—emerge (as Meredith’s women, wonderfully human, break through the tinsel veil of his artificialities) the most living and the most lovable of heroines. The Marthe of L’Échange 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, 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 conscience and courage, lifted just one degree higher; no heroine, 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: Ysé, with her fresh beauty and her yellow hair—Ysé, who is just woman, as Eve was woman; all passion, instinct, sex, all beauty, flower and grace: Ysé, whom we associate mysteriously with the Epode of La Muse qui est la Grâce, when the poet, overcome by memory, cries to the Grace of God:—

‘Va-t-en! Je me retourne désespérément vers la terre!

Va-t-en! Tu ne m’ôteras pas ce froid goût 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 viscères!

‘Qui a crié? J’entends un cri dans la nuit profonde!

J’entends mon antique sœur des ténèbres qui remonte une autre fois vers moi, L’épouse nocturne qui revient une autre fois vers moi, sans mot dire,

Une autre fois vers moi, avec son cœur, comme un repas qu’on se partage dans les ténèbres,

Son cœur, 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 élite 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 public in our islands. Is there no translator brave enough to undertake L’Otage, the most accessible of Claudel’s plays, or L’Annonce, so like 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 enlighten this hypothetical 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, Tête d’Or, which is really intolerably prolix. Yet there is much that is fine and moving 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 là, entre dans la terre crue! À même! Là où 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: Tête 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 unité,’ cried Goldilocks. But one man alone, however great, is little; and his last words are: ‘Je n’ai été rien.’

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, Cœuvre (in his play, La Ville), 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 ministry. He, too, has found in thought a second birth—‘dans la profondeur de l’étude, une seconde naissance.’

And now he writes to promulgate his certitude. Man does not live for man but for God; the happiness of self is an illusion; the soul alone exists; the only true order is based on sacrifice and association: such is the lesson that all his plays expound.

La Jeune Fille Violaine is an early study for Claudel’s masterpiece, L’Annonce faite à 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 hydraulic engineer, who loves her and whom she cannot love; she embraces him ‘en tout bien et tout honneur;’ but, just as her fresh lips are on her lover’s cheek her jealous younger sister, Mara, opens the door and stealthily 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 marrying? 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 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 birthright, Mara seeks in the hearth a handful of wood ashes to pounce the signature, and having dried the writing, flings 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 blinding Violaine for life.

When 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, still play so large a part in the life 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, blind 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 for some while vainly, through a wood, in the snow:—

La Femme: Si c’est pas un malheur de courir les bois comme ça à mon âge! Pour sûr que ça me fera pas de bien!

Mara: Alors on ne sait pas où elle gîte?

La Femme: Un jour ici, l’autre ailleurs. Et puis des mois sans qu’on la voie. Faut la traquer comme une bête.

Et comme ça, votre petit est aveugle?

Mara: Oui.

La Femme: Moi, j’ai mal dans le corps. (Silence. Il neige.)

Mara: Alors c’est des miracles qu’elle fait?

La Femme: Y a pas de miracles, que vous êtes simple! C’est ce qu’on appelle la ‘force,’ voilà!

Y a pas de miracles. C’est seulement la ‘force’ vous comprenez? On m’a bien expliqué tout ça.

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, all mangled, murdered, the broken form of the woman whose fresh youth he had loved. Violaine tells him all. She dies forgiving, reconciling, everybody—even the murderous Mara who, in her dreadful, 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 l’altre stelle.’

Quite recently, in 1912, Paul Claudel has made the symbol clearer in a new version of his play The Angelus (L’Annonce faite à 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-Raphaelite in L’Annonce faite à 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 her with his disease.

This seems to me a grave artistic error, since to some extent it exculpates the faithless Jacques, 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 cartload 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 uplifts 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 realise the Celtic base of France—at least, of the north of France. The French have ever Rome upon their lips, 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 d’Aurevilly from a Walter Scott.

La Jeune fille Violaine presents no great difficulties to a reader broken in by a sufficient course of recent Irish literature. L’Échange 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 discipline 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 carried off his French bride to the New World, a land whose traditions and conditions are contrary 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, Laine’s employer, Thomas Pollock Nageoire (Finn):—

‘Thomas Pollock, il y a plusieurs choses que j’aime en vous.

‘La première c’est que, croyant qu’une chose est bonne, vous ne doutez pas de faire tous vos efforts pour l’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 rêves, et vous ne vous contentez point d’apparences, et votre commerce est avec les choses réelles.

‘Et par vous toute chose bonne ne demeure point inutile.

‘Vous êtes hardi, actif, patient, rusé, opportun, persévérant; vous êtes calme, vous êtes 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 êtes raisonnable, et vous savez soumettre votre désir, votre raison aussi.