lyrique, ma première entrevue avec lui; il était déjà grand pour
quelques-uns d’entre nous. Je vois encore cette petite chambre
où l’on nous introduisit, mon camarade et moi. C’était une sorte
de cellule nue; trois choses attirèrent mon regard, les seules:
un chapelet, l’_Appel au soldat_ de Barrès, et un paroissien de
vieille femme. Il parut. Le marbre romain allait parler. Il avait
de l’antipathie pour la personne qui m’accompagnait: j’entends
le son sec et tranchant de ses brèves réponses. Le lendemain je
déjeunai avec Schwob et lui. Le marbre, resté glacial la veille,
s’anima: ce fut pour moi un émerveillement. Le catholicisme entrait
dans ma vie.’
‘Le faune avait des inquiétudes?’
‘Le faune était tenace. Mais insensiblement je commençais à me
demander: où est la vérité? Et de ne pas la connaître, de sentir
une limite à l’homme, j’éprouvais une impression pénible, je
découvrais un ver dans la pomme. Je m’apercevais qu’il y avait une
force dans la vie et que cette force je ne la possédais pas.’
‘J’étais dans cet état de désillusion et de doute quand je fus la
victime d’une crise morale affreuse. Je tombai dans le désarroi
le plus complet. J’avais demandé à un des mes amis de Bordeaux
l’hospitalité et je m’abandonnai à ma détresse; c’est alors que par
un bienfait de Dieu une lettre de Claudel nous parvint, une lettre
admirable de consolation et d’enseignement. Je fus frappé, je
réfléchis. Si cette vie que j’aime tant, me disais-je, ne me donne
pas son explication, elle n’est qu’une horreur, nous sommes dans un
hôpital de fous; j’allai à la cathédrale, longtemps je pleurai: le
travail de la grâce s’opérait en moi.
‘Je rentrai à Orthez. Ce que la lettre de Claudel avait commencé,
la parole de Claudel devait le finir. J’eus bientôt le bonheur de
le voir arriver; il me parla du catholicisme en grand philosophe,
en savant. Ensemble nous priâmes. J’étais au fond du fossé,
mourant, anéanti. Je me relevai guéri, sauvé. Le 7 juillet, 1905,
je me confessai, je communiai; Claudel, mon ange gardien, servait
la messe. Depuis lors j’ai retrouvé tout ce qui me manquait, j’ai
récupéré la joie. Après avoir traversé d’âpres solitudes, j’ai la
joie de la certitude, l’explication de ma vie. Je suis catholique!’
Dans l’espace, M. Francis Jammes lance cette profession de foi
comme un cri de triomphe.
‘Catholique pour de bon, insistai-je, pratiquant? La foi totale,
absolue, obéissante?
‘La foi du dernier savetier. Je ne suis pas un néo-chrétien.
Je pratique, comme vous dites, j’observe tous les préceptes
de l’Église, ma mère.... Je sais: on rit, vous riez des
dévotionnettes. J’en ai ri jadis moi-même. Je me les suis
expliquées. L’Église ne les aurait peut-être pas imposées si tous
les hommes étaient des Pascal et des Claudel. Mais l’humanité
n’est pas composée que de Pascal et de Claudel. Ces pratiques, ces
observances sont comme des nœuds au mouchoir, elles constituent, en
quelque manière, un rappel à la vertu et à la piété. L’Église les a
jugées nécessaires ou utiles. Je m’incline sans discussion. Cette
attitude a déconcerté certains hommes qui n’ont rien de catholique
mais qui veulent exploiter le catholicisme au profit d’un système
politique. Quand on a la flamme de la foi, comme je l’ai, on trouve
humiliante cette exploitation. Nous, nous sommes catholiques
foncièrement, pardessus tout.
‘Vous parlez comme si vous étiez certain de posséder la vérité.’
‘Je la possède. Je suis dans la vérité puisque la sécurité où je
suis est si bonne! Il n’y a rien dans le monde à quoi je puisse
comparer le bonheur que ma foi me donne. J’y tiens davantage qu’à
la vie elle-même. J’ai été comme un verger où le vent a passé,
maintenant je suis un verger doré avec de beaux fruits.
‘Et comme j’esquissais un discret sourire de scepticisme, M.
Francis Jammes me regarda avec infiniment de générosité.
‘Je vous souhaite le bonheur que j’ai.’
‘I was converted on the 7th of July, 1905,’ began M. Francis
Jammes, when I asked him if I were not indiscreet in seeking to
trace the progress of his mind from indifference to fervour.
‘You were not always a Catholic?’
‘I was christened a Catholic, but that was about all: that, and
a sort of sympathy for the fine literary themes afforded by the
Church, mixed by much disdain for what I no longer call the
“churchiness” of old women. I was a Pagan, a veritable Faun!
Flowers, forests, women--I was in love with all that lived! In all
Nature there was not a merrier young vagabond alive. Life was so
delightful in my eyes that the very idea of one day quitting all
that, seemed to me a frightful blasphemy.’
‘And you are no longer so much in love with Life?’
‘Not in the same way.’
‘You were changed by a sudden flash of grace?’
‘No; there were trials before the Grace of God touched me; and
there was Claudel, too, ... Claudel with whom I made friends
(through one of his old schoolfellows, Marcel Schwob) when I was
still a Faun, haunting the thickets.
(Claudel! The poet pronounces the name with a touching admiration
and emotion.)
‘Claudel! I shall never forget our first interview. He was already
a great writer in the eyes of a little clan. I still see the
small room into which we were shown, my friend and I. It was a
sort of bare cell: three things attracted my attention, a rosary,
an old woman’s prayer-book, and Barrès’s _Appel au Soldat_. And
then Claudel came in. It was as if a Roman bust were to move its
lips and speak. He disliked the person who accompanied me, and I
remember the harsh cut-and-dry tone of his short answers. But the
next day I lunched with him and Schwob; and the icy marble softened
into flesh and blood. I was lost in wonder, a sort of happy
astonishment. Catholicism had entered into my life....’
‘The Faun began to feel anxious?’
‘The Faun stood firm! But, little by little, I began to ask myself:
Where lies the Truth? And the sense of my ignorance, that feeling
of a limit to what man can do and be, was the canker in the fruit.
I felt there was a force in Life--a force that I did not possess.
‘And while in that state of doubt and disillusion, I was overtaken
by a cruel moral crisis. I wallowed in the Slough of Despond. One
of my friends lived at Bordeaux; I went to stay with him, and it
was there that, by God’s grace, I received a letter from Claudel.
Such an admirable letter, full of consolation and instruction! I
was struck by it. And I pondered it in my heart. “If this dear
life,” said I, “that I so love, remains a riddle, if there is no
answer to our questions, then away with it! Life is a horror, a
madhouse!” I went to the Cathedral, and for a long while I wept;
the miracle of grace began to operate in my soul.
‘I returned to my home at Orthez. That which Claudel’s letter had
begun, speech with Claudel was to effectuate. He came; he spoke to
me of religion like a great philosopher, like a man of science,
too; and we prayed together. I was in the bottom of the pit,
dying, dejected. On the 7th of July, 1905, I went to confession,
I received the Communion; Claudel, my guardian angel, served the
Mass. Since then I have found all that I missed in life; I have
recovered my delight. After the harshest solitudes I have come to a
place of certainty: I am a Catholic!’
(And M. Jammes flings this cry forth into space, like a chant of
triumph.)
‘A real thorough-going Catholic?’ said I; ‘absolute, obedient
faith?’
‘The faith of a cobbler! I am no neo-Christian; I practise all
the precepts of the Church I know. You smile (I used to smile) at
certain observances. The Church would not have enjoined them if
all the faithful stood on the intellectual level of a Pascal or a
Claudel. But humanity is not made up of Pascals and Claudels. These
minor practices are just knots in our handkerchief, lest we forget!
The Church thinks them necessary; I bow to her decision. I know
this attitude seems disconcerting to certain persons, who really
are not Catholics at all, but would like to exploit the Church in
favour of a political system. But, when the flame of faith is lit
in our hearts, we scorn to be the catspaw of a politician. We are
just Catholics.’
‘You speak as though you were sure of possessing Truth itself!’
‘So I am; Truth is my heritage, since I find my security so good!
Nothing in Life is comparable to the happiness which I derive from
my religion; it is dearer to me than life itself! I was as an
orchard harassed by the wind; and now I am an orchard golden with
ripe fruit.’
So spake Francis Jammes. I smiled the slight smile of the sceptic.
The poet glanced at me with an infinite generosity.
‘I wish you the same happiness!’ he said.
Elie-Joseph Bois, _Le Temps_.
_Nov. 3, 1913._
But this conversion has not greatly changed the nature of the poet.
His verse is still fresh with the fragrance of wild thyme newly wet
with dew. He continues to sing his happy valley, with the mountain
towering up behind, right into the blueness of the sky. Only, in his
landscape, he gives more prominence to the village church, garlanded
with yellow roses: _L’Église habillée de Feuilles_.
‘Par cette grande paix que l’homme cherche en soi;
Par les jours finissants aux vieux balcons de bois
Où le cœur noir des géraniums blancs s’attriste;
Par l’obscure douceur des choses villageoises;
Par les pigeons couleur d’arc-en-ciel et d’ardoise;
Par le chien dont la tête humble nous invite
À lui passer la main dessus; par tout cela:
Chapelle, sois bénie à l’ombre de ton bois!’
His verse has still its candour, its ingenuous freshness, its
Franciscan simplicity:--
‘Je prendrai mon bâton et sur la grande route
J’irai, et je dirai aux ânes, nos amis:
Je suis Francis Jammes et je vais au Paradis.
Car il n’y a pas d’enfer au pays du Bon Dieu.’
And yet so great a change has necessarily had its repercussion in
the very form of the poet’s art: Francis Jammes is no longer a
_ver-librist_. Having accepted a discipline for his soul, he may well
admit one for his muse. He would no longer write:--
‘J’avais été assez éprouvé pour connaître
Le bonheur de finir ses jours dans la retraite;’
and think he had done his duty by the rhyme. He would not now content
himself with the loose and lazy assonance of a verse (a beautiful
verse) like the following:--
‘Accablé, je m’étais assis, tant les ajoncs
Étaient impénétrables.
Quand j’eus équilibré mon fusil contre un arbre,
Je relevai le front.’
His last charming volume of Bucolics, _Les Géorgiques Chrétiennes_, is
written in rhymed Alexandrines, which differ only from those of classic
French poetry in a few innocent and agreeable liberties--a plural and a
singular being allowed to rhyme together, the mute E not counting where
it is not pronounced. It is a pleasant form of verse. The picture of
the harvesting angels whirling in the sky, which opens the poem, has
the rich colour and the large facility of a fresco by Correggio--say,
the Assumption at Parma. It is beautiful with a calm beauty:--
‘De temps en temps l’un de ces anges touchaient terre
Et buvait à la cruche une gorgée d’eau claire.
‘Sa joue était pareille à la rouge moitié
De la pomme qui est l’honneur de compotier.
‘Il reprenait son vol, et d’abord sa faucille.
Quelque autre alors foulait l’ombre qui fait des grilles.
‘Ou tous ils descendaient ensemble, ou bien encor
Ensemble reprenaient avec calme l’essor.
‘Chacun avait passé le bras à sa corbeille
Dont les tresses formaient comme un essaim d’abeilles.
‘Clarté fondue à la clarté, ces travailleurs
Récoltaient du froment la plus pure des fleurs.
‘Ils venaient visiter sur ce coin de la Terre
La beauté que Dieu donne à la vie ordinaire.’
One of my friends, who is Professor of Rhetoric (Modern Literature) in
a High School, tells me that the enthusiasm of her scholars for Francis
Jammes is a thing touching to behold--for we of a bygone generation can
never quite attain their diapason. Michelet and Renan leave them cold;
Claudel and Francis Jammes fire their imagination. If I were a teacher,
certainly I should profit by the experience; by all means let the young
learn from the young!
_Les Géorgiques Chrétiennes_ is full of the most delightful episodes
of country life told in beautiful (if rather free-and-easy) French.
There is no particular tale in it. It is rather a series of pictures;
the daily life of a family of husbandmen on a farm. It is a sort of
rural _Christian Year_. But what candid and happy pictures! What a
sense of rustic cheer and frugal abundance! What primitive poetry
in the labourer’s account of the creation of his daily bread; the
chestnut, the maize, the vine! And the betrothal of the little farm
servant! And the vocation of the farmer’s daughter who takes the veil.
There is but one thing in the whole volume which I find displeasing.
It is the short certificate of orthodoxy which the poet delivers to
himself on the first page and on the last. He is at great pains to
assure us that he is not a reformer, a philosopher, a modernist, or a
free-thinker. We should never have suspected this gifted and ingenuous
singer of being any kind of thinker! He is a poet, a most indubitable
poet, and that is enough.
RENÉ BOYLESVE
René Boylesve reminds me of some twy-faced Roman statue, some bust of
Janus, turning a different mask to opposite points of the horizon. One
of these visages (but that regards the Nineteenth Century) has the
libertine grace, the refined scepticism, the voluptuous detachment of
an Anatole France or a Henri de Régnier, with less philosophy than
the one and less poetry than the other; but these are the qualities
which distinguished our Republic yesterday: _Non ragionam di lor_. The
second face looks at the new Renaissance of our time, and is that of
an inhabitant of the province of Touraine, poet and gentleman-farmer,
a man pleasantly occupied with the affairs of his neighbourhood, in
which he finds the diversity, the unexpected developments, the food for
thought, which animate, in any place, if sufficiently observed, the
innumerable acts of the Human Comedy.
In addition to a mind of the subtlest moral delicacy and a more
than feminine refinement, M. Boylesve possesses a literary style of
transparent ease and charm; just the style to suit the landscape he
describes, the moderate classic harmonies and Attic graces of Touraine.
He is the historian of the charming _gros bourgs_ that surround Loches
or Azay. He describes their neat, white houses built of freestone,
topped with slate, their raised stone _perrons_ (or stoops, as they say
in America) and handsome ornamented windows; and we see the trellised
vine up the front, and the flowers in the gardens, and the fruit trees
everywhere. The villages of Touraine have brought prosperity to the
very brink of poetry!
These little farms where every sunny slope all round is planted with
the vine; these old gray manors and priories nestling under some cliff
lightly planted with slender oak-woods (so unlike ours!), in which
the gray-blue periwinkle and the gray-pink cyclamen grow wild; these
prosperous rural properties, with their air of solid comfort, their
teeming vats of wine; their kitchen-gardens, full of melons, cucumbers,
asparagus, artichokes, cardoons, green peas, egg-plants, tomatoes,
salsify, and scarlet-runners; their great barns; their stone stables
where the cattle spend so much of their time (for the land is too
fertile and too valuable to lay down in pasture); all this dignified,
delightful, indolent country of Touraine has found its prophet in
René Boylesve. Except Balzac in his _Lys dans la Vallée_, no one has
described it half so well--the land and the dwellers on the land....
‘Molles Turones,’ said Cæsar, and Tacitus calls them ‘imbelles,’ and
Tasso thought the peasant here was like his field, which is ‘molle,
lieta e dillettosa.’ And, in fact, these adjectives serve very well to
describe the lazy, charming art of René Boylesve.
I find in him the moral features of his race: measure and tact,
delicacy of sentiment, love of ease, something at once noble and
voluptuous, something humorous and nonchalant, and yet, at the same
time, something precise and positive, despite his softness. And often,
when I read a novel of M. Boylesve’s, the book slips from my hands, and
I see the Plain of Touraine under its customary sky of sunny gray--its
great wide rivers, its rocky cavernous cliffs, its forests of Loches
and Amboise, its rambling lanes sunk deep between two rows of pollard
windows, the great straight white high-roads that the aspens fleck with
shadow, and all the pleasant sequence of woods and fields, which seem
to be reasonably deduced the one from the other, like the different
parts of a discourse. Did M. Boylesve know, he would be charmed; for
the object of his art is, not to hurry the reader along on a current
of breathless events, but to foster in him this habit of reverie, of
reminiscence ‘chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancy.’
René Boylesve was born in 1867 at La-Haye Descartes, in Touraine, and
his first book, _Les Bains de Baden_, was published in 1896; but this
belongs to the Boylesve whom we renounce. In 1899, with _Mademoiselle
Cloque_, he opened that series of ‘Scènes de la vie de province’ (as
Balzac would say), which have made his reputation. Mlle Cloque is an
old maid of narrow means; just one of those ‘churchy’ old maids for
whom Francis Jammes has expressed a respectful tenderness. But Francis
Jammes was still a ‘Faun’ when his contemporary, Boylesve, delineated
this delightful lady.
Mlle Cloque’s affections are divided between two absorbing objects,
her pretty young niece and her church. That church is the basilica of
Saint Martin, fallen into ruin; and the dearest aim of this devoted
worshipper is to restore and repair the great sanctuary of Tours. For
to her Tours is still that Jerusalem of the West that our forefathers
called it, in memory of the first confessor of the Latin Church, Saint
Martin, once the honour and glory of France, neglected now in his own
diocese.
Long before Maurice Barrès wrote his apology for the churches of
France, the author of _Mademoiselle Cloque_ showed how a great
monument may be a liberal education, may raise an illiterate mind to
heights where it apprehends the mystery which extends beneath, beyond,
appearances; he, too, affirmed that the prayer of an old woman in her
parish church may rank with the meditation of the man of science and
with the inspired presentiment of the poet.
_La Becquée_ followed _Mademoiselle Cloque_. It is impossible to
read this long, slow, humorous, enchanting book, without seeing a
resemblance (a moral resemblance, for the setting, of course, is
widely different since the setting is Touraine), still, a strong moral
resemblance to the English novel of Victorian days. Tante Félicie and
her nephew, Riquet Nadaud, remind us, though so unlike, of Aunt Betsy
Trotwood and little David Copperfield. It seems to me that those who
love the one might, at least, like the other? I shall speak again of
Riquet Nadaud in my chapter on the Novel of Childhood.
A great part of the charm of these stories is the atmosphere of
Touraine, so marvellously captured. I do not mean only the physical
atmosphere: M. Boylesve is above all things a man for whom the inner
world is important. Twenty years ago, French literature was positive,
objective, and, if I may say so, visual. But now our younger masters
are men for whom the invisible world exists; they are chiefly occupied
with the interior sphere. Some while ago, René Boylesve described this
change of front very happily to a reporter of the _Revue des Français_
(September 25, 1912). He said:--
‘In my young days, I used to visit Alphonse Daudet whom I greatly
admired. He was very encouraging, and we would talk of literature;
he used to say to me gently: “I have never described anything that
I have not seen.” He was very kind, very discreet, and I would go
away despairing, for I felt he was offering me a suggestion, a
piece of good advice. And for long afterwards I was incapable of
writing anything, since at every turn I caught myself on the point
of describing things I had never seen, could never see!’
These unseen things--emotions, beliefs, traditions, opinions, all that
makes up the moral atmosphere of a society--are the peculiar sphere
of M. Boylesve. On this occasion he showed our journalist the plan,
or scenario, for a novel which was lying on his writing-table: no
project of a plot, no list of personages, but a sequence of maxims and
reflections. ‘Take care of the moral atmosphere,’ he seems to say, ‘and
the characters will take care of themselves.’ So soon as he begins to
write, he forgets these notes, which transpose themselves into persons
and events; but his preliminary care is to invent the moral world which
naturally brings them forth.
The classic grace of his native province, its sober delicacy, its quiet
order, do not exclude a latent energy, an amorous ardour, decently
dissimulated under the discretion and retinue of a civilised and
courtly tradition. The Tourangeau is sensual as well as temperate; he
is never perverse; he is seldom excessive; none the less, if his name
be often Descartes or Berthelot, he may by chance be called Ronsard, or
Rabelais, or Balzac. How should he live in a world of such good things,
such an earthly paradise, and not know--though he discipline them--the
pleasures of sense? His purity is not austere and his piety no flaming
romantic enthusiasm.
All the delicate sensibility, all this impassioned moderation of his
native place, M. Boylesve has put into the human, touching figure
of his _Jeune Fille Bien Élevée_. It is the story of a refined and
gentle girl, convent bred, pious, reared in all the old-fashioned
dignities and delicacies of a small provincial society in Touraine.
Her parents combine for her a sensible match--a _mariage de raison_
with a Parisian architect who, visiting Chinon, has espied the white
sequestered lily; he marries the dowerless Madeleine for her perfect
manners, her charming grace, her moral solidity--_et parce qu’il ne veut
pas être_.... Poor Madeleine in her wedding veil has overheard the
unthinkable word!
M. Serpe has evidently a great opinion of that moral solidity which
he so much admires, for, during their married life in Paris, he takes
no pains at all to shield it, plunging his young wife into the busy,
frivolous circle of contractors, speculators, money-makers, and
pleasure-hunters that eddied round the great Exhibition of 1889. This
is the subject of _Madeleine, Jeune Femme_, which is the continued
history of his heroine--M. Boylesve’s novels have the broad full flow
and lengthy winding course of his native Loire!
Madeleine passes unscathed among the booths of Vanity Fair. But by a
friendly hearth (the one spot which recalls the peaceful surroundings
of her early years) she meets a man of letters, a student of
subtle moral problems, a lover of Pascal, an inhabitant of her own
intellectual world, yet in his private life just as much an average
sensual man as any bachelor of the Boulevards. Madeleine succumbs
at once almost without resistance to the charm of M. Juillet--she
succumbs morally, we mean, and in secret; for in the world of fact she
never succumbs at all, and her would-be seducer retires, rebuffed and
ashamed, persuaded that she is one of those impregnable fortresses it
were a waste of time to besiege, while Madeleine is half enraged by
that inalienable aureole, or aspect of virtue, which so efficiently
protects her. The flood of sentiment which invades the charmed, the
passive soul of Madeleine, its mysterious regression, and the final
triumph of her old ideals--Duty, Order, the Interior Altar--are evoked
with a magic which touches in the reader’s heart a secret spring, and
makes him share in Madeleine’s temptation, her danger, her reluctant
escape.
If Madeleine does not succumb, it was not the beautiful quality of
her soul that saved her (our author seems to say) but the regularity
and discipline of her early education; and, to point his moral still
clearer, he places in front of Madeleine a charming madcap, a dear
little modern hoyden, Pipette Voulasne. Pipette has not a bad instinct
in her composition, but neither has she a principle; she has never
heard of the spiritual combat. Pipette, too, falls in love with the
irresistible M. Juillet. Pipette is sweet and twenty, rich, unmarried
and M. Juillet is a bachelor; but the lover of Pascal hesitates at the
idea of marriage with a romp whose ideas of fun is to dress up as a
seal at a fancy ball and swim in the pond.