Pipette commits suicide,--an almost comic suicide, in keeping with
her character; she makes a hearty meal of plum-pudding and then takes
a sea-bath! M. Boylesve is a traditionalist, a lover of the ancient
faiths and disciplines of France (a lover, perhaps, rather than a
believer). He delights to show us, in his magic mirror, the neat,
well-ordered world of civilised society; but sometimes the figures that
move there become transparent, revealing behind them the great primeval
forces, never completely disciplined, which drop into our neatest
systems some soul irreducibly irregular, a grain of sand throwing all
things out of gear. All his novels are _une invitation à réfléchir sur
la vie_.
There is decidedly something English in the talent of M. René
Boylesve--perhaps his patience, his slowness, his minuteness, his
lambent humour, as also his repugnance to all that is spasmodic, jerky,
or effective--for sometimes his art reminds us not only of _David
Copperfield_, but also of _The Mill on the Floss_; and perhaps we must
go back so far to find a novel whose moral effulgence is as persuasive.
A pure and lonely soul, accustomed to the quiet meditations of the
inner life; a young pilgrim of the ideal, suddenly plunged into the
robust materialism and frivolous worldliness of a middle-class coterie,
abruptly brought up face to face with passion--with unlawful passion,
in which, none the less, the young soul recognises something more akin
to the altar of her inner worship than was to be found in the daily
round and common lot; the swift temptation, the sick revulsion.
‘There came and looked him in the face
An Angel beautiful and bright;
And that he knew it was a Fiend,
This miserable Knight!’
Are we not telling the story of Maggie Tulliver? It is also the history
of Madeleine Serpe. It is her story, with one great, one incalculable
difference.
There is an old tale, familiar in many variants to the students of
monastic lore. Tempted, a nun leaves her convent, errs, returns full of
shame, to find that no one has missed her, that her sin is unguessed
at, since the Virgin has taken her place and her semblance, performing
all her duties in her place. This interior Virgin, who saves Madeleine
Serpe, who intervenes too late for Maggie Tulliver, is the habit of
goodness, the inheritance and practice of virtue, which protects some
natures half against their will. For (and there lies the delicacy and
naturalness of M. Boylesve’s story) Madeleine’s soul is saved against
her will! She feels all the attraction of the abyss. For one dizzy
moment she leans over, longs--but something pulls her back, and places
her reluctant feet on the dusty highway they had thought to quit for
ever.
* * * * *
René Boylesve is not one of the greatest names in contemporary French
literature--not a name to conjure with. No one has ever compared him
to Pascal or Dante, as (to our stupefaction) they compare Claudel; no
one has said of him, as it has been said of Péguy, that he is greater
than Victor Hugo. And it is as well: this discreet and moderate artist
would find no charm in immoderate praise. But we may say without fear
of contradiction that he is one of the most readable of contemporary
novelists.
ANDRÉ GIDE
André Gide is one of the acutest, one of the most sensitive critics of
the Twentieth Century. His review, _La Nouvelle Revue Française_, has
been no less indispensable to the development of our younger writers in
France, than the _English Review_ to the Georgian authors across the
channel. Instead of Masefield, of Conrad, André Gide has fostered the
talent of a Charles-Louis Philippe, of Marguerite Audoux.
But this critic, so perspicacious, so alert, so abreast of his times,
is, at the same time, a novelist, apparently of another generation.
The Nineteenth Century in its decline--the dear, delightful, decadent
Nineteenth Century--with its dreams, and its nihilism, and its irony,
and its delicate disenchantment--the Nineteenth Century which already
seems such worlds away!--remains incarnate still in the novels of André
Gide, hardly less than in those of France, or Régnier, or Pierre Loti.
He has the same sense of beauty, the same regret for some ante-natal
magic never since re-found, the same perfection of form, or rather a
perfection almost equivalent in its transparent and insidious grace, in
its purity, in its rare elegance: few writers of the Twentieth Century
are elegant! And, like Anatole France, Gide, in his latest work, is
full of a bitter contempt, a mordant, an almost impious derision of
human nature. Evil is, in his eyes, the mortar that binds together
our earthly tenement; a necessary condition of our being; man is a
creature made of dust and mud. But I will not speak of his later books.
Of the dozen volumes he has produced, no one is negligible, and at
least three, _Paludes_, _L’Immoraliste_, and _La Porte Étroite_, have
qualities for which one may suppose survival.
_Paludes_ has a charm of youth and decadence too different from our
serious age for me to praise it here; but _L’Immoraliste_ and _La Porte
Étroite_ are as much in earnest as the Twentieth Century can demand,
and yet they are not of it!
_L’Immoraliste_ is the story of a young man, newly married, highly
gifted, with all his life before him apparently, who suddenly falls
sick of a mortal illness. Hitherto he has been a student, spiritually
minded, almost austere. But the sudden neighbourhood of death, the
dread possibility of annihilation, change his philosophy; he feels
that instinctive shudder, that sense of the futility of creeds and
conventions which Mademoiselle Lenéru has called _le sens profond de la
mort_. And his ideals are reversed.
Henceforth he esteems not the moral, not the refined, but such things
as seem especially vital: Life, in such manifestations, bad or good,
as appear the most spontaneous, the most energetic. Instinct and
Vigour draw him like a magnet, for these make for survival. At Biskra,
where he winters for his health, he finds himself admiring the little
Arab boy who steals his wife’s scissors--the scamp is so adroit, so
deft!--and when he returns to his country home in Normandy, it is the
drunkards and the poachers in the tavern who strike him as the most
alive, and therefore the most estimable. When his wife, worn out with
nursing, falls ill in her turn, he neglects her (for illness has become
in his eyes disgusting, almost monstrous) and she dies in isolation.
André Gide may be himself, perhaps, something of an Immoralist--or
rather an Amoralist--as was the manner of the _Fin-de-siècle_, but
he preserves, as the clay preserves the trace of the long crumbled
sea-shell, the imprint of a severe and religious education. Like our
English Edmund Gosse, he has left behind him a Protestant past, which
he looks back upon to-day with some distaste, and yet perhaps with
something of an unconscious nostalgia.
His best novel, _La Porte Étroite_ (1909), is laid, so to speak, on
the grave of that Huguenot youth of his, so utterly vanished, like a
handful of flowers.
‘Le goût exquis craint le trop en tout.’ These words of Fénélon’s
rise to one’s mind in reading this story of a rare soul drawn into
the abyss of the inner life, ‘as waters are by whirlpools suck’d and
drawn,’ through a sort of dread of the excess, the commonness, the
transitoriness of mortal happiness.
Alissa Bucolin was the child of a West Indian Creole and a Norman
banker, Protestant and pious. The beautiful Mme Bucolin never took root
in the Huguenot society of Havre; she spent her days swinging in a
hammock or reclining gracefully upon a couch, a shut book dropping from
her idle hand; sometimes a violent _crise de nerfs_ would interrupt the
languid course of her existence, would alarm and arouse all the quiet,
plain, provincial household; only sometimes at dusk she would awake for
a moment as it were, show a transient animation, or sit at the piano
and begin some slow mazurka of Chopin; but her lovely hands would stop
in the middle of a chord, her voice leave the phrase unfinished, and
the sleeping beauty sink again into her incommunicable _ennui_.
Alissa Bucolin drew from her mother her dark romantic beauty and
a neurotic temperament, but her spiritual strain reflected the
cultured Huguenots of her father’s family. Born in the native town
of Mademoiselle de Scudéry (the author of the _Grand Cyrus_) and of
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (the author of _Paul et Virginie_), she was
akin to the great _précieuse_ and to the idealist philosopher--and
the likeness makes us wonder if a peculiar morbid sentimentality, a
rare delicacy of emotional fibre, be usual in the inhabitants of that
flourishing seaport! Alissa had grown up in the companionship of a
sister, a brother, and a young boy cousin, two years her junior--and
from their childhood it had been understood that Alissa and Jérôme were
one day to marry.
But when the girl was sixteen years of age, the mystery of Evil, and
all the scars and scoria of mortal passion, were suddenly revealed
to her by the conduct of her mother. A novel gaiety and laughter
transfigured Mme Bucolin, coinciding with the frequent visits of a
certain young lieutenant. And one day Jérôme found Alissa weeping and
praying by her bedside while from the floor below her mother’s laughter
pealed up--unaccustomed as a portent. ‘Bucolin, Bucolin,’ drolled the
young lieutenant, ‘Si j’avais un mouton, sûrement je l’appelerais
Bucolin!’ and Alissa, weeping, murmured to her dear confidant, ‘Jérôme,
ne raconte rien à personne ... mon pauvre papa ne sait rien!’
Thus, in its very bud, the young shoot of love in her heart was
infected by shame; and she felt the longing to expiate and offer
her life as an oblation. Moreover, Juliette, three years younger
than Alissa, had let her fancy light on her young cousin; and the
serious Alissa (to whom every preference appeared a vital passion)
determined to sacrifice her dream of happiness in her sister’s favour.
Her strenuous soul was naturally inclined to sacrifice, finding in
privation that mysterious exaltation of the will, that constant and
progressive self-mastery, which animate with an intense though secret
interest the life of the ascetic.
But neither her young sister nor Jérôme would accept her oblation.
Juliette married very young a middle-aged wine grower in the south of
France, had several children, became her husband’s associate, provided
an opening for her younger brother--fulfilled, in fact, the French
ideal of feminine activity, importance, and devotedness, and was
perfectly happy; while Alissa was left (so to speak) with her sacrifice
returned unopened, left upon her hands. And Juliette’s recovery
from her first love, her happiness in a simple marriage of reason,
contributed to discredit human passion in the mind of the fastidious
Alissa:--
‘Ce bonheur que j’ai tant souhaité, jusqu’à offrir de lui sacrifier
mon bonheur, je souffre de le voir obtenu sans peine.... Juliette
est heureuse; elle le dit, elle le paraît; je n’ai pas le droit,
pas de raison, d’en douter.... D’où me vient, auprès d’elle, ce
sentiment d’insatisfaction, de malaise? Peut-être à sentir cette
félicité si pratique, si facilement obtenue.... Ô Seigneur!
Gardez-moi d’un bonheur que je pourrais trop facilement atteindre!’
To Alissa, as to Mary, the usefulness and occupied content of Martha
appear the husks of life: _Unum est necessarium_. Such natures need the
liberty, the solitude, the rapt interminable progression, and ideal
refuge of the inner life. A sort of disgust of reality seizes them at
the very moment when the earthly paradise they dreamed of appears, at
last, within their reach. Alissa has only to stretch out her hand in
order to take her happiness. After all, is it worth while? The dread
of disenchantment, the sense of mortal imperfection, paralyse her. The
dawn of love is surely its most delicate, delicious moment; the high
day of noon can never improve upon that exquisite suggestion.
‘Enough; no more!
’Tis not so sweet now as it was before....’
Those who have once imagined themselves in direct communication
with that which lies behind appearances cannot resume unaltered the
conditions of human society. Pascal in the full glory of scientific
discovery--and is there any human emotion to compare with that of the
man who suddenly sees enlarged the very boundaries of Nature?--in the
passion of scientific debate, knew that abrupt revulsion of the mind,
that withdrawal from finite things, that unique absorption in spiritual
perfection which drove a Charles V. to quit the affairs of Europe for a
monk’s cell in Estramadura.
More than once the sense of Divine things has suggested to a strong
nature some cruel doctrine of voluntary martyrdom, which (according to
our own bias) we may deplore as a partial alienation of the mind, or
admire as evidence of eternal truth. M. Gide’s Alissa is only a woman
who renounces a permitted love; yet, in the same spirit, and with
something of the same high strenuousness, she erases her dream and
writes across the page of life: _Hic incipit amor Dei_. ‘La sainteté
n’est pas un choix’ (she tells the unfortunate Jérôme), ‘mais une
obligation.’
But Alissa was not a saint. She was an artist in Mysticism, a refined
and fastidious spirit ‘who would give all Hugo for a few sonnets by
Baudelaire.’ Nothing in her life shows that warmth, that zeal, that
desire to rush in and save which marks the saint, however visionary,
however ecstatic, be she Saint Teresa or St Catherine, be he St
Francis of Assisi or St Francis of Sales. In place of that simple and
passionate impulse of the soul Alissa, in her self-regarding solitude,
is all scruple, all a fastidious fear of doing wrong. We think of her,
and, opening Fénelon’s _Spiritual Letters_, we read:--
‘Rien n’est si contraire à la simplicité que le scrupule. Il cache
je ne sais quoi de double et de faux; on croit n’être en peine
que par délicatesse d’amour pour Dieu; mais dans le fond on est
inquiet pour soi, et on est jaloux pour sa propre perfection, par
un attachment naturel à soi....’
Over against these strenuous, self-torturing spirits, who arrive with
difficulty at perfection, thanks to ‘une certaine force et une certaine
grandeur de sentiment,’ the great Archbishop sets the luminous peace of
those quiet souls who glide, as it were, into their true haven, without
a conscious effort.
‘Tout les surmonte, selon leur sentiment; et elles surmontent tout,
par un je ne sais quoi qui est en elles, sans qu’elles le sachent.
Elles ne pensent point à bien souffrir; mais insensiblement chaque
croix se trouve portée jusqu’au bout dans une paix simple et
amère, où elles n’ont voulu que ce que Dieu vouloit. Il n’y a rien
d’éclatant, rien de fort, de distinct aux yeux d’autrui, et encore
moins aux yeux de la personne. Si vous lui disiez qu’elle a bien
souffert, elle ne le comprendroit pas.’
We read and reflect that such a friend as this was just what was
lacking to Alissa Bucolin. She would doubtless have been happier as
a Roman Catholic (only even then she might have chanced on a Pascal,
who would have exasperated her qualities, instead of on a Fénelon,
who would have tempered and allayed them to a milder perfection). A
spiritual director would have turned her energies into courses of work
and prayer, would have drawn her mind from the attraction of the abyss,
would, perhaps, have married her (like Juliette) or, more happily, have
fulfilled her vocation in some great active religious order, where an
Alissa may succour and inspire a multitude of lesser natures. Or, had
the bent to contemplation proved too strong, he would have let her
enter the contemplative life, but not alone. A soul, scarred by what
Sainte-Beuve has described as _la griffe de l’archange_, may be seized
with a vertigo, on attaining the summits of the inner world, if on
these giddy heights no staying, guiding, protecting hand be near. _Vae
soli!_
But in that case Alissa would not tragically have died, leaving behind
a long train of sterile regret and hopeless memories, and M. Gide would
not have composed the frail and spiritual story, which, in its purity
and charm, reminds us sometimes of _Dominique_.
CHARLES PÉGUY
When war broke out between Austro-Germany and the Allies, Charles Péguy
went to the front as a lieutenant in the reserves of the line and was
struck by a ball, or a fragment of shell, on the forehead as he was
leading his men into action at the Battle of the Marne. This heroic
death fitly crowns a career devoted to the love of country and the
gospel of fraternal self-sacrifice.
In its light, I re-read the trivial pages, the feeble
half-affectionate pleasantries with which I had saluted the poet and
teacher who, no doubt, occasionally abused the privilege which genius
sometimes claims to alloy the sublime with the ridiculous--or the
merely ultra-lyrical and wearisome. Is it possible that I did not
appreciate, in his lifetime, the prophet, the hero, the poet, whom
France reveres to-day? I examine my conscience. It is clear that I
was not drawn to Péguy in his habit, as he lived.... I see him still.
An odd little man with the look of a small farmer from the Loire--a
farmer, a village schoolmaster, a country doctor, a curé even--there
was something of all that in the refined and yet rather common little
man with the bent shoulders, the charming hands, the square jowl, and
the deep-set blue eyes whose glance was at once so keen and so gentle,
often so quizzical, sometimes so mystically tender, and sometimes so
irritable and angry.
‘Un petit homme barbu (said Barrès) un paysan, sobre, poli,
circonspect, défiant et doué du sens de l’amitié, bien campé sur
la terre, et toujours prêt à partir en plein ciel. C’était un
petit homme terne et lent, de qui se dégageait un merveilleux
rayonnement.’
He seemed to me like some preaching friar of the Middle Ages, vowed
to Dame Poverty; and, for himself, content with a crust in his
wallet,--a wretched living picked up as he went along the roads, yet,
where his Order was concerned, insatiable, a relentless beggar for the
Love of God. Pitiless to any human hobby or pursuit of yours which
did not square with that sublimer hobby and pursuit of his; himself
disinterested, and yet in his ardent piety as dauntless an intriguer as
any Jesuit of Eugène Sue’s; cordial and frank by fits and starts, with
that engaging air of rustic simplicity and popular plain-dealing, yet,
on the morrow, infinitely wily, full of craft, subtlety, and innocent
guile. I thought him (notwithstanding the mysterious, irradiating
kindness which beamed from that wonderful glance of his) on the whole a
crotchety creature, ‘difficile à vivre,’ with a temper full of sudden
twists and turns and unsuspected asperities.
Admirable he was, nevertheless. Patient as a peasant and courageous as
an apostle, wise and witty, bitter and gay, Péguy was full of sense and
of charity--was almost that rarest of geniuses, a saint--and failed
there (remaining merely a poet and a hero) chiefly, perhaps, because
of that insatiable vanity of his. He hungered and thirsted not only
after righteousness, but after praise. And in his lifetime he never
had his due share of it. That meed so scantily meted I might in some
small degree have swelled, and now regret my suspended judgment; but
Péguy roughed me up in every fibre, and I disapproved of him almost as
much as I admired him. There was something of Rousseau in the fiery
little autodidact with his penetrating delicacy of sentiment, and that
sore vanity of his as touchy as a gouty foot which always fears the
man across the way may stumble on it. When that aching place was hurt,
the poet, so exquisite in his sense of friendship, so abundant in his
recognition of encouragement, would surprise those most who knew him
best by certain restive or morbid quarrels--the blemishes of a too
sensitive temperament.
Despite this temperament, which was not great, there was something
really great and grand in Péguy. There was in him the most generous
passion of rescue--the desire at all risks to rush in and save. The
grandeur and misery of Man and his need of salvation was the idea which
dominated all his life. Péguy was a mystic; Time was nothing to him,
and he was sincere in saying that an act of rescue such as that which
cost him his life was worth a career of thirty years. Yes, Péguy was a
mystic, and one of the real, the greater race, no romantic idealist,
not at all vague or dreamy, but positive and practical and intensely
alive to every detail, because every fact in nature (and indeed all
the best things in industry and in art) appeared to him, in Meister
Eckhart’s phrase, ‘the words of God,’ and therefore infinitely precious
and important. One day that his friend and mine, Daniel Halévy,
that subtle and yet substantial critic, found him reading Dante’s
_Paradiso_, in view of a certain Mystery he meant to write: Le Propre
de l’Espérance (and the part, the lot, of Hope is Paradise), M. Halévy
asked the audacious poet if those whirling worlds of Dante’s and all
those whorls of singing aureoled angels did not inspire him with at
least a certain vertigo? ‘Not at all,’ replied Péguy. ‘My Paradise will
be quite different.’
‘“Il y aura dans mon Paradis des choses réelles.... Toutes les
cathédrales.” ... Et il faisait avec les deux mains le geste d’y
poser quelque chose. “Je les y mettrai.”’
And in fact (continues M. Halévy in the letter from which I am
quoting) Péguy would have admitted to his Paradise, not only the great
Cathedrals, but anything perfect in its own peculiar sphere. For
instance, he adduces:--
‘this ink with which I am writing to you, which indeed was Péguy’s
ink, made of the oak, coal-black, indelible; and his pens--they too
would have gone into his Paradise, certainly, all his pens! You
have understood I am sure; Péguy extends the future life, not only
to souls and sentiments, but to all that has achieved existence;
a resurrection not only of the flesh but of the things made,
cherished, and perfected by man on earth.’
It was more or less Swedenborg’s Paradise. In Péguy’s eyes the soul
vivified and transfigured and made alive all that it touched. Hence
his utter incomprehension of all attempts to examine matter that the
soul had _not_ transfigured, his withering contempt for science and
scientists, the scorn he would pour on those miserable insects, the
‘puissants millepieds’ of the University, in their laboratories and
archives:--
‘Et ce ne sera pas ces distingués cloportes
Qui viendront nous chercher dans notre enterrement....
Et ce ne sera pas par leur usage externe
Que nous nous lèverons de notre pourriture;
Mais la Foi qui nous sauve et seule nous discerne
Saura nous retrouver dans la fange et l’ordure.’
(_Eve._)
What discussions I have had with Daniel Halévy concerning the final
value of this poem of _Eve_, whose mighty jog-trot extends interminably
over a length which exceeds the _Odyssey_ and the _Iliad_ together!
My friend, to whose opinion I attach the greatest weight, insists
on ranking Péguy with Victor Hugo for poetry and with Rabelais for
prose! And no doubt he emphasises his expressions in order to spur my
tranquil spirit to the fray. Indeed the incitement never yet failed
of its effect; I rush to the encounter; sometimes, at the point of
the bayonet, M. Halévy recedes from his position as regards Victor
Hugo; but he maintains unshaken that comparison with the creator of
Pantagruel.
Well, all that is vain; Péguy now will never fill his measure. His
monument is a broken column, like those we see in cemeteries. In these
brief passages of recollection, I may not even stay to point out the
extraordinary design and intention of that monument; nor to quote that
prose, surely unlike any other prose, which creeps up, wave after wave,
with infinite repetitions and over-lappings, until, like the tide on
the strand, it has submerged and sucked in all the subject it meant to
cover. How, in two words, could I give an idea of that style?