all the plays of Mlle Lenéru: ‘La conscience malade, voilà le théâtre
de la fatalité moderne.’ A sick conscience, a soul diseased--in other
words, the problem of evil; or, in more modern phrase, the war between
an over-developed personality and the rights of others; such is the
theme which her genius, at once lucid and sombre, ardent and logical,
treats with a penetrating passion, with almost, as it were, a sort of
introspection, as though, in face of some grave derogation from current
morality, she had said: How did a nature, apparently excellent, arrive
at such a pass? How should I, in his place, have fallen and yet have
remained consequent with all that I was up to the moment of failure?
So that the dramas of Mlle Lenéru have the gravity and the spiritual
ardour of an examination of conscience. They seem to radiate from an
inner self full of revolt, passion, and implacable reason.
Not that Mlle Lenéru is religious. In writing this little book, it
is borne in upon me very clearly that man, not woman, is really the
religious animal. But Mlle Lenéru is not the usual free-thinker; she
is, so to speak, a theologian turned inside out. There is about her
something of the unfrocked priest who, whatever his present opinions,
feels himself always a priest, entrusted with the souls of others and
responsible for their eternal fate. She no longer accepts the promises
and the commandments of revealed religion; but nothing else appears to
her of really great importance.
In all she writes we recognise the conflict of a proud and ardent
character, a passionate and avid sensibility, with a soul enamoured of
honour, order, discipline, self-immolation; so that we never know which
is the real Marie Lenéru: the impassioned anarchist convinced that the
one important thing in life is for each individual to become the most
perfect example possible of his own peculiar type; or the ascetic,
eager to sacrifice the visible and natural life to a life invisible and
supernatural.
It is this double nature, doubtless, which gives so much substance to
the plays of this young writer. She conceals in her heart a romantic
who died young--or rather he is not dead, only buried in a perpetual
_in pace_, whence his voice sometimes issues in revolt or appeal; but
her mind is given over to the rule of a bitter and splendid reason
which assures her that neither the State, nor the family, nor any
constituted form of society, based on a firm tradition, needs genius
so much as order, passion so much as discipline, grandeur so much
as happiness; and indeed in all her plays she sacrifices (as Brutus
sacrificed his sons) the first of these categories to the second.
Her sensibility remains imbued with those ideals of individualism
and ambition which reigned in France throughout the nineties: she was
born under the Consulate of Nietzsche and of Ibsen; but experience and
reflection have shown her the disasters of a moral anarchy which still
engages her sympathy though she augurs no happy issue for it. On the
frontispiece of her first book, _Les Affranchis_, she has written a
couplet from Racine’s _Titus et Bérénice_, expressing this antagonism
between the individual and his environment: two lines in which the
Jewish Queen, sacrificed by her royal lover to reasons of state
(_invitus invitam_), reminds him of his duty to himself--and to her:--
‘Rome a ses droits, Seigneur, n’avez-vous pas les vôtres?
Ses intérêts sont-ils plus sacrés que les nôtres?’
And this question resumes a theme which never ceases to occupy her
tragic sense of passion and her strong intellectual curiosity.
Her first play is the history of a grand passion in two undisciplined
yet superior natures--two super-mortals--despite society, and law, and
order. Philippe and Hélène are (as Gobineau would say) ‘Children of
the King,’ morally and intellectually a head and shoulders above the
people. By what process of reflection are they induced to sacrifice
a miraculous possibility of happiness, a draught such as they alone
might quaff, to rights and duties which they do not acknowledge? Why,
being giants, do they submit to the bonds of the pygmies? Are they
right, are they wrong in the renunciation? Is there only _one_ right
and _one_ wrong? Such are the questions raised by the history of her
_Affranchis_--her Free Souls, thus most ironically named, since, in
fact, none of us is free, and we act, not as we would, nor as we
should, but as we can.
Philippe Alquier is a philosopher, a great professor, a pioneer of
ideas, an idol of the young: in fact, a sort of Bergson, a sort of
Barrès--the Barrès of yesterday. He believes neither in duty, nor
in the moral law, nor in any Absolute, nor in any certitude; and he
discerns, in the floating relativity of things, but one obligation,
that of augmenting to its utmost his personality. He is married to a
pleasant, pretty wife, whose irritating mediocrity is, so to speak,
the hall-mark of her virtue: it is impossible to be more respectable
than Marthe. In the early Twentieth Century, at the dissolution of
French monasteries, Alquier, the philosophic anarchist, receives under
his roof his wife’s sister, Mother-General of the order of Reformed
Cistercians, Abbess of Fontevrault.
Under his roof--or rather under _her_ roof, for the Abbess of
Fontevrault is co-heiress with her married sister in the properties
which the Alquiers inhabit, both in Paris and in the country. But
necessity in this case is doubled by no disapprobation: Philippe
Alquier naturally believes in the rights of minorities. Although
politically of the extreme left, he would in this affair have voted
with the extreme right (as did many Dreyfusards some twenty years ago,
who opposed the banishment of their political enemies, the Jesuits),
and thus, in the opening scene, the author establishes her hero’s
refusal to allow the tyranny of the greatest number.
The abbess brings with her a postulate of her order, secularised like
herself, but (in the case of the girl) before she had pronounced her
vows. Hélène Schlumberger, young, beautiful, intelligent, and rich, is
naturally the heroine of the piece. Her mind, the fresher that hitherto
it has been restricted to the skyey sphere of theology and ethics,
revels in the wide and indiscriminate culture with which Alquier
delights to enrich it. Nietzsche, Bergson, Anatole France, she absorbs
all without a protest. Naturally, history repeats itself, and Abelard
falls in love with Héloïse, and Héloïse still deeper in love with
Abelard.
What, in this conjuncture, is the duty of a free soul? Shall Philippe
Alquier divorce his faithful, admirable, uninspiring wife? Shall he
keep a virtuous young lady as his secret mistress? He makes both these
proposals, but he makes them as one who feels how impossible they are.
For we act, not in accordance with what we actually think and believe,
but as persons still inspired by what we used to think and have long
been in the habit of believing: when Alquier proposes a divorce to the
girl he has educated in the ideas of Nietzsche, her first instinctive
cry is: _Et les autres?_ She is an altruist still, and a Christian, in
spite of herself, and acts according to an impetus given years ago,
perhaps before her birth.
Hélène in the convent to which, unbelieving, she retires, is happier,
probably, than she would have been as Alquier’s concubine (setting
society at defiance) or as his wife, Hagar enthroned, having sent out
the lawful Sarah into the wilderness. In the convent at least she
finds, if not a faith, a rule of life. A discipline and an ideal are
things more intimately necessary to her soul, such as the ages have
formed it, than the happiest passion, if satisfied in their despite.
And Alquier, too, will acquiesce. When he threatens the abbess with
political reprisals, with the ruin of her order, she smiles:--
‘Vous ne ferez rien de tout cela, Philippe, et vous me donnerez
votre fille à élever.’
In her second play, _Le Redoubtable_ (produced at the Odéon
Theatre in January, 1912, and withdrawn by the author after three
representations), Mlle Lenéru shows still more forcibly the monstrous,
the almost cancerous growth that a too exasperated personality may
become in an organised community of mediocrities.
Georges Malte is the most brilliant naval officer of his promotion;
all that an individuality can acquire and possess in one generation, he
has acquired, he possesses. But nothing else, neither traditions, nor
inherited breeding, nor the instincts of a gentleman, nor even fortune;
Malte is the son of an Italian pastrycook, and no more French by birth
than Napoleon, or Zola, or Gambetta--who, after all, were pretty
tolerable Frenchmen. And his soul is devoured with ambition for the
refinements he does not inherit; and his mind is consumed by the desire
to be first, by that _amor dominandi_ which is, in certain natures, the
strongest passion of all.
And his heart is wholly occupied by the mistress he adores, who is,
most simply and most naturally, all that he can never be: the child of
a ruling race. Laurence Villaret is the daughter of one admiral, the
wife of another. For six years she and her lover have belonged to each
other in secret, and at length the time comes when Malte (who in his
love of supremacy has affected the rich man) feels his creditors close
upon him and disgrace near at hand. Money he must have or farewell to
his career, good-bye to the love of his life.
Unfortunately, a brilliant officer has always at his disposal one
means of raising funds--if he listen to temptation. And Malte listens.
He communicates to a foreign power certain secrets, and the good ship
_Redoubtable_ is rendered worthless--just as the _Affranchis_ were
not free; just as _La Triomphatrice_ will be shown to be an unloved,
broken-hearted, solitary woman. All Mlle Lenéru’s titles are epigrams
of irony! Yet, in _Le Redoubtable_, Mlle Lenéru has given us the
_reductio ad absurdum_ of her former theme. If, at the close of the
_Affranchis_, we doubted whether the lovers were wise in sacrificing
their utmost joy ‘au bon gouvernement du monde’ (and such is the
contagious force of passion that we had left the theatre happier after
seeing them elope to some undreamed of isle), we doubt no longer when
we have seen _Le Redoutable_.
Although we may admit that the moral law is in process of evolution,
though we may look forward to a day when a new vital order shall
supplant our established order, yet, meanwhile, we must observe the
rules of the game, even though they mean no more to us than the
rules of a game! In fact, however we choose to _think_, there is
but one profitable way of _living_: that which consists in treating
as fundamentally true those truths alone which have weathered the
experience of generations. _Foris ut moris, intus ut libet._ Or as
Pascal puts it: ‘Il faut dire comme les autres, mais ne pas penser
comme eux.’
And so Mlle Lenéru, one of the rare individualists of the younger
generation, Mlle Lenéru, so romantic, with her love for the noble, the
exceptional, with her revolt against platitude and mediocrity, repeats,
in a mood of revolt and irony, the refrain of Jules Romains:--
‘Nous cessons d’être nous pour que la Ville dise: MOI!’
This young writer, so extraordinary by reason of her depth of
meditation, and the strange Pascalian vigour and beauty of her
language, was the more surprising (and yet perhaps the more explicable)
because of a singular infirmity: she lived immured in an interior
world. If, indeed, her short-sighted vision perceived a vague image of
our earth and its inhabitants, the noisiest city left her undisturbed
to her reflections. Mlle Lenéru was absolutely deaf. She heard no
echo of the applause which greeted the _Affranchis_. In 1918 when the
comedians of the Théâtre Français read and accepted ‘à l’unanimité,’
her new play, _La Triomphatrice_, she alone remained unmoved. The
blindness of Milton, the paralysis of Heine, the deafness of Beethoven,
have accustomed us to these ironies, or compensations, of a mysterious
fate.
The humble ferment which produces alcohol when its development is
checked and interrupted, flourishes as an unproductive mildew if its
organism find all that it requires. An obstacle is often the stimulus
of genius. But when genius has made at last a pearl of the wound, a
ruby of the fissure, and turned starvation into rapture, how cruel
appears the sudden fate that snatches the hard-earned prize from its
grasp! Marie Lenéru died of the grippe on the 23rd of September, 1918.
THE PASTORAL NOVEL
There has always been a pastoral novel in France, because France
is an agricultural country. Except milk, meat, and a little bread,
England draws too little of her nourishment from her own resources;
her plenty is a cheap import; and even the beauty of much of her
landscape suggests an indifference to agriculture. We have known a
French admirer, confronted with a marvellous panorama of wild Sussex
heath--wood, grassy links, and gorse-covered common--contemplate the
scene and sigh, ‘Rien, rien, rien, à se mettre sous la dent!’
France, on the other hand, is self-sufficing, almost self-supporting,
and always has been so. If we consider the Duke of Berry’s _Book of
Hours_ we realise that in many parts of France the business of life
has continued almost unchanged since the Fourteenth Century. From the
pruning of the vine in February (our month of March) to the fattening
of the swine in the oak-woods in November, while the wood-cutters mark
the trees for felling, here are just such scenes as the dweller in
rural France has constantly before his eyes to-day, unaltered--scenes
which the accumulated associations of countless generations have
invested with a human interest more poignant, more intimate, than any
which mere landscape can afford. And we admire the French peasant; his
frugality, his industry, his endurance are indeed beyond all praise;
his economy is marvellous, and such is his good humour that he makes
a pleasure of his self-denial; miserably lodged, poorly fed, he is
conscious of no inferiority; he knows himself to be the backbone of
France.
The peasant and the landscape for ages have remained unchanged.
France is so large a country, with so great a variety of soil and
climate, that there are all sorts of French peasants: materialistic,
clean, bright, and gay, in Touraine and the Charentes; superstitious,
poverty-stricken, imaginative, in Vendée and Brittany; good-humoured,
ambitious, and positive in Auvergne--and so on through all the nations
of France. When you knew the place, you knew the peasant--until quite
lately. The ‘regionalist’ (the provincial) novel has come into being
just when the field labourer himself has ceased to be regionalist, or
provincial; for military service is a wonderful leveller and unifier.
Until the middle of the last century (until, that is to say, the
days of George Eliot in England and the latter days of George Sand in
France), a Fourteenth-Century peasant might have revisited his country
parish almost anywhere in France, and have noted little alteration to
mark the flight of time. The last fifty years have made more difference
in rural matters than the five centuries that went before them. The
dairy farms of Normandy with their patent separators, their ferments
for cheese flavours, sent down in neat little tubes from the Pasteur
Institute; the arable lands with their great red, throbbing mechanical
sowers, reapers, binders, automatic ploughs, threshing machines, etc.;
the network of roads with their motor-cars and bicycles; the train
whirling past in a white puff of smoke behind the screen of poplars;
such homely sights of our everyday Twentieth Century would cause a
mediæval husbandman to open his eyes considerably.
He would have to seek the depths of Brittany, the heart of the
Cantal, the wastes of the Lozère, to find some faint image of the
world he knew. There, indeed, save for the frequent crops of potatoes
and buckwheat, which he would not recognise, he would find little
changed; the one-toothed wooden plough still scores its furrow on the
steep hillside; the thud of the flails is loud in the dusk of autumn
evenings; in the fields the women stoop and gather the buckwheat into
stooks and bind it standing, even as the reapers cut the stalks from
the ground; the old pastoral life continues, not greatly changed for
better or for worse. But even here the century-old country life of
France is menaced, and that threat hanging over it renders it more
dear, and almost sacred, that the rural novel in France is at once more
exact and more tender in its record than it was in the century gone by.
When I came to live in France in 1888, there was a pastoral novel
of course--there has always been a pastoral novel in France, as I
said--but it was of a most calumniatory and reviling sort. Great was my
surprise, when I spent my summers in the country, to find that the old
gaffers on the farms were _not_ left to die of hunger and neglect when
they could no longer work, but, on the other hand, were treated with
the utmost honour and consideration, given invariably the best seat on
the settle, the best wine, expensive tonics from the doctor’s shop, and
all that filial kindness could devise. Maupassant’s wonderful stories,
Zola’s _La Terre_, must evidently have some foundation in fact. But my
personal experience has not corroborated their pessimism.
Then, after the pastoral novel _genre rosse_, came, with the very last
years of the Nineteenth Century, the reign of the social novel; and,
as a matter of course, the pastoral novel followed suit. The best
stories of those times, I think, are René Bazin’s, especially that
most picturesque and touching idyll of a farm in Vendée gradually
destroyed by the rural exodus, _La Terre qui Meurt_. In _Donatienne_,
the same writer paints the poverty of a Breton village, and the
temptation--almost the dire necessity--which induces the young mother
to quit home and children in order to earn the large wages, and live
the facile days of a wet-nurse in Paris. And, naturally, he shows the
moral (and finally the material) ruin which follow on that ill-judged
step.
In _Le Blé qui Lève_ (The Growing Corn), René Bazin describes
the life of the woodland labourers--the foresters, wood-cutters,
charcoal-burners, and so on--who form an important part of the rural
population in France; and he shows them ravaged by strikes, syndicates,
etc.; for M. Bazin is nothing if not Catholic and Conservative.
Yet the tone of his novels--though in my brief account the stories
sound melancholy enough--is as far removed as possible from the _roman
rosse_ of the Eighties; M. Bazin is full of faith and hope and charity;
he is, in spite of human malice, so convinced of the final triumph of
God that we might write on all his books the refrain of Æschylus:--
‘Sing alas! and say alas! But the Good shall come to its own!’
Aιλινoν, Aἰλινoν, ειπε, τo δʹέυ νικατω.
In those last years of the Nineteenth--in those first years of the
Twentieth--Century, while René Bazin’s angelic voice was welling up in
treble ecstasies, the pastoral novel in France had other notes which
held, as it were, the bass--deep, strange notes--brief, complicated,
syncopated phrasing. In other words, Jules Renard and Charles-Louis
Philippe were giving their sense, too, of the life of woods and fields.
I wrote once that Jules Renard was the Hokusaï of French literature.
He just glances at an object, sees its essential character, fixes that
and neglects the rest; a bird, a flower, a little boy with carroty hair
and sensitive, eager eyes, a scolding housewife, best of all, perhaps,
an old, old country-woman, who cannot read or write, but who is full
of the knowledge of things. I would give even _Poil-de-Carotte_ for
_Ragotte_! The quarrel of Ragotte and her son, ‘le Paul,’ moistens
one’s eyes with the tenderest pity; and yet it is told with a dry,
almost a hard precision, a concise sobriety; not a word superfluous.
The thing happened so, and a pity ’tis ’twas so; there’s no more to be
said. But underneath this real compassion there is a sad certitude of
the end of all things, a melancholy nihilism, a hopeless irony.
Few books are sadder reading than Jules Renard’s Bucolics. This harsh,
terse, impassible writer breaks our heart by his choice of a subject:
an ill-treated child, a helpless, infirm old woman. If we smile at
anything that he evokes, it is seldom a happy thought, a hopeful
suggestion, but some quaint image or touch of character, for Jules
Renard enjoyed the gift of an incomparable visual imagination: he makes
us see the bushy-tailed squirrel flitting through the autumn woods and
lighting up all the dead leaves with his bright brush as he passes;
or old Mother La Chalude, knitting as she walks, who has threaded on
her apron string the pierced kernel of an apricot and placed it at her
waist, a little to the left, to support the end of one of her knitting
needles; or older Honorine, coming across the field-path, bent double,
so that she appears a headless woman, while her stick, on which her
rugged hands stand out like knots, is higher than her cap.
This keen appreciation of the beauty and character of Nature, combined
with a tragic sense of the aimlessness and incertitude of human
destiny, are the peculiar quality, I think, of the closing Nineteenth
Century: a mingling of enchantment and disenchantment. Nowhere, of
course, is it so remarkable as in Pierre Loti, but he is out of our
perspective--which only concerns the Twentieth Century. We have
noticed it in Jules Renard, only lately dead (1864-1909). We shall
find it again, with less artistry and a more poignant pity, in another
writer, ten years younger, who died about the same time, Charles-Louis
Philippe; as we found it in Madame Colette.
Jules Renard was one of the rare French authors of our time who do
not scorn to love their calling; who are men of letters from the
bottom of their soul, and not principally apostles, or disciples,
or reformers, or philosophers;--who are as happy as Flaubert when
at last they enclose an aspect of reality, however humble, in some
perfect phrase as pure as the amber which preserves a fly. Renard
had ideas and passionate convictions of his own; to resume, let us
say that they were the exact opposite of the ideas and passionate
convictions of a Paul Claudel; but he did not usually write to express
or to expound his peculiar theory of anti-clericalism or democracy.
If these opinions came into the picture, he noted them with his
customary poignant exactitude, no more. Only once did he think of
writing a play with a purpose. His great, his scrupulous endeavour
was to represent reality as he saw it, just as it struck his shrewd,
short-sighted gimlet-glance, his Japanese or Alexandrian sense of
detail; but an endless patience--the patience of the sportsman and the
painter--enabled him to track an impression down to its most secret
touch. And then he fixed it in one perfect phrase--sometimes just
marred by too tense an effort to seize an evanescent reality. Jules
Renard, in fine, was an artist.
He looked at Nature, not as so many do, from the fourth floor of a
Paris boulevard, but from the village street or from the field that
slopes away beyond the orchard hedge. He was mayor of the little
commune in the department of the Nièvre where he spent so much of his
time--and a mayor passionately absorbed in his municipal affairs; but
when he turned homewards and sat down to his writing-table, Chitry-les
Mines and Chaumont lost their magic; the man, the mayor, gave place to
the patient artist--surely the most scrupulous of our time--carving his
cherry-stone, polishing his bead of amber, where some chance insect
lives for ever in a pellucid incorruptibility.
This love of detail, this desire to reproduce a landscape, an object
or a personage in its individual, intimate truth, are points of contact
between Renard and another novelist from the same centre of France:
Charles-Louis Philippe. But Philippe’s eyes were less keen and his
heart was far more tender: Philippe was, as it were, steeped in the
Russian pity of a Dostoievski. And he knew the poor and the miseries
of the poor, not as an artist knows them, mingled with romance, but as
the child of poor people who has felt such things at first hand.