Chapter IV: Part 4

But Coûfontaine will not be convinced. At least he will wreak his vengeance on the usurper. So, having signed the papers which bring the king to his own, having carried them off, he takes, through the open French window, a parting shot at Toussaint Turelure, which Sygne intercepts, receiving it in her heart, while Turelure, with a shot of his pistol, kills the aggressor. Thus the two cousins perish; their kingdom is not of this world; yet they leave an heir: a child of the body of Sygne, an heir to the name and the titles of Coûfontaine by an act of legal substitution. Like Violaine, like Mesa, Coûfontaine can leave no child: the hateful Mara, the brutal Toussaint--brief the children of Action--can make the fruits of the spirit flourish and multiply, and they alone.

Why does Sygne save the life of the husband she never forgives? Is it an act of sacrifice? A homage to the sacrament? No, for she dies unshriven because unforgiving. It is because Death is better than Life: ‘une chose trop bonne pour que je la lui eusse laissée.’ This heartrending last act of _L’Otage_ is especially moving in the last version, that acted in Paris during the summer of 1914, in which, mute, dying, relentless, Sygne opposes only silence to the blatant triumph of her odious master. It is, indeed, the dialogue of Life and Death.

What will be the ultimate position of Claudel? It is yet too soon to say. His influence on the writers of our time is a fact. He is still young; he is incontestably original; he is no doubt obscure. But many of the greatest writers were and remain obscure--Dante, for instance, and Pascal.

In our own times, Carlyle, Browning, Whitman, Ibsen, Nietzsche, are often mysterious. And none the less, from the date of their appearance, they have been read with eagerness, and they continue to be read (a little less eagerly), and, indeed, to be revered, as the bearers of a message, by an undaunted band of followers. Like all these, Claudel aspires to be a conductor of souls. And in the things of the spirit a certain obscurity is no disadvantage, if there be a real message behind it. We fill out the author’s adumbrated meaning, as we read an intention into a fine musical phrase, and his sentence gains by all the priceless bulk of our accumulated interpretations.

There are passages of Shakespeare, there are _Pensées_ of Pascal, which we contemplate, as it were, in an atmosphere of moral beauty, a halo, a luminous aura, through which they shine transfigured and augmented. They certainly mean more to us than to the most admiring of their contemporaries: their words have been messages to so many passionate and earnest souls! This phenomenon of accretion is the reward of the obscure: they only, like the saints of Afghanistan, continue to grow in their graves. An Addison, a Voltaire, however great, means what he has always meant. But your obscure genius, in time to come, will be either a gospel or a Gongorism; there’s no third state for him.

FRANCIS JAMMES

Francis Jammes is a Faun who has turned Franciscan Friar. As we read his early poems, his delicious rustic prose, we seem to see him sitting prick-eared, in some green circle of the Pyrenees, with brown hands holding to his mouth a boxwood flute, from which he draws a brief, sweet music, as pure as the long-drawn note of the musical frog, as shrill as the plaintive cry of some mountain bird who feels above its nest the shadow of the falcon.

And then he met Paul Claudel and was converted.

After all, little was changed, for his innocent paganism had been tinged with natural piety, and in his religion he might say, like the Almighty, in the _Roman de Lièvre_,--

‘J’aime la terre d’un profond amour. J’aime la terre des hommes,
des bêtes, des plantes et des pierres.’

Only henceforth we see him, in our imagination, like Saint Francis, with a monk’s hood drawn over his brow, sandals on his feet, his brown gown cinctured with a knotted cord, a couple of doves hovering over his shoulders, and, at his side, fawning and faithful, a converted wolf....

I met M. Jammes at Madame Daudet’s house one winter, and, in fact, his appearance was not wholly unlike this fancy portrait. The gown was a brown woollen suit, but just the Franciscan colour. Above the ruddy, jocund, rustic face, a crown of grizzling curls, behind which Nature had provided the tonsure. Neither dove nor wolf, but, in their stead, all the young Catholic poets of Paris, pressed in serried ranks to meet the Master who, for a few days, had consented to quit his beloved solitude of Orthez.

We can remember a different Francis Jammes. The poet has said of himself, ‘My soul is half the soul of a Faun, and half the soul of a young girl.’ But let me quote an admirable strophe from his _Le Poète et sa Femme_:--

‘Il est de ceux qui voient les parfums et il sent
Les couleurs. Et il s’intéresse
Au scarabée cornu, au hérisson piquant,
Et aux plantes des doctoresses.
Mais le voici, avec sa figure camuse
Et son sourire de Sylvain,
Fatigué par l’amour bien plus que par les muses
Qui aiment son cœur incertain ...
Lui-même est un Silène, on le voit au jardin
Veiller au légume, à la treille....’

This gentle Francis Jammes recalls sometimes the charming La Fontaine, and also Verlaine. A La Fontaine bereft of his philosophy, his deep knowledge of human nature; a Verlaine from whom the taint of corruption has been washed and therewith his terrible sincerity. And if we can imagine these two great poets mulcted so utterly in their essential substance, the residue in them, too, might remind us of a Faun and a young girl--a mischievous, experienced rustic maid, yet holding in her arms a bunch of lilies. The first prose study of our poet--which still remains one of his most exquisite pages--is the story of a young girl, _Clara d’Ellébeuse_. What a delightful book! It is the sort of little story one can read a dozen times in a dozen years, and find it as affecting the last time as the first.

If any attentive student should feel inclined, having read these pages, to fill a shelf with some selected volumes of these modern French writers--with _Colette Baudoche_, for example, from among the novels of Barrès, and _Antoinette_ from Romain Rolland; with _La Jeune Fille Violaine_ from Paul Claudel; with _La Porte Étroite_ from André Gide; to which he might add _La Jeune Fille Bien Élevée_ from the works of René Boylesve; _L’Ombre de l’Amour_ by Madame Tinayre; _Marie-Claire_ by Marguerite Audoux; and the young girls of Francis Jammes, especially _Clara d’Ellébeuse_,--what an idea, what an admirable, unconventional idea such a reader would get of the young French girl! What a gift, at once instructive and delightful, he could make to some young English girl on, say, her five-and-twentieth birthday!

Francis Jammes has spent nearly all his life in or near that little town of Orthez (in the department of the Lower Pyrenees), where he was born about 1869. In that part of France, almost as much as in Ireland, Protestants and Catholics divide society pretty equally. Our poet was born and baptized a Catholic, but many of his nearest relations were Huguenots, and, seeing so much of both sides, he does not seem to have taken either very seriously. He showed no particular precocity and, though he began to write poetry, like most people, in his twentieth year, he made his real debut only in 1898, with a volume called _De l’Angelus de l’Aube, à l’Angelus du soir_.

A certain languor mixed with fervour ran in his blood. He had inherited Creole traditions. His grandfather, the doctor, and his grand-uncle had emigrated from Béarn to Guadeloupe, and had settled there, had died there; his father was sent back to France to be educated at seven years of age; his dim memories of the Antilles, his stories of the cousins in Martinique, and the little chair in rare colonial wood that the child had used on the passage, were, a generation later, to set a-dreaming another child, our poet, whose first heroine will belong, like him, to a family dispersed among the Atlantic Islands and the Pyrenees.

I suppose that a doctor would describe Clara d’Ellébeuse as a victim of the _maladie du scrupule_. She is a girl of sixteen; a dear little old-fashioned girl, living in a dear little old-fashioned manor, sheltered among the foothills of the Pyrenees, towards 1848. She has that dread of sin, of impurity, as a sort of quagmire into which one may fall unawares and be lost for ever, which the practice of confession may exaggerate, or palliate, according to the wisdom of the confessor. (Our poet Cowper was no Catholic.) Poor Clara d’Ellébeuse, because one day the young poet she secretly adored had wiped away her nervous tears and laid upon her bowed nape a pitiful, respectful hand, imagines that she has fallen into the sin of unchastity and that she is with child! (And we think of Renan who, in his twelfth year, I think, accused himself in confession of ‘the sin of simony.’)

The mischief with Clara is that she does not confess; she tells no kind elder of her secret fear; she lets concealment feed, like a worm in the bud, upon her damask cheek. And we know how that ends. Clara does not pine away. One day in March, overcome by horror and remorse for her imaginary crime, she drinks a dose of laudanum and quits this unkind world.

In telling the pathetic history of Clara d’Ellébeuse, Francis Jammes left unhampered that half of his soul which is that of a young girl; but in narrating the fate of _Almaïde d’Etremont, jeune fille passionnée_, that other half (which belongs to a Faun) shows the cloven foot. More tenderly does he commemorate the sad life of _Pomme d’anis, jeune fille infirme_.

But it is not to be supposed that a poet who, by his own showing, partakes so largely of the nature of Silenus and his Sylvans, should frequent exclusively the society of virgins. Some of his earlier poems betray an ardent sensuality. One cannot read either these or the _Notes_ printed in the volume called _Le Roman du Lièvre_ (or even, perhaps, that most touching idyll of a play: _La Brebis Égarée_) without feeling that the poet’s experience has lain also among the lost sheep ... among the lost sheep, and perhaps among the swine; for there was a moment when he was even as the Prodigal Son!

In 1913, making a general confession of those past errors (oddly enough) to a reporter of _Le Temps_, Francis Jammes recalled their bitterness. Nothing except a love story is so interesting as the true history of a conversion--I give this one therefore without apology, though it appeared for the first time in a newspaper (November 3, 1913).

‘Je me suis converti le 7 juillet, 1905, commence M. Francis Jammes
lorsque je lui demande s’il n’est pas indiscret que je cherche à
savoir comment sa pensée évolua de l’indifférence à la ferveur.’

‘Vous n’étiez pas catholique?’

‘De baptême? Si. Mais pas davantage, avec des sympathies pour
les beaux motifs littéraires du catholicisme, avec beaucoup de
dédain pour ce que j’appelais, pour ce que je n’appelle plus le
catholicisme des vieilles femmes. J’étais un païen, un véritable
faune. Les fleurs, les bois, les femmes! J’avais la passion de tout
ce qui existait; il n’y avait pas dans toute la nature de gamin
plus déchaîné; j’aimais tellement la vie que la seule pensée de la
quitter un jour me paraissait un épouvantable blasphème.’

‘Et vous ne l’aimez plus?’

‘Plus de la même manière.’

‘Ce fut un coup de la grâce?’

‘Non. Avant la grâce, il y eut les épreuves et il y eut Claudel....
Claudel, dont, par l’intermédiaire d’un de ses anciens camarades de
classe, Marcel Schwob, je devins l’ami à l’époque faunesque où je
battais les buissons....

‘Claudel! Le poète prononce ce nom avec une émotion et une
admiration touchantes.

‘Claudel! Je n’oublierai jamais, raconte M. Francis Jammes
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.

Pipette is marked out for fate, and here no sudden angel intervenes; Pipette commits suicide,--an almost comic suicide, in keeping with her character; she makes a hearty meal of plum-pudding and then takes a sea-bath! M. Boylesve is a 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!_