Chapter VIII: Part 8

No chapter in my book has a more delightful choice of reading than is offered by these Novels of Childhood. And among the most enchanting of all I would place _Le Grand Meaulnes_. Henri Alain-Fournier leapt into being (from a literary point of view) in 1913 with this strange romantic little novel. The book is not of our time in the least, though without any affectation of archaism. It appears related far more nearly to George Sand’s _Petite Fadette_, or to some tale of Musset’s, or to Gérard de Nerval’s _Sylvie_, than to any Twentieth Century production; and I think the closest we can get to it in our own times would be one of the more poetical of Hardy’s Wessex novels, before he fell into the tragic pessimism of _Tess_ or _Jude_. The poetry, the fantasy, is all in the author’s imagination; for what, I ask you, could be less romantic than the setting of his tale--a Training College for Primary Education, or rather a large village Board-School, with a class reserved for future teachers,--even though it be situate in the very heart of Berry? And yet over every page of _Le Grand Meaulnes_ there slips and trembles the light that never was on sea or land. The heroes are two lads of fifteen and seventeen; and rarely has any author rendered more delicately the prestige of the big boy for the little boy, and the chivalrous half-mystic hero-worship in which he walks enveloped. The mystery, the beauty, the wonderfulness of the poet’s world transfigure the homely story, which is merely that of a schoolboy of fifteen who runs away from school, who misses his way and gets caught up in the whirl of a large country wedding at a quaint half-ruined manor-house whose name he does not know. Never again can the lad find that manor or that beautiful girl who was the bridegroom’s sister, with whom he has fallen in love. And at last his boy friend, ‘le grand Meaulnes’ discovers her, but keeps her for himself; the capricious, fascinating Meaulnes marries that fairy Princess and deserts her on the morrow, leaving her for all companionship and consolation the adoring devotion of the humble friend, who tells the story.

Those first rays of fame, which are brighter than the rising sun, slipped over the young author’s fresh horizon. And then the war broke out. Henri Alain-Fournier set out for Lorraine, a Lieutenant in the Reserve; on September 22, 1914, he was reported missing. For many months, for nearly a year, the hope that dazzles so many tearful eyes--the hope that he was retained by the Germans a prisoner in the invaded provinces, from which no communication was allowed with France--sustained his family and friends and that portion of the public who, like myself, watched his career with sympathy. And then, one day last summer, I heard the sad story.

A young lieutenant, fresh from the Polytechnique, the son of one of my friends, fell in with Alain-Fournier during those months of victory and retreat on the frontier of Lorraine. The two young men, no less ardent in their intellectual energy than in their military theories, recognised each other as kindred spirits; with a third (a young pastor, I think, or the son of a Protestant pastor) they used to meet o’ nights, their day’s work done, in a broken-down military motor car, wrecked by the side of the road. I like to think of the three young officers, on those August nights--the immense French camp asleep all round them--as they sat till the dawn broke, like gipsies in their van, eagerly talking _de omni re scibili_. In the daytime they generally saw little of each other; but, on August 22, one of the two others, marching to the front, met Alain-Fournier and his men going in a contrary direction. ‘Ordered to the rear! (he called out); no luck! Au revoir!‘; and he passed on. It chanced that that day’s engagement was a particularly murderous one, but the two friends when they met at night felt no anxiety about the third of their accustomed party, deeming him safe. And yet, when the dead were counted and buried, there was one figure, the head bashed in, whose limbs and hands bore so great a resemblance to their friend that the young men felt a chill presentiment. They looked for the badge of identity; a wicked bayonet-thrust had driven it into the breast. So haunting was their surmise that they cut it out; but they could not decipher the number on the battered, bloodstained plaque. Since then, unbroken silence: Alain-Fournier is among the ‘missing.’

Of all these books--save, perhaps, Alain-Fournier’s, for which I have, I own, a peculiar weakness; of all these novels of childhood--unless I except M. Boylesve’s, and _Marie-Claire_, and _Jean-Christophe_ (for so many of them, when you come to think of it, are really quite first-rate)--the most delicate, the most pregnant with a sensibility extraordinarily rich, and ample, and yet sensitive as the impressions of convalescence or the first images of childhood, is an immense novel, published in the winter of 1913-14 by M. Marcel Proust, under the enigmatic title, _À la Recherche du Temps Perdu_: _Du Côté de chez Swann_. The book with which it is easiest to compare it, is Henry James’s _A Small Boy_, though that, indeed, is concise and simple compared with M. Marcel Proust’s attempt at reconstituting the vague shimmering impressions of a young mind, the wonderment with which--inexplicably to us--it regards places and people which in our eyes possess no magic. M. Proust’s hero is a small boy living in the bosom of the most regular of families--one of those vast French families, closely knit, whose tissue unites grandparents, great-aunts, uncles, cousins in such quantity as to limit the possible supply of outside acquaintance. One most familiar friend, however, there is, the friend of the family, a ‘hereditary friend,’ as Homer would say, M. Swann. He is a man of the world, a member of the Jockey Club, a friend of the Prince of Wales, a comrade of the Comte de Paris, a great collector; but for the small boy and his family he is especially ‘le fils Swann,’ the son of their old friend the member of the Stock Exchange (‘qui a bien dû lui laisser quatre ou cinq millions’) who has made a ridiculous marriage with a demi-mondaine--a case of all for love and the world well lost.

And the world is lost the more completely that the impossible lady continues her adventures unabashed and unabated after matrimony. She therefore is not ‘received,’ or indeed hardly mentioned, in the ample respectable home of the small boy; so that Swann and this unlikely love of Swann’s, this beautiful wife of Swann’s, and Swann’s remote, intangible, but not invisible little girl, are the constant objects of his romantic curiosity.

There are two walks at Combray: you may set out in the direction of Guermantes or else go round by Swann’s: ‘du côté de chez Swann,’ and to the childish hero of the book these two walks gradually accumulate round them the material for two views of life--Swann standing for all that is brilliant, irregular, attractive, Guermantes representing an orderly and glorious tradition. This long novel, _À la Recherche du Temps Perdu_, sets out to recover, in three volumes, a child’s first impressions in both sorts; but this instalment records (in 500 closely printed pages) the earliest images _du côté de chez Swann_: images forgotten by the intellect, mysteriously resuscitated by the senses--by a tune sung in the street, or a whiff of thyme or mignonette, or (as in the case of our author) by the flavour of a fragment of sponge-cake dipped in tea; images in which matter and memory are subtly combined in a sudden warm flood of life, revived, without the intervention of the understanding.

In all this the influence of Bergson is evident. But can we imagine the Twentieth Century in France without Bergson? As well conceive the Eighteenth Century without Rousseau. Such a delicate excess of sensibility does not exist without disorder; such a need to fuse and unite the very depth of the soul with the ambient world--such a sense of the fluid, pregnant, moving flood of life--exceeds the strict limits of a perfect art. Evidently M. Proust’s novel, by its faults as well as by its qualities, is admirably adequate to the spirit of our age. Again, I repeat that, while I read with delight the delicate, long-winded masters of our times, I think sometimes with regret of a Turgeneff, no less subtle, who, even as they, wrote at tremendous length and recorded the minutest shades of feeling, but, having finished, went through his manuscript again, pen in hand, and reduced it to about one-third of its original length.

In the case of M. Proust’s novel, the result is the more bewildering that the book is conceived, as it were, on two planes; no sooner have we accustomed ourselves to the sun-pierced mist of early reminiscence than the light changes; we find ourselves in glaring noon; the recollection becomes a recital; the magic glory fades from M. Swann and the fair, frail Odette de Crécy; we see them in their habit as they lived and moved among their acquaintance; we smile at the evocation of an artistic coterie under President Grévy, and suffer a sort of gnawing under our ribs as we realise the poignant jealousy of the unhappy Swann. And then the light shifts again; we are back in childhood; and Swann is again the mysterious idol of a dreamy, chivalrous little boy:--

‘Il me semblait un être si extraordinaire que je trouvais
merveilleux que des personnes que je fréquentais le connussent
aussi et que dans les hasards d’une journée quelconque on peut-être
amené à le rencontrer. Et une fois ma mère, en train de nous
raconter comme chaque soir, à diner, les courses qu’elle avait
faites dans l’après-midi, rien qu’en disant: “À ce propos, devinez
qui j’ai rencontré aux Trois Quartiers, au rayon des parapluies:
Swann,” fit éclore au milieu de son récit, fort aride pour moi, une
fleur mystérieuse. Quelle mélancolique volupté d’apprendre que cet
après-midi-là, profilant dans la foule sa forme surnaturelle, Swann
avait été acheter un parapluie.’

Can I end better than with this brief and casual quotation, which, better than my criticism, will show the fresh and fine reality which these pages mysteriously recover from the back of our consciousness (where it exists in a warm penumbra of its own) and exhale, as naturally as vapour from a new-ploughed autumn furrow? Something older and deeper than knowledge pervades the book.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] Translated into English under the title of _The House on the Hill_. David Watt, 1904.

EPILOGUE

As we glance from across the Channel at these writers, so often consciously opposed, the charm of distance blends the tints, harmonises the outlines, and shows us in most of them a certain similarity. They are children of Dionysos, not of Apollo; they are mystics, not materialists; they conceive existence as a great religious symphony which you must experience and not seek to understand. More than once, in reading the most liberal and modern among them, the words of the Catholic, Claudel, have risen to my lips:--

‘Il ne faut pas comprendre; il faut perdre connaissance!’

They have, most of them, the intuition of a state transcending reality--I mean objective reality. Yet, notwithstanding this spiritual ideal, they set a high value on action, on social energy. I have just said that, as a rule the French writers of the Twentieth Century are mystics, but they are not ecstatics wrapt in a solitary trance; they are eager to act on men and women, to bind them in associations--though, of course, their groups are different, for some of them are Socialists, like our pastoral novelists; many are Nationalists from points of view as different as Rostand and Boylesve and Barrès; and to some the only vital bond is a religion (since they are French, naturally the Roman Catholic religion).

They are almost all Intuitionalists; and, in almost all of them there is the same reaction from the Individualism of the Nineteenth Century. The influence of Bergson is evident, and also that of the Symbolists of the closing Nineteenth Century. They are anti-rationalists, almost to a man--or a woman; for it is perhaps symptomatic that the feminine writers should be so abundant and so remarkable in the younger generation.

There is something primitive, elementary, spontaneous, romantic, in much of their art which will often remind the middle-aged English reader of our pre-Raphaelites of yesterday, but which is, really, even more akin to the modern Irish revival, on the one hand, and to the school of Dostoievski in Russia. Although they are as national as they are nationalist, these symbolists and mystics do not seem to us English easily recognisable as French, because we do not remember that France is Celtic as well as Latin, sentimental no less than witty, a land of saints as well as a land of pleasant sinners; and that Pascal and Fénelon, Vincent de Paul and Joan of Arc, are no less characteristic of France than are Montaigne or Voltaire.