Heirs of Balzac and Stendhal
THE French novel, with Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola and Proust, has produced five such complete yet separate worlds that it is now almost impossible for newcomers to , escape their influence ; in choosing the elements of the . world that. they intend to create, they inevitably use sonic material that can already be found in the works of these predecessors. Thus one is always told that Maurois and Lacretelle have borrowed much from Stendhal, Jean-Richard Bloch from Flaubert ; that Romain Rolland and Jules Romains owe much to Zola ; that Celine is the Proust of the . slums, and that Green imitates Balzac. This is perhaps because .the French mind, more abstract than the English, tends to stylize experience according. to certain genres ; and, because the number of these genres is so. limited, French.writers are bound to poach more easily in each other's fields. In any ease all filiations such as that from Montaigne, through Saint-Simon and Chateaubriand, to Proust, are easier to trace in France than elsewhere.
M. Julien Green's new novel, Le Visionnaire, is one of the first, in the past few years, that appears to establish a new genre. It ha's much in common, as an account of youthful experience, with Alain Founder's Le Grand Meaulnes ; and the whole description of the hero's vision belongs to the same world as Marcel Jouhandeau's Opales. The milieu is the same stagnant provincial bourgeoisie as that of Balzac's „Eng/rile Grandet ; yet in spite of all these similarities M. Green definitely offers something new, and it is this novelty that is most difficult to grasp or to define. One might say that his characters are further advanced in stagnancy than those of Balzac, perhaps because history, in the past hundred years, has now relegated them to a dead world that is wholly .their own .; or that the vision is more human and universal, ,more easily applicable, as an allegorical experience, to all Individuals than those of Jouhandeau's heroes, which are generally too individual and literary. And, in any case, Le Visionnaire is more mature than the only novel of Fournier, who was never able to fulfil the promise of his . early work.
A widow adopts her impecunious sister's orphan ; the child is consumptive and .definitely unbalanced, physically and intellectually and spiritually. The boy has not one characteristic of his father, whom his aunt had loved, though in vain ; yet she, who has always been jealous of the senti- mental richness of her sister's life, unconsciously showers on her nephew, in a perverted form, all the affection, desire and love that she had never yet been able to express. But the boy loves her daughter, whom the mother invariably tries to thwart, even in her aspirations towards a religious life, grudging her all the happiness that she herself has failed to grasp, despising her as the offspring of a miserable match. There is also a long narrative taken from the consumptive's diaries, a fantastic vision of life in an imaginary chateau, haunted by death, where all the actors are enslaved by a sort of routine of tradition and fate where past and future intermingle so strangely as to exclude all possibility of a present. And this imaginary chateau is situated in some woods, on the exact spot where the consumptive eventually dies while on a walk which was arbitrarily dictated by the caprice of his young cousin. The whole book is a series of narratives in the first person ; the first and third parts, describing the arrival and death of the hero and, towards the beginning, a strangely immature and immaterial love- scene and sexual experience between the two children, come from the girl's diaries. The vision, which is like a short story independent of the whole intrigue, is set in the middle of the book. The intrigue can scarcely be reduced to a precis ; the milieu, with all its moral traditions and thwarted aspirations, its perverted vitality, is far more important.' Yet this milieu is that of Balzac and the style, though extremely personal, in many ways scrupulously classical. Much of the imagery is of the same imaginative and romantic sort as that of the surrealists : " un soleil noir," &c. . . . Yet it is never far-fetched, nor precious, nor arbitrary. The - genius • and originality of the novel reside in M. Green's approach to experience and in the moral
tone and mood in which he writes ; and these, I believe, ar.:. new to French literature.
It is no longer necessary to introduce M. Maurois to his many English admirers. His new novel- contains the same qualities of observation, taste and style as all his former works. Its faults, as far as the English public is concerned, are those of the French novel in general : its extreme taste, style and observation seem to exclude any of the really deep and original feeling that we are used to finding in the more
romantic productions of the English genius. •
- Son and daughter of two families of provincial landowners have fallen in love and decided to marry. The local social queen suddenly approves of this union. Then the trouble begins. The girl's patents must admit to their old friend, whose approVal is aw, that they were unmarried when their chil I was born ; and the old lady manages to pacify the parents of the young man. In the course of this first drama the girl's parents are astonished to discover that their daughter already knew the secret of her birth. But a second problem arises. The girl suddenly inherits a vast fortune from a man who had been her mother's lover before her marriage and who is, in reality, her own father. Again the old lady, with her vast experience of life, is asked to bring her diplomacy into play and break the news to the supposed father. Again it is discovered that he had always known this secret. Twice the child's future has been in danger of being wrecked. Twice it has been saved by an incredible instinct, which she shares with her parents and which always makes them sacrifice everything in favour of their future ; this " instinct for happiness " is a mixture of very human common sense and extremely individual and independent thinking.
According to my former classification of the French novel under five great headings, M. Maurois is in the tradition of Stendhal with whom, in his careful handling of social problems and of their conflicts with sentiment, he has much in common.
EDOUAED RODITI.
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