MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IN the Figaro the other day I read a short article, or chronique, by M. Georges Duhamel, of the French Academy. I always admire the skill and dignity with which distinguished French authors are able to express transitory experiences or feelings in perfectly balanced form. They hold the view that a practised writer should be able, in impeccable prose, to interpret and illumine incidental events in such a manner as to relate them to the eternal verities and the solemn traditions of the Latin mind. Anatole France (who is passing through.a phase of eclipse among his own countrymen) was a master of this important technique. A facet of his contemp- tuous mind was stirred by the absurdity of marionettes or puppets making stylised human gestures, and thereby express- ing universal human emotions, by the movements of strings directed by invisible gods. He wrote several articles on the subject of the puppet theatres of France and Italy, in which his contempt for human beings was mingled with his sympathy for them in their inability to control or understand the unseen forces that jerked them into activity. These articles have always seemed to me, models to be adopted by the cynical sage, desir- ing to give vent to his hatred of human beings and to his perception that our mistakes are attributable to agencies, such as gods jerking strings, of which we have no knowledge. The gods gloat over the ungainly gestures that they foree the puppets to perform. Irony and love are not easy to combine in suave conjunction: yet Anatole France by the perfection of his prose, by wonderful alternations between the grin and the sigh, manages to unite these opposites on a " poetic " com- bination. His articles about marionettes amuse and delight us; an aftertone of sympathy lingers in the mind. We agree that men are often foolish, sometimes wicked. and generally absurd; we agree that many of our actions are the result of mechanical jerks administered to us by unseen forces rather than of the élan vital or the categorical imperative. We are left feeling sorry for our fellow mortals who are thus moved by little tugs on strings.
* * * * The English, unlike the Scotch and the French. find it difficult to express pathos lightly without becoming sentimental. Being a very anglicised person, I am afraid of sentiment and seek to conceal it. At the same time I love it dearly and, when it is aroused incidentally, the tears gush into my eyes. I have learnt by now that I can face tragedy with the impassivity of a Stoic, wearing a fine senatorial face. But the slight incidents of sentiment upset me so terribly that I refuse ever to visit a cinema in the company of anybody else. How do I know that some episode flung upon the screen may not suggest courage veiled by becoming modesty. virtue triumphant, patriotism, the Greek islands, one of the more luscious poems of James Elroy Flecker, the final justification of someone (perhaps even a little boy of eleven) who has been unjustly accused ? One sees such things upon the Alms. If all unawares I am caught by these puffs of sentiment, then I start shaking with sobs and the tears follow each other down my hardy cheeks. If I am alone in the theatre I can dry myself without attracting undue attention. But a companion beside me would expose my weakness to a wide circle of friends. Yet the French deal with sentiment with a hard unflinching hand, even as a surgeon will lance a tumour. They manage the business without even a blink.
* * * * In this article that stirred me with serious admiration, M. Georges Duhamel deals with a personal theme of such poignancy that, had I seen it on the screen, I should have wept aloud. But he does it with such perfect taste and reticence that I am just left enjoying the sensation produced and admiring so deft a stylist. He describes how, being afflicted with a malady of the eyes, he visits his oculist; how in the consulting- rooth, which faces north, the light of the sun is reflected from a window opposite. He has been depressed by
his illness and the menace to his eyesight. He is depressed by modern life. Yet this reflected ray of sunlight seems to him a message of hope. Could anything, if we apply our reason, be more sentimental ? Yet somehow the chronique of M. Georges Duhamel is not sentimental in the least. He begins by saying how fortunate he was that these days of illness descended upon him when he was in his own home surrounded by his own family, and not, as might have happened, in the cabin of a transatlantic steamer or in some alien land. There around him are his books upon their shelves. True it is that he is not allowed to read them. But they whisper to him com- fortably. " We are here waiting," they say to him. " until your eyes again become limpid and vigilant. In this universal catastrophe, we are the ones who know how to wait: we are your friends." Unable to read. M. Duhamel lies there, listen- ing to the wind of January brutalising the shutters and the rain lashing against the windows and sliding down the panes " like the tears of an exile." He visits his oculist along the noisy street. And there he finds the ray reflected by the opposite window, tactful and comforting, changing by magic the turbulent voices of his former despair.
* * * During the hours of darkness, when he lay there dreading the outrage of blindness, he had thought with almost panic hatred of our modern world. What about France ? What future was there for his own children and grandchildren ? What atrocities would be committed against the standards of civilisa- tion to which he had devoted all his life ? What was the meaning of all this terrifying scientific progress ? If the aim of learning was to render the unknown known, then had we not, by our inventiveness, destroyed that aim in rendering the unknown vulgar? M. puharncl in an agony of sadness deplores the invention of the wireless and the cinema, since they tell us far too much. The poet, for instance. whose works held an honoured place upon his bookshelf,' is suddenly interviewed by some pert producer on the wireless. The poet from that moment ceases to be a hero, and becomes a senile old gentle- man, bqpvildered by the questions.the pert producer puts to him, hesitant, and stuttering, and—oh tragedy ! -making silly, vulgar or inept replies. The wind and the rain still howled around M. Duhamel's shutters. He came to the con- clusion that the only golden age was the age in which men knew nothing at all. " Today," he writes. " we are not permitted to be ignorant of anything." Obviously depression, when one is afflicted with acute conjunctivitis, and believes, in one's misery, that one will never read or write again, is liable, on a wet winter night of storms, to intervene. M. Duhamel was rescued from the uttermost cavern of despair by the memory of the reflection of sunlight in his oculist's consulting-room. The beam of hope, he implies, cannot be experienced directly; it must be thrown back on us by some outside reflection. The sun of happiness is hidden from us since we face to the north. It is no more than an intimation that we can receive.
* * * * Not being, for the moment, threatened with blindness, I regard the rain as beneficent to this rich -earth and not as recalling for me the tears of exiles. I share at moments M. Duhamel's despair with modern conditions and his dread that, for our children, even the sanctity of learning and art may be besmeared. But I do not find that magic has- passed from this earth. It flashed for a quick moment in Mr. Churchill's speech at Ottawa. I find it once or twice a day. But I am not able to write about it often, fearing to become sentimental and not possessing M. Duhamel's gift, which he shares with his fellow Academicians, of being able to write about the incidence of sentiment without becoming vdp'ci. When I read prose such as his, such as that of M. Mauriac, I am glad to acknowledge that the French remain the great teachers of civilisation.
Previous page
