BOOKS AND WRITERS

SINCE the taste for Anatole France evaporated, few French novelists of our time have been widely read in translation in this country. Proust is more than ever a name to conjure with, but it is hard to think of anybody among the living who enjoys in England a fraction of the popularity accorded to at least three or four present-day English novelists in France. Perhaps M. Duhamel, and next to him M. Jules Romains, are as largely read in English translation, and as well thought of by the library- borrower, as any. At least, that was very likely true until some four years ago, when the first volume in a collected English edition of the novels of M. Francois Mauriac was published. The effect upon many for whom until then he had been only a name in the French Catholic literary tradition was evidently very considerable ; here was, in some sort, a new experience. It would be interesting to know how large a proportion of M. Mauriac's English readers after the first or second volume appeared consisted of other than Roman Catholics, but that he has impressed himself deeply upon the serious reading public as a whole in this country there can be little doubt. The depth of the impression is very understandable. For M. Mauriac is a writer of commanding powers, an analytical novelist of sombre and uncompromising strength, a moralist and pietist of implacable purpose.

* * * * His range of imaginative illustration is somewhat narrow ; M. Mauriac's warmest admirers must reckon with his monotony. It is not so much that his scene varies so little, that he scarcely ever sets foot, except for a visit to Paris in its aspect of joyless Bohemia, outside the shuttered, airless houses of the decaying haute bourgeoisie in Bordeaux or the cloistral half-peasant estates among the pinewoods and sandy wastes of the neighbouring Landes ; nor even that his characters project tensions, conflicts, dilemmas of such marked uniformity. What above all restricts and impoverishes the illusion of life he creates, while at the same time lifting his argu- ment to an almost forbidding eschatological intensity, is the supremacy of his Roman Catholic and Jansenist doctrine. Not life but a doctrine of grace and predestination spurs his imagina- tion. All the accidents of human mortality, in M. Mauriac's view, derive from man's irremediable sinfulness and his prospects of divine election. M. Mauriac, one would say, does not believe in life ; he believes in the will of God, of which men and women, by their utter submission, may make themselves the instrument. There is no such thing as happiness, sensual love is an illusion, prayer and renunciation and death are successive stepping-stones to the divine love—these are the verities which M. Mauriac pro- pounds over and over again and within which he confines the values of human experience in his novels.

* * * * Yet how powerful, how formidable a novelist he is I How searchingly he exposes the nerves of the flesh and the perturbations

of spirit of the sinners and martyrs who people his world without happiness ! Here is a novelist who seldom fails to discover hidden truth in the spectacle of human folly or suffering. His limitations of theme become more apparent with every book of his one reads, but so, too, does his remorseless insight into weakness and error. The two novels' in this sixth volume, Ce Qui Etait Perdu and Les Anges Noirs, which belong to 1930 and 1936 respectively, exhibit in a remarkable degree his power of destructive analysis. Like all the others, they are dramas of good and evil, of the insufficiency of man and the pursuing mercy of God. In the first the odours of corruption rise not from the malice and heartlessness of Hervd de Blenaugc only but from the unsanctified love and resignation of the dying Irene, the canker of weakness in the drifting Marcel, the shallow avidity for life of the girl Tota ; in the other the average sensual nature of the youth Andres and the all too human maternal passion of Mathilde condemn them even more surely than the act of

• The Collected Edition of the Novels of Francois Mauriac. "That which was Lost." Translated by J. H. F. McEwen. "The Dark Angels." 3'ranslated by Gerard Hopkins. (Eyre and Spottiswoodc. 10s. 6d.1 • . murder condemns the stricken monster Gabriel Gradere. In both novels M. Mauriac strips the last rag of pride from the erring flesh, the last illusion of courage or confidence from the unilluminated soul. He dispenses stern justice even to those who pray but yet belong to " that race of dead souls who never hear God's answer." Both novels are-done with a majestic calm of conviction, though neither fully persuades and neither stirs emotion in seeking to win acceptance for its dogma of the infinite imperfectibility of man.

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That, I think, is the reserVation which not a few English readers would make in recognising the force and penetration of M. Mauriac's treatment of character-of Therese Desqueyroux, Brigitte Pian and the others, of Nerve de Blenauge and Gabriel Gradere. One is left a little cold by their behaviour, and one accepts it up to a point only. Beyond that point a reader wants to argue. La Rochefoucauld's saying, "Les personnes foibles ne peuvent etre sincerer," holds a truth which strikes at the roots of the process of conversion in so many of M. Mauriac's characters. Nor is the process always more convincing in those of his characters whose will is strong. If the hardened depravity of a man like Gradere, who seems to wear the mask. of Dorian Gray, is true to life, the quivering tone of his written confession to the young priest Alain is scarcely credible, while the redemption that is promised to him on his death-bed carries only the logic of a creed more Calvinist than Augustinian. These values of experience in M. Mauriac's created world seem to breathe, in fact, a sort of

romantic theological gloom that mind and feeling reject. Man is a weak vessel, but in face of this philosophy of utter submission

to his mysterious destiny one adopts a Protestant or even agnostic attitude in order to restore proportion to one's knowledge of life. Proportion is not restored by contemplating the saintliness of the young priest of Liogeats.

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The narrative resource, the clarity of sentiment and the poetic feeling of M. Mauriac remain. These two works fall below his highest level of performance, though each preserves a remarkable evenness and consistency of dramatic texture. He has fewer pro- found observations in either story than in, say, Le Mal, which came in between them, or in La Pharisienne. but there is a striking illus- tration of the quality of his religious thought and sensibilty in a concluding passage of Les Anges Noirs, in which Alain watches by the bedside of the dying Gradere: -

"This enemy of men's souls, this murderer, was going in peace to Heaven, was leaving this world with a heart that overflowed with joy. But the man of chastity who had sheltered him beneath his roof, who had saved him from despair and given him absolution, felt at this moment troubled and tormented. Not that he had to fight any of those specific temptations which he would have strangled even before they had fully taken shape. He would have found it hard to say what this vague distress might be that swelled his heart, this longing for tenderness and tears. It was nothing at which he need feel horror, nothing for which he need even have blushed. . . . Yet, to feel himself no longer in the presence of God, to have lost contact with God, set an immense con- fusion in his mind. He had not wholly lost Him, and deep in his heart love was still a living reality. The living love still dwelt within him. . . . It was simply that his poor heart had just slightly turned aside to contemplate another aspect of existence, to look at the face that life showed in the throbbing •

- darkness. He was being assailed by the scented dark and the sappy odours of the earth."

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As regards the translation, I have not looked at the French, but Mr. McEwen's syntax seems a little doubtful at times and some of

his phrases pulled me up sharply, while Mr. Hopkins' meads smoothly and well. The volume should be read, even though most English

readers may remember or care to remember that, besides gun' powder and printing, Carlyle listed the Protestant religion anioaS the three great elements of modern civilisation. R. D. CliaaQuEs.