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.