Unfortunately, a brilliant officer has always at his disposal one means of raising funds—if he listen to temptation. And Malte listens. He communicates to a foreign power certain secrets, and the good ship Redoubtable is rendered worthless—just as the Affranchis were not free; just as La Triomphatrice will be shown to be an unloved, broken-hearted, solitary woman. All Mlle Lenéru’s titles are epigrams of irony! Yet, in Le Redoubtable, Mlle Lenéru has given us the reductio ad absurdum of her former theme. If, at the close of the Affranchis, we doubted whether the lovers were wise in sacrificing their utmost joy ‘au bon gouvernement du monde’ (and such is the contagious force of passion that we had left the theatre happier after seeing them elope to some undreamed of isle), we doubt no longer when we have seen Le Redoutable.
Although we may admit that the moral law is in process of evolution, though we may look forward to a day when a new vital order shall supplant our established order, yet, meanwhile, we must observe the rules of the game, even though they mean no more to us than the rules of a game! In fact, however we choose to think, there is but one profitable way of living: that which consists in treating as fundamentally true those truths alone which have weathered the experience of generations. Foris ut moris, intus ut libet. Or as Pascal puts it: ‘Il faut dire comme les autres, mais ne pas penser comme eux.’
And so Mlle Lenéru, one of the rare individualists of the younger generation, Mlle Lenéru, so romantic, with her love for the noble, the exceptional, with her revolt against platitude and mediocrity, repeats, in a mood of revolt and irony, the refrain of Jules Romains:—
‘Nous cessons d’être nous pour que la Ville dise: MOI!’
This young writer, so extraordinary by reason of her depth of meditation, and the strange Pascalian vigour and beauty of her language, was the more surprising (and yet perhaps the more explicable) because of a singular infirmity: she lived immured in an interior world. If, indeed, her short-sighted vision perceived a vague image of our earth and its inhabitants, the noisiest city left her undisturbed to her reflections. Mlle Lenéru was absolutely deaf. She heard no echo of the applause which greeted the Affranchis. In 1918 when the comedians of the Théâtre Français read and accepted ‘à l’unanimité,’ her new play, La Triomphatrice, she alone remained unmoved. The blindness of Milton, the paralysis of Heine, the deafness of Beethoven, have accustomed us to these ironies, or compensations, of a mysterious fate.
The humble ferment which produces alcohol when its development is checked and interrupted, flourishes as an unproductive mildew if its organism find all that it requires. An obstacle is often the stimulus of genius. But when genius has made at last a pearl of the wound, a ruby of the fissure, and turned starvation into rapture, how cruel appears the sudden fate that snatches the hard-earned prize from its grasp! Marie Lenéru died of the grippe on the 23rd of September, 1918.
THE PASTORAL NOVEL
There has always been a pastoral novel in France, because France is an agricultural country. Except milk, meat, and a little bread, England draws too little of her nourishment from her own resources; her plenty is a cheap import; and even the beauty of much of her landscape suggests an indifference to agriculture. We have known a French admirer, confronted with a marvellous panorama of wild Sussex heath—wood, grassy links, and gorse-covered common—contemplate the scene and sigh, ‘Rien, rien, rien, à se mettre sous la dent!’
France, on the other hand, is self-sufficing, almost self-supporting, and always has been so. If we consider the Duke of Berry’s Book of Hours we realise that in many parts of France the business of life has continued almost unchanged since the Fourteenth Century. From the pruning of the vine in February (our month of March) to the fattening of the swine in the oak-woods in November, while the wood-cutters mark the trees for felling, here are just such scenes as the dweller in rural France has constantly before his eyes to-day, unaltered—scenes which the accumulated associations of countless generations have invested with a human interest more poignant, more intimate, than any which mere landscape can afford. And we admire the French peasant; his frugality, his industry, his endurance are indeed beyond all praise; his economy is marvellous, and such is his good humour that he makes a pleasure of his self-denial; miserably lodged, poorly fed, he is conscious of no inferiority; he knows himself to be the backbone of France.
The peasant and the landscape for ages have remained unchanged. France is so large a country, with so great a variety of soil and climate, that there are all sorts of French peasants: materialistic, clean, bright, and gay, in Touraine and the Charentes; superstitious, poverty-stricken, imaginative, in Vendée and Brittany; good-humoured, ambitious, and positive in Auvergne—and so on through all the nations of France. When you knew the place, you knew the peasant—until quite lately. The ‘regionalist’ (the provincial) novel has come into being just when the field labourer himself has ceased to be regionalist, or provincial; for military service is a wonderful leveller and unifier.