2 o2 FRENCH LITERATURE 



There is something English in the talent of M. Boylesve (b. 1867), something that 

 recalls at times the minute interior art of George Eliot or Mr. Galsworthy precise small 

 touches disengage the character of a soul, of a society. In the.last three or four years 

 M. Boylesve has risen to one of the highest places in the fiction of France. Continuing 

 Lajeunefille bien elevee, his last novel, Madeleine, jeune femme (1912) is the story of a 

 pure minded solitary girl, convent bred, pious, quietly reared in a small town of Touraine, 

 suddenly cast by her marriage with a rising architect of Paris into that vortex of con- 

 tractors, speculators, moneymakers and pleasure hunters which eddied round the great 

 exhibition of 1889. The refined and sensible Madeleine passes unscathed among the 

 booths of Vanity Fair. But by a friendly hearth (the one spot which recalls the peace- 

 ful surroundings of her early years) she meets a man of letters, a student of subtle moral 

 problems, a lover of Pascal, an inhabitant of her own intellectual world. And almost 

 without a struggle Madeleine succumbs succumbs morally, we hasten to add, and in 

 the very secret of her soul, for in the world of fact she never succumbs at all and her 

 aureole of virtue effectually protects her. M. Boylesve is a traditionalist, a lover of the 

 ancient faiths and disciplines of France, a lover perhaps rather than a believer. Yet if 

 Madeleine is saved it is not, he seems to say, the beautiful quality of her soul that 

 saved her, but the regularity and nobleness of her early education; and to make the 

 example clearer, he sets face to face with Madeleine a charming madcap, a child of 

 nature, Pipette Voulasne, without a bad instinct in her composition, but without a 

 principle, a faith, or an ideal. Pipette is marked out for Fate, and here no sudden angel 

 intervenes. M. Boylesve loves to show us the neat well ordered world of civilized society 

 but in his magic mirror the figures that move therein become sometimes transparent 

 and reveal behind them the great primitive 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 a reflector sur la vie." 



The art of M. Boylesve has made a strong impression on the young; among those 

 who walk in his traces we may mention M. Rene Behaine, M. Alphonse de Chateau- 

 briand, and M. Andre Lafon, to whom was awarded in the summer of 1912 the first 

 Grand Prix de Litterature (400), recently inaugurated by the French Academy. 



Still more important than M. Rene Boylesve is M. Maurice Barres (b. 1862), his 

 elder by a few years. Boylesve was one of the young writers (with Hugues Rebell, 

 Rene" Menard and Charles Maurras) who collaborated on La Cocarde, the odd little 

 review which Barres edited in 1894 and 1895, a review which was at once Boulangist 

 and socialist, patriotic and individualist, military and literary; in brief, as Barres defined 

 it, the production " d'un groupe d'hommes passionnes pour le developpement historique 

 de notre pays." La Cocarde was not long lived, but its authority and inspiration, 

 promulgated by a band of thoughtful young writers, with an ideal and a discipline of 

 their own to propose to a somewhat disorganized literature, was enduring. La Cocarde 

 was to the literature of the early twentieth century in France all that The Germ had been 

 to Mid-Victorian England. 



The sentiment of national traditionalism, which these writers elaborated, has proved 

 the finest, the most stimulating tonic to French literature. Their shibboleth: " Notre 

 terre, nos morts," is the pass-word of modern letters. The sense of responsibility, the 

 dream of order, the feeling for continuity, the belief in the persistence and perpetuity of 

 an ideal, are motives which inspire most of the principal writers of the present day 

 in France. The Colette Baudoche (1909) of Maurice Barres is one of the evangels of this 

 doctrine, written with an ease, a measure, a liberty and grace which form a little master- 

 piece. It is one of those books (romantic by their sentiment and classic by the simple 

 purity of their form) which outlive schools and their gospels. We may place it on the 

 shelf near Paul et Virginie, The Sorrows of Werther, or The Vicar of Wakefield. 



This local life, this " regionalism " which the traditionalists offer as a remedy to the 

 excessive importance of Paris, has its evident danger, the dispersion of national feeling, 

 the dissociation of the provinces. It is an evil against which they propose to guard by 

 the restoration cf the Catholic Church and the cult of great men. In two short studies 



