FRENCH LITERATURE 203 



(L'Angoisse de Pascal, 1910; // Greco, 1912) Barres has written in praise of natures with 

 whom his own has obscure but intimate affinities. The great figures of history are the 

 natural educators of a nation, its intercessors, its patrons and its patterns: A Pascal 

 or a Corneille is surely more to France than St. Denis. In // Greco the writer inquires 

 into the secret of the spiritual life. II Greco is emphatically a painter for whom the 

 invisible world exists. His faults, his voluntary distortion of the human figure, the 

 flame-like fragility and aspiration of his personages are not repugnant to M. Barres, who 

 maintains that an artist may sacrifice the detail of external truth in view of obtaining a 

 greater intensity of emotional expression; he esteems such aberrations to be fortunate 

 errors if they prove a condition of the utterance of certain spiritual states. II Greco, 

 like Blake, takes a poet's licence with anatomy, but he admits us to a mystical world of 

 rushing spirits, of flooding light, of joy and fire, a world of adoration, bliss, eternal 

 space. And so he has the praise of M. Barres, who is far removed from the doctrines of 

 Naturalists. In the last weeks of 1912 M. Barres completed a new novel, La Colline 

 Inspir&e. We may mention in the wake of M. Barres, the brothers Tharaud, novelists 

 distinguished for a literary style singularly pure, firm and brilliant; the fanciful and 

 ingenious critic and romancer, Andre Beaunier, and that profound and singular young 

 genius, Mademoiselle Marie Leneru. 



Another modern Plutarch (who, like M. Barres, seeks to propose to his contempo- 

 raries, in the Lives of Great Men, a discipline and an ideal) is M. Romain Rolland (b. 

 1866), the author of studies of Beethoven (1903) and Michael Angelo (1906), which 

 reveal his intense and dreamy genius, but especially known for his biography of an 

 imaginary German musician, Jean Christophe; it is, in fact, a biography rather than a 

 romance. Jean Christophe, a huge novel in successive books (the first, L'Aube, published 

 in 1904), as long as Clarissa Harlowe or War and Peace, is perhaps the most remarkable 

 work of contemporary fiction, as well known in Italy, almost as well known in Germany 

 and England, as in France. A singular moral fervour, a rare imagination, an extraor- 

 dinary alternation of sarcasm, rancour, revolt and tenderness breathe from the pages 

 of this disconcerting book. M. Rolland is the Rousseau of our times, and he has the 

 defects of his model: a negligence and diffuseness in the style, alternating with chapters 

 so beautiful and touching that we may rank them with the best contemporary work; a 

 lack of proportion and measure; an irritating spleen; sometimes a shrill- voiced choler 

 almost shrewish in its denunciation, its polemics. But there is a greatness in M. Rolland 's 

 outlook, a penetrating quality in his insight, which is his own peculiar gift. No great 

 question leaves him incurious. What is genius? Why does its production so often dis- 

 locate and jangle the nature which gives out the spark? In what degree is that creative 

 force a thing distinct from the personality that harbours it? What is that dualism in 

 the mind partly a trained intelligence, partly the capricious play of a free unconscious 

 instinct? What is that simultaneous working of intuition and understanding which 

 goes to produce a masterpiece? No psychologist, we think, has noted these questions 

 more finely than M. Rolland in the volume of Jean Christophe entitled La Revolte (1906). 

 And what tenderness he brings to describe the ephemeral beauty of a girl's life who dies 

 young, an Antoinette or a Sabine; all the pathos of human destiny is there. With how 

 intense a passion, a rancour, a fatality, he treats the overmastering force of love in 

 Le Buisson Ardent. There is something of the wild tragedy of Tristan and Isolde in this 

 episode (and here, we feel, his musician, who in his childhood reminded iis of Beethoven, 

 resembles Richard Wagner). At every turn our author treats the difficult problem of 

 the artist's relation to his environment. Jean Christophe knows what it is to be one 

 single cell, aching with individuality, in the national body of which, nolens volens, he 

 forms a part; and he knows the attraction, too, which draws together the members that 

 form a whole. He has learned the two great lessons: revolt, which strives and creates; 

 acceptance, which assimilates and transforms. At the end of 1912 the final volume of 

 Jean Christophe, the tenth, closed on a note of peace this contemporary epic. 



M. Andre Gide (b. 1869) is a very different artist, narrow but exquisite. " Le gout 

 exquis craint le trop en tout." These words of Fenelon's rise into our mind whenever 



