32C 



DISCOVERY 



by the French people of our generation as " first-class " 

 arc scarcely known by name on this side of the Channel. 

 Often it is ten or fifteen years before a work of genius 

 such as Guillaumin's Vic d'lin Simple {Life of a Simple 

 Man) is accorded a notice in an English review. The 

 average English reader of French still regards Loti and 

 Bourget as the chief representatives of modern French 

 fiction. Jean Christophe, the works of .\natole France, 

 and an occasional novel such as Marie Claire or Colonel 

 Bramble, have found translators and a large circle of 

 admirers in this country. But what of the numbers of 

 books that are yearly awarded the highest honours of 

 the French nation — the Pri.x de I'Academie, the Pri.x 

 Goncourt, the Pri.x de la Vie Heureuse ? Why do we 

 English not ask ourselves what these works stand for, 

 and seek some inde.x to the French mind and character 

 in the literary creations that the French themselves 

 admire ? 



The list of novels given at the end of this survey has 

 been compiled from French, not English, sources ; it 

 contains some of the books that literary France is 

 reading and discussing. It is no idle task for an 

 Englishman to try to discover, first, the mental, moral, 

 and spiritual tendencies of their authors, as representa- 

 tives of their nation, and then to use them as clues to 

 the mental, moral, and spiritual values of their readers. 

 " Tell me what you read, and I will tell you what you 

 are." 



The law of supply and demand holds good in art and 

 literature as in more materialistic spheres. The 

 average Englishman's desire for the greatest amount of 

 physical activity combined with the smallest mental 

 effort produces the prolific adventure-novel, spy-story, 

 and their like. The French love of psychological 

 analysis accounts for the fact that every F'rench novel 

 may be classed as a "psychological novel." The 

 reason why the novels of Pierre Benoit are becoming 

 so popular in England is that they are rare examples 

 of French stories whose interest is historical rather 

 than psychological— something happens. If there is 

 analysis of character, it takes a subordinate place ; 

 what matters is the working out of the plot, with its 

 local colour and historical setting. 



But L'Atlanlide (Atlantis) and Pour Don Carlos 

 (For Don Carlos) are freaks among the family of 

 French novels. The normal novel may deal with love, 

 or with religion, or with the various social and indus- 

 trial questions of the day, or with child-life and adoles- 

 cence, or with life in some lonely farm in a distant 

 French province ; no matter what the outward pretext 

 may be, the underlying motive is inevitably psycho- 

 logical analysis. If classification were not oiit of 

 fashion, it might be an interesting task to divide French 

 fiction into various classes of psychological investiga- 

 tion, as, for instance, the psychology of passion, the 



psychology of religious experience, the psychology of 

 maternity, and so on. There is a very large class of 

 novels devoted to the study of childhood and adoles- 

 cence. Most of these take the form of reminiscences, 

 as, for example, the three volumes by Anatole France 

 which relate the author's early life, Le livre de mon 

 ami [My Friend's Book), Le Petit Pierre (Little Peter), 

 and Pierre Noziere. Others, less numerous, are stories 

 about a child, written for grown-ups. Of these, M. 

 Lichtenberger's Mon Petit Trott (My Little Trott) is 

 the best example, though Jules Renard's Poil de 

 Carotte (Carrots) runs it very close in popularity. 

 Charles-Louis Philippe's La Mere et I'Enfant (Mother 

 and Child) paints a touching portrait of a child of 

 poor country folk, left to suffer from a lingering 

 disease because his parents are too simple and ignorant 

 to give him the proper treatment. Their attitude is 

 typical of their class ; Fate has sent misfortune to 

 their child, and all they can do is to surround liim with 

 tenderness and love and leave him to suffer. 



The impression of morbidity left by this book is not 

 uncommon. Scarcely one of the child heroes or 

 heroines (these are very rare) of these French tales 

 would be passed by an Englishman as a normal, healthy 

 specimen of humanity. Take the childhood of that 

 infant prodigy, Jean Christophe. Nothing could be 

 more neurotic than the state of that small boy, and 

 the fact of his genius does not sufficiently account for 

 his neuroticism. One of the most artistic descriptions 

 of a childish mentality is that given by Marcel Proust 

 in the first few chapters of Du Cote de chez Suiann 

 (Towards Swann's House). Yet it is quite obvious, 

 from the first page, that the child is hypersensitive, 

 almost hysterical, and that any sane parent would have 

 either packed liim off to school or provided him with 

 companions of his own age long before he had had time 

 to find out so much about his owti sensations and ideas. 



The general impression made on an English reader 

 by all these studies of cliild-life is that there are no 

 French children; only infants and " young people." 

 But the fact that French authors think it worth while 

 to record their early life, mostly wth regret for its lack 

 of joyousness, may perhaps indicate an approaching 

 change in the upbringing of the French child. Up to 

 the present, there appear to be only two alternatives 

 for the child in a French household — either to lead its 

 own inner life (rather a melancholy inner hfe), apart 

 from the " grown-ups " who make no effort to under- 

 stand its griefs and joys ; or to take an active part in 

 the general affairs of the family, and thus to develop 

 rapidly into a miniature man or woman of the world. 

 Nursery life in the English sense is a thing unknown in 

 France, a state of things undoubtedly resulting from 

 the facts that large families are rare, and that the Latin 

 races are naturally more quick in developing than the 



