THE NOVEL OF CHILDHOOD
Edmond Jaloux, André Lafon, G. des Voisins, Marcel Proust, etc.
Twoof the pastoral novels we have just considered,Charles BlanchardandMarie-Claire, are novels of childhood; and the first two volumes (the most beautiful) ofJean-Christophecome into the same category; when we examined the works of René Boylesve, we found that the hero of two of his most touching stories is a little boy; Anatole France is even now writing the history of ‘Petit Pierre’; Francis Jammes has consecrated a whole volume to the observation of his baby daughter; and there is Mæterlinck’s exquisiteOiseau Bleu. And here are several other writers who, in the last half-dozen years, have written novels of conspicuous beauty and reputation concerned with little children.
When I came to live in France, some thirty years ago, the novel of childhood was supposed to be a product of English manufacture, almost exclusively. It was much admired, for the French are a nation of child-lovers and a people of psychologists; but it was generally supposed that Anglo-Saxon blood was needed to relate the youth of a Maggie Tulliver or a David Copperfield. In thosedays the French yellowback, in six cases out of ten, was a love story; in the other four it was a social novel.
Is it the philosophy of Bergson, his glorification of instinct, sensibility, intuition, that has changed all that? The novel of childhood is now one of the most frequent, the most admired of French romances. Not the mere observation of childhood; not the sole charm of reminiscence, always popular because it aureoles our faded foreheads with the light of other days: ‘Ah! so I used to think! Even so was I!’ It is rather a careful reconstruction of the point of view of a young boy—except Marie-Claire, I remember no girls in the novel of childhood!—and his first impressions of the mysteries of life: love, sin, pain, madness, death. These novels of childhood are, in fact, studies in psychology.
Dickens perhaps began it—Dickens always so beloved in France. Yet Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Little Nell, if they suffer from the world’s oppression, suffer rather than reflect or observe. The theme was really inaugurated, I think, by Mr Henry James, some fifteen years ago, inWhat Maisie Knew, the impression made on a child by the mysterious iniquity of its elders.
M. René Boylesve was the first:L’Enfant à la Balustradeappeared, if I remember right, in 1903. We have considered in another chapter the provincial studies of this exquisite author; here I will only draw attention to his childish hero. Riquet Nadaud, the narrator ofLa BecquéeandL’Enfant à la Balustrade,[3]is a little boy who has been sent, on the death of his mother, to live with his maternal grandparents in their old-fashioned house in the country near La Haye-Descartes. How charming his descriptions of the child’s walks in the fields with brusque and capable Tante Félicie I have had occasion to declare elsewhere. For the moment my concern is with little Nadaud when, after his father’s re-marriage, he goes back to live with his parents at Loches.
The stepmother is a gentle, languid, gracious creature, born in America though French by race, a beautiful Creole from Louisiana. Needless to say, she is bored to death at Loches—not quite at first, when her young loveliness, her position as bride, her gift for music, ensure her a certain social importance and consideration. But her husband, the notary, cribbed and confined in his narrow house—mindful, too, that his first wife’s death had been in some degree attributed to that house’s sunlessness—secures the reversion of the handsomest building in the town, after the actual owner’s death. Unfortunately, M. Nadaud was not the only man who had set his heart on that comely residence! Soon the town is up in arms against the lawyer for stealing his march on others, and poor Tantine, the foreign wife, is left alone in her dull parlour with Riquet for her sole society.
Riquet—and young Dr Troufleau, faithful tohis friends. Excellent Troufleau, awkwardest, honestest of men! Charming Tantine, without an evil thought in her feather-head! Alas, opportunity, thy guilt is great! Out of sheer boredom on her part and simple pity on his, they are drawn quite close to the edge of the abyss—close enough to feel its attraction, its dizzy, strange, reluctant fascination—under the sensitive eyes of the child who knows nothing of passion or of sin. Doubtless that innocent presence it is that saves them; they recoil in time.
M. Nadaud at last realises that his wife is being enervated by solitude, demoralised by idleness, deprived of energy to resist the simplest temptations. She needs social intercourse. A few visitors, a little appreciation of her music and her beauty, and Troufleau would soon occupy his proper place in her regard—that of a kind, friendly young man, smothered in an absurd frock-coat and honestly in love with another woman.
So the husband puts his pride in his pocket, and reconciles himself with his neighbours; and things soon right themselves. Only a child has apprehended that which does not belong to the world of a child, only a boy’s lofty pure-minded ideal has been injured by contact with the hard realities of life.
Madame Tinayre, in a volume of stories,L’Amour Pleure(1908), took up the tale a few years later. Robert Marie is a lad of fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, regarded as a ward by the notary of Beaugency and his wife, Uncle Bon and Aunt Belle. He hasno relations, only his godfather and godmother, M. and Mme Cheverny, who live in Paris, and who from time to time come down to see him. Robert can remember a time, long distant, when there was no uncle Bon, no Aunt Belle, but, so far back as his mind can carry, there have always been a M. and Mme Cheverny, and always they have come to see him together.
He knows there is a mystery about his real parents; and the different suppositions he makes concerning them, the gradual growth of his desire to know who he really is, are the substance of this haunting story; but not for a moment does he suppose that M. and Mme Cheverny (who seem the sole links between him, poor waif, and those other boys who have a place in the world, parents, a name) are not really M. and Mme Cheverny, are not married: they whom he has not ever seen apart!—are each of them married to another. And he is their son, brought up by stealth, visited in mystery. The contrast between the passion of these unhappy, charming parents and the robust indignant innocence of their unconscious son is told with a sincerity and a romantic realism peculiar, I think, to the work of Madame Tinayre.
About the same time—a year later, I think—in 1909, a young writer from Marseilles, M. Edmond Jaloux, published hisLe Reste est Silence, which obtained the Prix Vie Heureuse for that year. There are many points of contact between this novel andL’Enfant à la Balustrade; but M. Jalouxhas not the more than feminine delicacy, the subtle moral tenderness of M. Boylesve. He, too, tells the story of a small boy, the surprised, half-unconscious involuntary witness of the growth of an unlawful love. Madame Meisserel is a less innocent, less charming Tantine, and here, too, there is a dull, awkward, not unpathetic husband.
The delicate sky, the gracious landscape of Touraine are replaced by the busy brilliance of Marseilles; the key is higher, the sonority is louder; and it is well that this is so; we need a dose of southern brutality—or at least callousness—to enable us to digest the supposition that it is the son of Madame Meisserel (now grown up) who revives in reminiscence the history of his dead mother’s guilty passion, as he witnessed it in his seventh year. How wise was M. Boylesve to make his little boy a stepson, and the charming stepmother almost innocent—a little frivolous at worst. We suspect Madame Meisserel of having gone to greater lengths and yet we scarce forgive her son his tone of superiority.
The same theme, in 1912, furnished M. Gilbert des Voisins with the matter ofL’Enfant qui prit Peur. Here the plot is pushed to a tragedy; the child, aghast to find the serpent rampant in his little Eden, and his father’s friend his mother’s lover, commits suicide. We are still further here from M. Boylesve’s exquisite moral delicacy.
We neighbour it again inL’Élève Gilles, the first novel of a young schoolmaster which, in1912, obtained the new great prize of the French Academy—the prize of £400, as yet only twice bestowed: once onJean-Christopheand once on the too-slender but charming book before us. (I mention all these prizes to show the undoubted popularity of the theme, and may add that M. des Voisins’ book very nearly obtained a Prix Vie Heureuse.)
Gilles is a little boy suddenly sent from home to live with an old aunt in the country because his father is suffering from neurasthenia and needs a complete rest: no noise, no movement about him. The child’s mother takes him and leaves him with her aunt and the old servant, Segonde, whose portrait is one of the charms of the volume; and though the lad is happy enough with them, we feel there is something poignant behind—something we do not know, and that the child does not even suspect. He is sent to the grammar school of the little town near his aunt’s property, and we feel that the shadow—the unsuspected shadow—hangs over him, there, too, increasingly evident to those about him, though still invisible to the child narrator.
Little by little, by a word here, a silence there, by the sensitive temperament of the child himself, by the strangeness of the father (who has come for rest and change to the quiet country house) we learn the truth: the man is mad. Gilles never knows it; but if he is so quiet, so sensitive, and so solitary, it is because the whole little world around him marks him for the madman’s child; a beingto be spared, respected, but not played with like another boy. He is a child apart.
No chapter in my book has a more delightful choice of reading than is offered by these Novels of Childhood. And among the most enchanting of all I would placeLe Grand Meaulnes. Henri Alain-Fournier leapt into being (from a literary point of view) in 1913 with this strange romantic little novel. The book is not of our time in the least, though without any affectation of archaism. It appears related far more nearly to George Sand’sPetite Fadette, or to some tale of Musset’s, or to Gérard de Nerval’sSylvie, than to any Twentieth Century production; and I think the closest we can get to it in our own times would be one of the more poetical of Hardy’s Wessex novels, before he fell into the tragic pessimism ofTessorJude. The poetry, the fantasy, is all in the author’s imagination; for what, I ask you, could be less romantic than the setting of his tale—a Training College for Primary Education, or rather a large village Board-School, with a class reserved for future teachers,—even though it be situate in the very heart of Berry? And yet over every page ofLe Grand Meaulnesthere slips and trembles the light that never was on sea or land. The heroes are two lads of fifteen and seventeen; and rarely has any author rendered more delicately the prestige of the big boy for the little boy, and the chivalrous half-mystic hero-worship in which he walks enveloped. The mystery, the beauty,the wonderfulness of the poet’s world transfigure the homely story, which is merely that of a schoolboy of fifteen who runs away from school, who misses his way and gets caught up in the whirl of a large country wedding at a quaint half-ruined manor-house whose name he does not know. Never again can the lad find that manor or that beautiful girl who was the bridegroom’s sister, with whom he has fallen in love. And at last his boy friend, ‘le grand Meaulnes’ discovers her, but keeps her for himself; the capricious, fascinating Meaulnes marries that fairy Princess and deserts her on the morrow, leaving her for all companionship and consolation the adoring devotion of the humble friend, who tells the story.
Those first rays of fame, which are brighter than the rising sun, slipped over the young author’s fresh horizon. And then the war broke out. Henri Alain-Fournier set out for Lorraine, a Lieutenant in the Reserve; on September 22, 1914, he was reported missing. For many months, for nearly a year, the hope that dazzles so many tearful eyes—the hope that he was retained by the Germans a prisoner in the invaded provinces, from which no communication was allowed with France—sustained his family and friends and that portion of the public who, like myself, watched his career with sympathy. And then, one day last summer, I heard the sad story.
A young lieutenant, fresh from the Polytechnique, the son of one of my friends, fell in with Alain-Fournierduring those months of victory and retreat on the frontier of Lorraine. The two young men, no less ardent in their intellectual energy than in their military theories, recognised each other as kindred spirits; with a third (a young pastor, I think, or the son of a Protestant pastor) they used to meet o’ nights, their day’s work done, in a broken-down military motor car, wrecked by the side of the road. I like to think of the three young officers, on those August nights—the immense French camp asleep all round them—as they sat till the dawn broke, like gipsies in their van, eagerly talkingde omni re scibili. In the daytime they generally saw little of each other; but, on August 22, one of the two others, marching to the front, met Alain-Fournier and his men going in a contrary direction. ‘Ordered to the rear! (he called out); no luck! Au revoir!‘; and he passed on. It chanced that that day’s engagement was a particularly murderous one, but the two friends when they met at night felt no anxiety about the third of their accustomed party, deeming him safe. And yet, when the dead were counted and buried, there was one figure, the head bashed in, whose limbs and hands bore so great a resemblance to their friend that the young men felt a chill presentiment. They looked for the badge of identity; a wicked bayonet-thrust had driven it into the breast. So haunting was their surmise that they cut it out; but they could not decipher the number on the battered, bloodstained plaque.Since then, unbroken silence: Alain-Fournier is among the ‘missing.’
Of all these books—save, perhaps, Alain-Fournier’s, for which I have, I own, a peculiar weakness; of all these novels of childhood—unless I except M. Boylesve’s, andMarie-Claire, andJean-Christophe(for so many of them, when you come to think of it, are really quite first-rate)—the most delicate, the most pregnant with a sensibility extraordinarily rich, and ample, and yet sensitive as the impressions of convalescence or the first images of childhood, is an immense novel, published in the winter of 1913-14 by M. Marcel Proust, under the enigmatic title,À la Recherche du Temps Perdu:Du Côté de chez Swann. The book with which it is easiest to compare it, is Henry James’sA Small Boy, though that, indeed, is concise and simple compared with M. Marcel Proust’s attempt at reconstituting the vague shimmering impressions of a young mind, the wonderment with which—inexplicably to us—it regards places and people which in our eyes possess no magic. M. Proust’s hero is a small boy living in the bosom of the most regular of families—one of those vast French families, closely knit, whose tissue unites grandparents, great-aunts, uncles, cousins in such quantity as to limit the possible supply of outside acquaintance. One most familiar friend, however, there is, the friend of the family, a ‘hereditary friend,’ as Homer would say, M. Swann. He is a man of the world, a member of the Jockey Club, a friend ofthe Prince of Wales, a comrade of the Comte de Paris, a great collector; but for the small boy and his family he is especially ‘le fils Swann,’ the son of their old friend the member of the Stock Exchange (‘qui a bien dû lui laisser quatre ou cinq millions’) who has made a ridiculous marriage with a demi-mondaine—a case of all for love and the world well lost.
And the world is lost the more completely that the impossible lady continues her adventures unabashed and unabated after matrimony. She therefore is not ‘received,’ or indeed hardly mentioned, in the ample respectable home of the small boy; so that Swann and this unlikely love of Swann’s, this beautiful wife of Swann’s, and Swann’s remote, intangible, but not invisible little girl, are the constant objects of his romantic curiosity.
There are two walks at Combray: you may set out in the direction of Guermantes or else go round by Swann’s: ‘du côté de chez Swann,’ and to the childish hero of the book these two walks gradually accumulate round them the material for two views of life—Swann standing for all that is brilliant, irregular, attractive, Guermantes representing an orderly and glorious tradition. This long novel,À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, sets out to recover, in three volumes, a child’s first impressions in both sorts; but this instalment records (in 500 closely printed pages) the earliest imagesdu côté de chez Swann: images forgotten by the intellect, mysteriously resuscitated by the senses—by a tune sung in the street, or a whiff ofthyme or mignonette, or (as in the case of our author) by the flavour of a fragment of sponge-cake dipped in tea; images in which matter and memory are subtly combined in a sudden warm flood of life, revived, without the intervention of the understanding.
In all this the influence of Bergson is evident. But can we imagine the Twentieth Century in France without Bergson? As well conceive the Eighteenth Century without Rousseau. Such a delicate excess of sensibility does not exist without disorder; such a need to fuse and unite the very depth of the soul with the ambient world—such a sense of the fluid, pregnant, moving flood of life—exceeds the strict limits of a perfect art. Evidently M. Proust’s novel, by its faults as well as by its qualities, is admirably adequate to the spirit of our age. Again, I repeat that, while I read with delight the delicate, long-winded masters of our times, I think sometimes with regret of a Turgeneff, no less subtle, who, even as they, wrote at tremendous length and recorded the minutest shades of feeling, but, having finished, went through his manuscript again, pen in hand, and reduced it to about one-third of its original length.
In the case of M. Proust’s novel, the result is the more bewildering that the book is conceived, as it were, on two planes; no sooner have we accustomed ourselves to the sun-pierced mist of early reminiscence than the light changes; we find ourselves in glaring noon; the recollection becomes a recital; the magic glory fades from M. Swann and the fair, frail Odette de Crécy; we see them intheir habit as they lived and moved among their acquaintance; we smile at the evocation of an artistic coterie under President Grévy, and suffer a sort of gnawing under our ribs as we realise the poignant jealousy of the unhappy Swann. And then the light shifts again; we are back in childhood; and Swann is again the mysterious idol of a dreamy, chivalrous little boy:—
‘Il me semblait un être si extraordinaire que je trouvais merveilleux que des personnes que je fréquentais le connussent aussi et que dans les hasards d’une journée quelconque on peut-être amené à le rencontrer. Et une fois ma mère, en train de nous raconter comme chaque soir, à diner, les courses qu’elle avait faites dans l’après-midi, rien qu’en disant: “À ce propos, devinez qui j’ai rencontré aux Trois Quartiers, au rayon des parapluies: Swann,” fit éclore au milieu de son récit, fort aride pour moi, une fleur mystérieuse. Quelle mélancolique volupté d’apprendre que cet après-midi-là, profilant dans la foule sa forme surnaturelle, Swann avait été acheter un parapluie.’
‘Il me semblait un être si extraordinaire que je trouvais merveilleux que des personnes que je fréquentais le connussent aussi et que dans les hasards d’une journée quelconque on peut-être amené à le rencontrer. Et une fois ma mère, en train de nous raconter comme chaque soir, à diner, les courses qu’elle avait faites dans l’après-midi, rien qu’en disant: “À ce propos, devinez qui j’ai rencontré aux Trois Quartiers, au rayon des parapluies: Swann,” fit éclore au milieu de son récit, fort aride pour moi, une fleur mystérieuse. Quelle mélancolique volupté d’apprendre que cet après-midi-là, profilant dans la foule sa forme surnaturelle, Swann avait été acheter un parapluie.’
Can I end better than with this brief and casual quotation, which, better than my criticism, will show the fresh and fine reality which these pages mysteriously recover from the back of our consciousness (where it exists in a warm penumbra of its own) and exhale, as naturally as vapour from a new-ploughed autumn furrow? Something older and deeper than knowledge pervades the book.
FOOTNOTES:[3]Translated into English under the title ofThe House on the Hill. David Watt, 1904.
FOOTNOTES:
[3]Translated into English under the title ofThe House on the Hill. David Watt, 1904.
[3]Translated into English under the title ofThe House on the Hill. David Watt, 1904.