TWO FRENCH WRITERS

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25246, 26 July 1947, Page 7

TWO FRENCH WRITERS

The “Manchester Guardian” of June 2 carried the following sub-leader: This week Oxford University, by conferring honorary degrees on M. Andre Gide and M. Mauriac, will be paying a small part of a long-standing national debt—the debt which is owed by English readers to French writers. M. Gide is already a legend. It is 56 years since his first book was published and since then he has never ceased to add to his reputation and our pleasure with such novels as “Les Nourritures Terrestres,” “L’lmmoraliste,” and “Les Faux Monnayeurs.” His latest work, “Thesee,” not yet published in this country, still has the clear classic style, the acute perception, and the almost pagan love of sensuous beauty which has made him pre-eminent even in his own country, where such qualities are commoner than in our own. M. Mauriac is less well known, but Mr Raymond Mortimer has recently described him, with due seriousness, as “the greatest novelist alive.” Unlike M. Gide, M. Mauriac is a Roman Catholic, writing with all the weight of the French Catholic tradition, and for that reason more aware than most modern writers of the problem of human sin. Like M. Gide, M. Mauriac is also a journalist (for journalism and literature are not finally divorced in France), and his weekly articles in “Figaro” have great influence. In these articles, in which he writes as one who “has nothing much to hope for nor to fear from other men.” he defends justice, freedom, and his Church with eloquence and patent sincerity. He has. of course, been called a “reactionary.” and perhaps he is one. If all reactionaries were like M. Mauriac civilisation would be safer than it is to-day. MINUTE LIMBO And here, coming to that vague rubric, appreciation of others, I feel we have got to a district of Limbo about which few of us should have the audacity to speak, and few, as a fact, have the courage honestly to think. What do we make of others, in our constant attempt to justify ourselves? No Japanese bogie-monger ever produced the equal of certain wooden monster-puppets which we carve, paint, rig out. and christen by the names of real folk—alas, alas, dear names sometimes of friends! —and stick un to gibber in our memory; while the real image, the creature we have really known, is carted off to Limbo. But this is too bad to speak Let us rather think gently of things sad but sad without ignominy, of friendships stillborn or untimely cut off, hurried by death into a place like .that which holds the souls of the unchristened babies: often, like them, let us hone, removed to a sphere where such things grow finer and more fruitful, the sphere of those we have not i loved enough in life. —VERNON LEE: “Ariadne in Mantua.**