François Mauriac and the Classical Tradition

, j FRANC;OIS MAURIAC AND THE CLASSICAL TRADITION A. E. CARTER TO the pessimistic observer, the collapse of France in 1940 removed her literature from the contemporary to the historic ,plane. Her authors assumed something of the marble dignity of Greece and Rome--witnesses of what had been and was no longer. Other books would of course be written: something called France still existed. But the shadow of the library lay heavy upon her great writers. They had descended into the , stacks, along with Virgil and Aeschylus, to be exhumed in after years by the patient scholar, curious of an age the world had forgotten. There was almost a kind of logic in it: Fre,nch civilization, by its very brilliance, seemed out of place and doomed amidst the ferocious ideologies of the twentieth century; and that the worst fears were not realized is surely an extraordinary proof of the vitality of the French literary. tradition. , Whatever ignominy the nation may have endured during the dark p'eriod 'of German occupation, her literature emerges from it with added lustre. Despite censorship, persecution, and the hundred miseries of conquest, the writers of France continued throughout to hold the attention of the world. Books by Valery and Gide were na"t,wanting; Le Creoc-Cceur provided the best war poetry our tremendous modern conflicts have thus far occasioned; and Fran~ois Mauriac published yet another nove1.1 Of these varied phenomena the last was in a sense the most reassuring. For a novel by Ma'uriac represents the unspent force of a literary doctrine which is so peculiarly French as almost to represent France herself. His work embodies that ,great classical tradition with its roots in the humanism of the Renaissance and the psychological realism of the seventeenth century) a tradition whic,h M. Henri Peyre) in a recent monograph, has proposed as the finest contribution of France to European civilization. A classical novelist is something of aeontradiction in terms. The seventeenth century, it is true" and the eighteenth (still nominally "classi- .cal") produced novels: books like La Princesse de Cleves and Les Liaisons dangereuses are mas~erpieces of the analytic method; but'"they are embry- 'onic masterpieces-if judged from the standpoint of nineteenth-century fiction. It is not surprising that ,the novel did not reach its full development until after the Revolution, which had made all varieties of setting 'and material suitable food for art. The novel, in fact, does not lend itself ' to the classical method; it is diffuse; even when based-as most good French novels are-upon psychological analysis, it requires the meretricious 'adornment of description, social criticism, atmosphere, etc., which the cl~ssicai method canriot,in~,lude without ceasing to be classical. In Mauriac, however, there is a spiritual affinity' with the writers of the seventeenth lLa Pharisienne (Paris, Grasset, 1941). 225 226 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY century which enables him to assimilate the composite elements of the craft of fiction into a harmonious whole. HAn author only decides to :write one biography out of a thousand possible ones bec'ause he feels in harmony with the master he has chosen to write about/'2 he notes, in the introdU ,ction to his life of Racine. He might have applied the 'same remark to , his superb studies of Pascal and Moliere. Like so many of the great writers of the seventeenth century, Mauriac received a strict Catholic upbringing, tinged with Jansenism; it sharpened his awareness of man's moral problems. The boy who prayed for his free-thinking father's salvation, who was accustomed to make a strict examen de conscience on the occasion of each communion, who used to watch the maskers at the Bordeaux carnival and think that they were damned, who developed (as he tells us) "a twitching of the face, a gri~ace, a movement of the head from right to left in order to say 'no' to sin,"3 was eminently suited to comprehend the mystic agonies of Pascal or the remorse Racine experienced over his 'breach with PortRoyal . A novel by Mauriac is the result,of the same spiritual conflict that 'produced Phedre or Les Pensees; and therein it...