The Wanderer

I

It is a high privilege to introduce the English translation of Le Grand Meaulnes, a rare pleasure, indeed, to present so exquisite a masterpiece to readers who may never even have heard of it. I hardly deserve my good fortune, for it is little more than a year since I first read it myself. Moved by the praise of good French critics, I obtained the book and was fascinated by its quality. My friend Madame Françoise Delisle, in whose hands I placed it, was equally impressed and conceived the desire to translate it; in the midst of a busy life she has given her best care to the loving preparation of the version here presented. She is, I think, elect for the task, not merely by sharing Alain-Fournier’s love of England and English culture, but drawn to an artist who disappeared in the Great War on the verge of maturity, since she is the sister of a distinguished young painter, Jean Paul Lafitte, who was lost at about the same age and the same time in a precisely similar way.

If I am a novice in the appreciation of this book, it may be added that even in France the growth of Alain-Fournier’s reputation has been slow. A quiet story of rural life—as on the surface it seems to be—put forth by an unknown author on the eve of the most catastrophic episode of recent history, in which he himself perished, it was not likely to make much stir in men’s minds. Acclaimed from the first by a few fine judges, like Péguy, Madame Rachilde, and Julien Benda, it was only by a slow process of penetration, when the war was well over, that Le Grand Meaulnes began to take the high place which at length it has won. Now, fifteen years after its first publication, there is no doubt about the reputation of this book in France and the neighbouring countries sensitive to French influence. Thus Jaloux, perhaps the best critic of the modern novel, has repeatedly described Le Grand Meaulnes as one of the masterpieces of our time, and a chief source of inspiration to contemporary literature. In Belgium, where strains of temperament congenial to the spirit of Fournier may be found, the influence of this book on the new writers of to-day is pronounced; a delicate and mysterious work, bathed in so intimate and profound an illumination of silence, as one of their young writers puts it, that one almost dreads for it the noise of fame. ‘Le Grand Meaulnes,’ the young Belgian novelist Thialet has written, ‘remains in my mind and my heart as at once the most beautiful memory of a whole epoch that no one has understood and the most impassioned hope for the novel of to-morrow.’ In Holland, a little more afield but again on a soil we can well believe congenial, Dirk Coster, a notable Dutch author of to-day, lately remarked to M. Frédéric Lefèvre in the course of an interview: ‘There is a beautiful novel—I do not know what you think of it in France but everyone knows it here—which I had the luck to read when it appeared, Le Grand Meaulnes. It is like a child’s smile, like a ray of sunshine on the face of a child or a youth. This book of adolescence awakes in me the same impression as the paintings of Douanier Rousseau; it reveals the freshness of soul as of a child who, by some marvellous chance, possessed the power of expression of a man and of a great artist.’ Put in another way, we see in this book the work of a man, a great artist, who had still retained the vision of youth.

So it is that we may best approach Le Grand Meaulnes by knowing something of the man who stands behind it and wrought it out of the substance of his own spirit. It is part of the good fortune of the English translation of his book that to-day we can for the first time come near to the elusive personality of Alain-Fournier. This is due to the recent publication, in four substantial volumes, of his intimate correspondence with his lifelong friend Jacques Rivière, who later became editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française, the most distinguished of French literary periodicals, and until his premature death was one of the most interesting figures in contemporary French letters. By the piety of Madame Isabelle Rivière, sister of one of the friends and wife of the other, the letters of both have been brought together and published, seemingly in full. It is a fascinating record of the development in character and experience of two sensitive youthful figures, one of them at least an exquisite artist, who stood at the centre of the revolutionary change in the orientation of the French literary spirit which took place during the first decade of the present century.

II

Henri Fournier—to use the name by which he first comes before us—was born on October 3, 1886, at Chapelle-d’Angillon, a small place, to the north of Bourges in the Département of the Cher, on the border of Sologne. The Sologne is a region between the Cher and the Loire, once flourishing and with many Huguenots among the population. When they were driven out the region became deserted, a land of marshes and ponds thinly populated under unhealthy conditions, but also a land of tender and delicate solitudes, with many a more or less decayed old mansion or château still marvellous and exquisite amid the wild scenery. In recent years there has been a movement for draining and reclaiming this district; it has become healthy and more populous, though still a favourite country for people who go to shoot wildfowl. We have to note these traits of the Sologne for it was background predestined for the adventure of Le Grand Meaulnes, ‘the country of my dreams,’ wrote Fournier in later life of Nançay and the Sologne, ‘the country from which I am exiled.’ But it was more especially the still smaller village of Épineuil, at the extreme north of the Département, where his parents were for a long time the village teachers, that his childhood and boyhood were passed, leading the life of a little peasant. This region, in the centre of France, the old province of Berry, is in its southern portion the literary land of George Sand. But Fournier was in the north of it, a region of different aspect, quieter, a land of alders, rushes, and reeds, in a horizon which, it has been said, recalls the miniatures in the old French Books of Hours with their delicate little pinnacles against the sky. It was the region which alone Fournier knew in early life and it made on him a profound impression. He loved it, but in some mysterious way, while far from the sea and from international routes, it was the background which favoured the ardour of his adventurous spirit. We know how that flame was fed. At the beginning of July, every year, the books arrived which were later to be distributed as school prizes. These books Henri and Isabelle carried up to the attic to devour greedily beforehand. It was in this way probably that he first read Robinson Crusoe, a book that always meant much for him, though at first merely as a story of actual adventure, and this was the beginning of his attraction to England, which for him was the land of adventure. Naturally it was towards the ocean that his thoughts were directed (it was by no accident, as Pilon remarks, that Frantz de Galais belonged to a family of sailors) and at the age of thirteen he resolved to become a naval officer. After a short period at school in Paris he went to Brest to prepare for this career. But here, although he had done well in mathematics, he seems to have found the work uncongenial and felt out of sympathy with his surroundings. He left Brest with regret, but with his adventurous temper unquenched, and throughout his work we catch subtle suggestions of ships and the sea. Henceforth his adventures in real life, even for those who most sensitively follow his career and his intimate letters, were largely beyond exact analysis; we catch glimpses, there is a far music in our ears, we inhale a delicate fragrance—and that is all. ‘Perhaps I am not altogether a real person,’ said Benjamin Constant, and we are told that when Fournier came on that remark it was with a shock; he felt it applied to himself. ‘But,’ he said on reflection, ‘perhaps I am able to pass where you see only an abyss.’

It was from lack of anything better rather than from any immediate sense of vocation that Fournier turned from the sea to letters, thinking, no doubt, that all his early dreams had gone for nothing. It was not so. We do not understand Fournier unless we remember Bougainville, the great French navigator who found and fascinatingly described a Paradise in the Pacific, and unless we bear in mind the scheme of Robinson Crusoe, the great English epic which is the prototype—however remote it may seem—of the adventure of Meaulnes in Sologne, in the heart of France.

At the age of seventeen, then, in 1903, Henri Fournier went to a well-known Secondary School, the Lycée Lakanal, delightfully situated to the north of Paris, with the idea of preparing for the École Normale Supérieure. Here his independent temper quickly manifested itself in revolt against various antiquated regulations and humiliating obligations; he placed himself at the head of a group of rebels and circulated revolutionary petitions aimed at the scholastic officials. Jacques Rivière, who from Bordeaux had entered the Lycée at the same age and the same time and with the same object, observed his comrade’s proceedings with interest, even with secret sympathy, but his own temperament was different and his character more timid. These dissemblances at first held them apart. But before long a revelation, which came to both at once, served to bring them together.

When we are young we do not immediately know where we shall hear those voices of our own time to which our virginal hearts will deeply and instinctively respond. They must come from figures of our own time, older than we are or they would not have found expression, but not old enough to have ‘arrived,’ so that we do not at once learn of their existence. Our teachers, as well as popular fame, thrust upon us the figures of the last generation, by whom they had themselves been inspired in youth, and these are, in general, precisely the figures to whom our instincts are most rebellious—though later we grow able to estimate them better—while the great figures of the past can only be genuinely understood when we have ourselves reached maturity. Young Fournier seems to have discovered nothing of literature or art at Épineuil, and at Lakanal the figures that came before him—Racine, Rousseau, Chateaubriand, even Flaubert—had nothing to say to his heart, for the great masters presented in a scholastic framework can scarcely make any strong appeal to the young mind. But one day a professor read to the class Henri de Régnier’s Tel qu’en Songe. A new note struck both boys at once. They turned towards each other and from that moment were friends. ‘We came upon words,’ as Rivière later put it, ‘without even knowing before that such existed, chosen expressly for ourselves, words which not only caressed our sensibility but revealed us to ourselves. An unknown spot was touched in our souls; a harp we had not suspected within us awoke and replied.’ It was the process of religious ‘conversion’ which so often occurs in youth. With Rivière, who was less of a poet and artist, the process was not final; a spirit of disquiet, receptive and yet always quickly critical of what he received, he was much troubled in later years over more specifically religious problems. But with Fournier—though he, too, was at one period touched by religion—the experience was decisive; he had, once and for all, found the path to his own Heaven.

Henri de Régnier is perhaps the most exquisite poet of the so-called Symbolist Movement which at that moment reached its full expression in French literature. It was natural that these two youths should respond harmoniously to the spirit of their own time. But it must not be concluded that Alain-Fournier (or Rivière either) is to be classed among the Symbolists. Symbolism was the porch through which Fournier entered to take possession of his own mysterious domain, but while echoes of the Symbolists’ delicate music linger about that domain, it has a vigorous life of its own completely independent of the fashions of a movement which had in it much that was merely decorative and artificial and evanescent, though it opened a new home of the soul for the young poetic natures of the end of the last century. We are not surprised to find the youthful Fournier, who had not yet discovered Mallarmé or Verlaine or Rimbaud or even Baudelaire, reading with congenial enthusiasm Henri de Régnier and Maeterlinck and Viélé-Griffin, but more especially Laforgue and Jammes. These two really embodied aspects of his own temperament, and if at this time they may seem to have excited a certain degree of formative influence over him, while Rivière was at first carried away by Barrès, they were merely aiding him to discover his own path. In Laforgue he found a temperament closely allied to his own, tender, timid, proud, ironical (‘ironical because wounded, and only on that account’). Physically, Rivière remarked, Fournier was far from being timid, but he had a deeper timidity of the spirit, in the sense that while he was strongly attracted to women he could not endure the idea of being disconcerted or ill-used, and required for the development of love the perfection of purity and innocence. In this way, as will happen to the idealist, he manifested the cruelty of those who demand more than life will yield. At this period of youth he formed a relationship, of quite innocent nature, with a student girl who became his companion on Sunday excursions and whom he tried to form to the shape of his ideal. But he suffered from the limits she imposed to his imagination; he desired more sincerity, more openness, and her little feminine coquetries hurt him.

Francis Jammes was a rather later but still youthful influence; he appealed to Fournier on the naturalistic side, to that sensitive realism which was never submerged in his idealism. Fournier was enchanted by Jammes’ close and fervid grip of Nature and the felicity with which he has sometimes been able to incarnate the very scent and colour and shape of things in verse which, it has been said, ‘may sometimes be grasped like a pole and sometimes be crushed between the fingers like a sprig of mint,’ while Jammes’ great maxim, ‘We do not separate art from life,’ was adopted by Fournier and carried to a point of exquisite perfection which Jammes never attained. It was at this time—while absorbing Gide and Claudel and Rimbaud and Ibsen—that Fournier began to seek after his own personal style in the art of writing. Now also, at the age of nineteen, he began occasionally to write verse, always in free form, and, while personal and genuine, hardly the utterance of a born poet. But it remains interesting to us precisely because it is personal and genuine. Some poems have been printed since his death and are important because they record (especially ‘A Travers les Etés,’ one of the earliest) the precise germ of the future Grand Meaulnes.

One day (it was Ascension week in 1905), Rivière narrates, while walking in Paris along the Cours-la-Reine, Fournier met a marvellously beautiful girl whom he was impelled to follow. He even succeeded by some lucky ruse in obtaining her name and address. The next time he saw her, although her air was extremely reserved, he approached and spoke. Strange to say, for she appears to have been of superior social class, he was favoured with some words of response which led him to think he was not altogether disdained. He felt that this lovely apparition was exerting an effort over herself to say: ‘We must separate; we have been foolish.’ She left Paris; Fournier had the greatest difficulty in finding her traces. At last, in 1907, he learnt—on the very day after he had unexpectedly failed to pass his École Normale examination—that, as he at once wrote briefly and in deep grief to tell his friend Rivière: ‘Mademoiselle de Q. was married last winter. What is now left to me, dear friend, but you?’ That corollary was wrong. The great adventure of Alain-Fournier’s life was indeed over. But Admiral Meaulnes had set forth to seek Yvonne de Galais, and a masterpiece of art was slowly growing beneath the surface.

The woman who incarnated for Fournier the essence of a mysterious domain which was hardly of this world (in his later letters he always refers to her as Yvonne de Galais) continued to live in his memory, though there were episodes in his life, we clearly discern, which left behind an oppressive burden later to be echoed in Le Grand Meaulnes. But the anniversary of the day on which he met the young girl in the Cours-la-Reine was a sacred season for Fournier. Later, the year before his death, he met her again, married and more inaccessible than ever, and wrote to Rivière: ‘That was really the only being in the world who could have given me peace and repose. It is now probable that I shall never achieve peace in this world.’

III

We have gone a little ahead in the story of Fournier’s life. Another significant event belonged to the year 1905. From childhood he had felt an attraction to things English; now he resolved to spend the summer holidays—from July to September—in London, and secured an easy post as French correspondent for a London merchant, into whose house he was admitted as a boarder on friendly terms. All the impressions of this episode are duly recorded in letters to Rivière. They are mainly favourable; indeed in many respects England and the English made an intimate appeal to the French youth.

When we read the detailed reports of his impressions we note a touch of critical amusement from time to time, but always mixed with sympathetic appreciation. He lived in the western suburb of Chiswick within easy reach of Kew Gardens and Richmond, and was delighted with the green freshness of England and the pleasant little villas, with white-curtained windows, each in its own garden, so unlike Paris. He quickly began to observe English girls, with whom he came in touch both at the office and in the house, and the impression they made on him was not altogether favourable. He seems to have felt that—‘with their masculine gestures and noses in the air’—they were often incompletely aware of the fact that they were women and only concerned to be good comrades. They were too far away from the Frenchwoman, whom he describes as ‘unknown beneath her veil, silent and remote, shut up in her distant salon, and so femininely enwrapped in her dark dress.’ There are exquisite young girls in England, he remarks, but they become at once too comradely. He himself, on the other hand, seemed to them cold and reserved.

England, he said later, enlarged his vision of life. He studied a new national temperament. He learnt to love Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Rossetti, and Morris. He grew seriously interested in painting. He was specially drawn to the Pre-Raphaelites. To-day there is a revulsion of feeling against that wrongly named movement, and it is no longer easy to realise the new revelation of beauty and naturalism which Burne-Jones and his fellow-workers brought to the youth of forty years ago, disgusted with the dead academic conventions of the epoch. For Fournier it was still new, and it embodied in painting something of the same union of realistic detail with dreamlike vision which he himself was already foreseeing in the novel. His favourite in contemporary French art at this time, Maurice Denis, may be said to have similar points of affinity. Fournier left England (in excellent reputation with his hosts) ‘with much tenderness of heart,’ for ‘in many points I resemble these English,’ and he carried away, not only the memory of exquisite countrysides, but a new confidence and serenity in the road he was himself to follow.

Next year Fournier settled in Paris with his grandmother and sister and attended as a day-pupil the upper courses at Louis-le-Grand. His aim was still the École Normale. But when the day of examination arrived he was suffering with brain fatigue from the strain and he failed in the oral. The career he had aimed at was definitely closed to him. ‘I do not see you a professor,’ Rivière had written to him, and on looking back after Fournier’s death he wrote that the design was mad, for to a spirit of that temper ‘no paths could be easy save those that had never been explored.’

In 1907, Fournier wrote and published in the Grande Revue (with a dedication to Maurice Denis) his first personal little essay in prose, though still a rather poetic prose, ‘Le Corps de la Femme.’ With that indifference to ‘pure beauty’ which Rivière said he hated in his friend, Fournier here revolted against the classic image of woman, the nude pagan idol which he associated with Taine and Louys and Gourmont, and celebrated a more modern ideal which had passed through centuries of Christianity, and emerged frail and tender, yet with something of the simplicity of the peasant and the fragrance of nightfall in spring, all the delicate essence of her body expressed in her garment. In 1907 also he began his two years of military service and endured the miseries, fatigues, and forced oppressive comradeships which that life brings to men of his temperament, emerging, however, at the end as a sub-lieutenant, and carrying away with him not only an enlarged knowledge of the France he loved (there are exquisite passages of description in his letters) but a precious familiarity with the lives of the men of the people, his comrades.

At one moment of discouragement Fournier proposed to go out to China to enter the Customs Service under Sir Robert Hart, and at another almost accepted a post in an English school at Margate. Through everything he became increasingly occupied in the absorption or the criticism of contemporary letters and art and music. At an early period he recognised that his own field was the novel, and he realised, with remarkable lucidity in self-judgment, the precise nature of the art he was bringing to the novel. That art was so natural to him that we cannot discern the moment at which Le Grand Meaulnes began to grow in his mind, though we may follow its development and modifications for five or six years before it was finally completed and published.

But a definite step in the growth of the book took place in 1910. He had not yet completely left Symbolism behind and was struggling with a method which he felt to be difficult and artificial. At this time he was much impressed by Marguerite Audoux’s Marie-Claire and R. L. Stevenson’s Treasure Island; they gave him a new impetus towards a method he had already felt within him, and now he writes to Rivière: ‘In the end I have scrapped it all, for, one fine evening, I found my road of Damascus. I began to write simply, directly, as in my letters, in little tight voluptuous paragraphs, a simple story which might be my own. Now it goes by itself.’

Alain-Fournier lived in the Observatory quarter of Paris in a quiet and isolated street recalling the streets of Bourges, and his room, we are told, was simple and neat and orderly. He might often be seen in the Luxembourg Gardens, a slender young man dressed in black, with a dark serious face and slight moustache, ‘the face of an imperious young prince,’ it has been called. Pilon says he recalled the figures described by Pater in his Imaginary Portraits when dealing with Watteau. ‘You could not see him without loving him,’ said Paul Fort. But Paul Fort had no intimate knowledge of the man he found so lovable; to come near to Fournier may well have been a difficult experience; his sensitive tenderness was not incompatible with hardness and violence. There was a certain awkwardness in him—even in his hands, we are told—and he lacked patience. ‘Only women who have loved me,’ he himself said, ‘know to what point I can be cruel. Because I want the whole. You see,’ he adds, ‘my hero Meaulnes!’ And Valentine in the story, I may further add, was based on Fournier’s personal experience. In a letter to his sister he narrates the episode with the real Jeanne B. whom he treated so badly. Fournier mentally prescribed to women as Rivière says, the angle at which they were to enter his life, and at the smallest lapse on their part he would overwhelm them with reproaches for their innocent failure to attain his ideal. The ideal demand, he himself remarks in 1907, which he would make of his wife, was ‘audacious initiative’ blended with ‘superhuman tact.’

He formed various literary relationships during the last years of his life, the most notable being with Péguy, whom he first met in 1910. Péguy, for all his obstinate temperament, was often influenced by Fournier and always ready to follow his advice. Fournier on his side found in Péguy the most congenial of contemporary writers. He felt a strong sympathy with his instinctive, childlike peasant’s nature; he admired his spiritual materialism (‘a Rabelais of ideas,’ he calls him), and with that tendency to find the miraculous in everyday life which Péguy carried to so high a point Fournier was entirely at one. Péguy was not without influence on Le Grand Meaulnes and, during Fournier’s last years, seems to have been his nearest friend. Rivière’s sympathy with Péguy was only partial, and at this period the correspondence between Fournier and Rivière begins to languish. The old personal ties always subsisted, but the profound temperamental difference was becoming more clearly revealed. Rivière admits that Fournier’s attitude sometimes ‘gets on his nerves,’ while Fournier jealously guarded his own spiritual integrity and could not be moved from his own path. But to Rivière we owe a sensitively appreciative and adequate account of Fournier’s life which cannot be superseded.

Over the last years we seem to feel a hovering obscurity. Rivière in after days reproached himself—though the reproach was unnecessary—with a neglect that led his friend to fall, we gather, into what Rivière regarded as evil courses and to come under disturbing influences. Amid episodes with women which brought him no satisfaction because, as he said, he had ‘once met an Antigone,’ we find Fournier still actively pursuing his aims in literature and with the promise of success. But often we only see him through an atmosphere of melancholy. He realises that he has lost his childhood vision of the world and at times he is inclined to recover what he has lost by turning to religion. He obtains a copy of the Bible and is touched by incidents in the Gospels; he is deeply impressed by Dostoevski, especially by The Idiot. At one moment it even occurs to him that he would like to enter a religious order and seek new adventure as a missionary.

When the Great War broke out in the summer of 1914 Fournier happened to be in the south of France. Like others—like Rivière, also in the south and who chanced to be in the same army division—he was hurried among many hardships to the front, and found himself eventually in the Meuse, near Vaux-les-Palameix, at a later period of the war occupied by the Americans. Fournier’s captain was an unintelligent man whose own idea, against the better judgment of his lieutenants, was: ‘Hunt out the Boches!’ Fournier, ‘timid but fearless,’ for whom life was a ‘great game,’ never drew back. The inevitable end swiftly ensued. Fournier led a company; the captain was in command. On the 22d of September at Saint-Rémy a vague figure was seen in the enemy’s lines. The captain rushed forward, revolver in hand, followed by Fournier, but only by a small number of men. They were being led into an ambush on the edge of the wood. Most of them were shot down. Fournier fell struck in the forehead, according to the only report that could be obtained, but his body was not recovered. Until the end of the war his friends cherished the hope that, like his friend Rivière, he had been imprisoned and conveyed to Germany. When after the war, Rivière came to search the ravaged and desolate ground for traces of his friend he found little memorials set up by the Germans—some ‘to a French hero’—but they were all of later date than Fournier’s disappearance.

Five years earlier he had written in a letter: ‘I am seeking for the key to these escapes into desired lands—and perhaps it is Death, after all.’

IV

There are people to whom Le Grand Meaulnes seems a simple and insignificant story, just as there are people who inhale in vain the most exquisite fragrance of flowers, or, to keep within the sphere of art, find only trivial the music of Mozart which transports others beyond the earth. For, as Racine said, in defending his Bérénice from critics who could see nothing in it but bald simplicity, all creation is out of nothing. And while Jehovah on the seventh day beheld everything he had made as very good, for an unseeing eye it may still have been chaos.

That is why it has seemed worth while to trace the career of Alain-Fournier with some care. It is worth while, that is, to give the reader the clue to the process of creation here achieved. Fournier disliked intellectual abstractions; he moved in the sphere of the intangible. Yet he was an acute critic with the most precise knowledge of the subtle course of his own mind. Although receptive to outside influences, he only admitted those that were akin to his own temperament. He knew from an early period his exact aim, and the exact equipment he possessed for attaining it, although he was not at first sure of the path by which it was to be reached. The letters written to Rivière from school days on to maturity—besides being one side of a most notable record of friendship—form a fascinating document of the sensitively self-conscious evolution of an original artist and are a real contribution to the psychology of art.

The posthumous volume of Fournier’s fragments is entitled, in accordance with the headings of some of them, Miracles, and that title chances to indicate the nature of his work. In a supreme masterpiece of literature which describes and symbolises what is called ‘miracles,’ it is told how the divine artist may turn simple water into wine, or make a little everyday bread suffice to feed a multitude. Such always is the miracle of the finest art, stupendous only in its simplicity. Le Grand Meaulnes holds us, not as a brilliant achievement of rural romance such as George Sand accomplished in the same region of France with La Mare au Diable, nor as a fantastic fairy-tale allegory such as Theodore Powys has presented superbly in Mr. Weston’s Good Wine. Alain-Fournier put forth no magnificent effort. He remained true to his early maxim of the unity of life and art. It is possible to say that there is nothing in Le Grand Meaulnes from one end to the other but the trivial details of real life as its author had known life. Only they had fallen slowly from childhood on to a peculiarly sensitive and vibrant organism and when at last they were transformed into art a miracle was achieved and the water had become wine.

We realise the fidelity to his own life of the episodes and the atmosphere in Fournier’s novel when we read the correspondence. Not only is he himself in the narrative all through, so that, as he once remarks, he hardly knew whether he was Meaulnes or young Seurel or Frantz or the writer of the book, but we may note how in the smallest details he seeks to come as close as he can to his own personal life. The place-names of the book are, with little or no change, those around his early home. So are the personal names; Fournier’s father was Auguste, and Meaulnes, after some changes, was finally called Augustin; Uncle Florentin, with his large family and large shop, corresponds to the real Uncle Florent of Nançay (‘the land of my dreams’), as described in Fournier’s letters. The sounds and sights and odours that sank into the sensitive spirit of the real youth—all the traits of this remote and lonely spot of old France—live again transposed in the novel. Nor must we conclude that Alain-Fournier was merely a regional novelist. His outlook was too wide for this; his alert intelligence and emotional sensibility were equally alive in the totally different atmosphere of cities. He projected a novel in which he would do for Paris, his later home, what he was doing in Le Grand Meaulnes for his early home; he had planned, and even begun, several novels, and a fragment of one (Colombe Blanchet) has been published.

Rivière has somewhere remarked that it is not easy to describe the method of Fournier in words that might not equally apply to the method of Maeterlinck’s early plays. The methods are, however, totally different. Maeterlinck’s structures were of romantic material, heightened by the skilful use of silence, even (to use the phrase of Villiers) a crescendo of silences. Fournier’s structure was severely realistic in every detail, and it was the interstices of the structure itself that were subtly interpenetrated with dream-life. Rivière, always a severe critic of his friend, told him in early life that he had too much ‘sensiblerie,’ that he was inclined to be sentimental, and to find everything ‘touching,’ too much in the vein of Dickens’s David Copperfield and Goncourt’s Germinie Lacerteux. That certainly was the danger for Fournier; but he was saved by his own acute self-criticism, in spite of his profound contempt of the intellect, and, above all, by his instinct as artist, for, as he himself replied to Rivière, ‘sensiblerie’ could not come in where perfect art was attained. All his life he was haunted by dreams, but it was his good fortune to be instinctively aware that, as Paul Valéry has put it, ‘to tell one’s dreams one must be infinitely awake.’ Fournier has been called the brother of Gérard de Nerval, and it is probably true that Nerval is the one figure in French literature with whom Fournier may be instructively compared. Gérard de Nerval was a fascinating and original dreamer, but there was this profound distinction that he was never fully awake and his final suicide was the natural outcome not only of his life but of his art. Fournier himself found Gérard de Nerval’s Sylvie rather conventional and artificial. But it must be remembered that Fournier in spite of his eager interest in all that books may yield, had a deep distrust of ‘literature,’ and felt that it was his own business as an artist to hold aloof from it. ‘Every effort to bend my thought to literature, ancient or modern, is vicious.’ While as to abstractions and formulas, ‘the formula must unroll itself as slowly as life.’ But this attitude involved neither an insensitiveness to what others were doing—that must already be clear—nor any egotistic concentration on himself. ‘The novel that I have carried in my head for three years’ he wrote as early as 1905, ‘was at first only me, me, and me, but it has gradually been depersonalised and enlarged and is no longer the novel which everyone plans at eighteen.’ And, again in the same year, he explains that his aim in seeking to express tangible life in the form of a novel, is to produce, not himself, but ‘the rich treasury of accumulated lives’ he already held within him in the form of a moving ‘dream’—and such dream must embody everything in the vision of the people described which is not mere social or animal mechanism. With all his vivid sensibility to the subtlest facts of real life it was by his ‘dream’ that Fournier was led, and that dream, as he explained, was at once the reality of the past and the desire of the future, since we are made of old memories, and impressions that are unconscious, so that Desire is Recollection. ‘Behind every moment of life,’ he wrote in 1907, ‘I seek the life of my Paradise; behind every landscape I feel the landscape of my Paradise. I am content.’ Or, as in another mood he puts it: ‘If I have been childish and weak and foolish, at least I have, at moments, had the strength in this infamous city to create my life, like a marvellous fairy-tale.’

In every poet—in the heart of everyone who shares in the poet’s spirit—there is a certain restless homesickness of the soul for which each seeks to find his own expression; Poe, for instance, in To Helen, Shelley over and over again, and once at least in the record of a personal experience, Epipsychidion. Alain-Fournier was similarly inspired by his own life, and if we seek in prose an expression of this nostalgia of the soul we can perhaps nowhere find it so well expressed as in a book which may now be counted among the permanent human possessions, Le Grand Meaulnes.

This Introduction is mainly based on Jacques Rivière et Alain-Fournier, Correspondance 1905-1914 (1928), the Introduction by Rivière to Miracles (1924), and a booklet by E. Pilon, Alain-Fournier (1920).