A Christian Dramatist
LeClercq, J. G. C.
A CHRISTIAN DRAMATIST By J. G. C. LeCLERCQ IT IS, perhaps, not strictly accurate to describe Henri Gheon as the founder of the modern French Christian theatre, for there have been writers...
...Long before, Louis LeCardonnel had broadened out and abandoned the Symbolists to achieve his "union sacree" between "the poet and the priest...
...However far one may share these views, one is grateful for their exclusion from his Temoignage d'un Converti...
...Le chretien rentre dans le rang...
...he has covered so wide a field and the consequences of his effort are so significant that he emerges as a powerful originator...
...The Action Francaise group, J-K...
...But at last the moment came...
...He met Lieutenant Dupouey, a friend of Gide's but a believer...
...To begin with, he is an important literary figure who can meet the educated public, indeed so sophisticate an audience as that of the Vieux Colombier, on its own ground...
...To him, Moreas's disciples /are puerile...
...The one important ante-bellum event in Gheon's life is his journey to Florence with Gide...
...Inr a general sense, what brought proselytes to the Maurras group was based, in the beginning at least, largely upon political and nationalistic argument...
...Born and bred in the Catholic faith, Gheon fell away without qualms...
...With the exception of certain pages that come right at the end—and they are not many, though he has caught, in some of them, the fervor and the glow of En Route—it may not even be a very good second-rate piece of writing, from the technical view...
...Yet he delayed, even after he felt it was wrong to delay...
...The important point to be noted here is that while the presence of Dupouey was so fleeting, Gheon's conversion was gradual...
...The desperate cry of Andre Gide—"If I did not write, I would kill myself 1"—is not for Gheon...
...Each element depends upon the other and enriches it...
...A singular and an eloquent conversion...
...on the other, "La Bergere au Pays des Loups" performed in the basilica of Pibrac under the auspices of the Archbishop of Toulouse, can appeal to an entire community...
...Moreover, it is the manifest and logical result of the intellectual, psychological, and emotional phenomena that we shall here describe...
...It was at this place that he made the sensational friendship which brought him into the Church...
...By so doing, one cannot but follow their example...
...It is not, however, with Gheon's admirable literary performance as such that we propose to deal in this article...
...Understanding will follow soon enough...
...I have striven, my God, neither to lose you nor to find you again...
...he can see none of his plays as truly French...
...He has evolved a national theatre possessing at once a religious, social, and artistic significance...
...it is a chart, one might say, of his spiritual health...
...Dostoyevsky becomes odious to him...
...The day I was able to exclaim 'I believe!' my reason found its aim and its limits...
...What does belong there, what makes the book so vital a document is Gheon's manly sincerity and his proud, tender subordination to his ideal...
...Creation is unavailing, unless its mainspring is a more powerful and affirmative impulse...
...What this particular Christian has accomplished in the ranks is another and an equally wonderful story...
...if only they had read us the Acts of Saint Cecilia, the story of the Passion of Anne-Catherine Emmerich, or even the legendary Fioretti...
...Later, in his book of criticism, Parti Pris, we see the fruit of his literary judgment...
...of Corneille he will say "it remains to be proved whether Ibsen will have been more noxious to France than Le Cid...
...Yet, lacking discipline of order as it does, it is more than that: it is a human document, and as such, it possesses a value quite apart from its literary quality...
...It became free and only then did its work begin...
...Aesthetically, it has a great influence upon him...
...Artist and Catholic are one and the same in him...
...One must watch them praying, one must watch them dying...
...A CHRISTIAN DRAMATIST By J. G. C. LeCLERCQ IT IS, perhaps, not strictly accurate to describe Henri Gheon as the founder of the modern French Christian theatre, for there have been writers before him occupied in creating plays of a religious nature destined to supply the Catholic with dramatic material of his own faith...
...He saw him three times...
...Thus, on one hand uLe Pauvre sous l'Escalier" and "Le Mort a Cheval" can win the approval of Jacques Copeau's public...
...Nietzsche, too, was a hero of his, though he was saved from a total subservience by his intense patriotism ("plutot republicain que monarchiste, plutot 'droits de l'homme' que nationaliste integral") and by the sense that the German philosopher had come at the moment when Gheon's generation's floating religion needed propping, rather than that this generation followed Zarathustra...
...He was first at Charleroi, later at Nieuport...
...Huysmans, Louis LeCardonnel, or Max Jacob display considerations of a very different nature...
...But he is the same cynical figure as before...
...He is already, in 1909, far from the narrows of literary sectarianism...
...It deserves comment for itself and apart from the personality of its author...
...It is the blending of these diverse elements which stands Gheon in best stead as a capital dramatist and a capital Christian...
...It was the example of Dupouey...
...Dupouey was killed...
...Submit...
...Sublime virtue of the fighting men...
...No play is too serious to exclude a richly humorous vein, none too buffoonish to fail in presenting a sincere and tender idealism...
...This is the sole lesson Gheon wished to draw from a personal story in which his own personality counted for nothing...
...At his mother's funeral, side by side with Peguy who was praying, he gazed at the Eucharist, saying: "Tu n'es pas...
...Again, he can address his plays to special groups, as, for instance, the Catholic youth in school and lycee...
...When war broke out, Gheon, as a physician, joined an ambulance...
...his poems in honor of his native land are filled with hope, with love, with reverence...
...Surely, these are no slight virtues...
...For Gheon did not arrive at Catholicism through his work, as did Rette, for instance...
...Henri Gheon, however, became a Catholic for reasons at once more simple and more complicated...
...Yet, all his dramatic work, from the most deeply reverent to the most broadly farcical, teems with common qualities...
...With all its defects of form, Le Temoignage d'un Converti is natural, sincere, and tender...
...L'individu s'efface...
...It gives the history, step by step, of his moral progress...
...Gheon is French to the bone...
...but neither En Route, nor anything in the Cahiers, nor Au Pays des Lys Noirs offers a simpler, clearer, and more certain example of the laying bare of a human heart, or a truer history of the aspiration of a human soul...
...They do not belong there...
...His word about religious education is eloquent: "They discoursed, in scholarly fashion I believe, on original sin, on theologic virtues, on grace...
...Too timid for politics, too weak to shake off the yoke of aesthetic preoccupations and to attack the vital problems, though he subsequently followed Peguy in his evolution, though he admired the champions (except Maurras), he struck no blow...
...He belonged to what was called the Naturist school, professing an intensely human and sane art...
...He resisted to the end...
...there was, in his outlook, something of the Huguenot dryness with which Beraud reproaches Gide...
...The Dreyfus case brought him out on the side of Zola, for the same reasons, he says, that actuated Deroulede in the opposite camp...
...A remarkable book, but in no sense a literary masterpiece...
...Corneille, he thinks, hated France...
...Yet, he has attacked the problem from numerous and diverse angles...
...Huysmans's reaction was in its initial impulse mainly aesthetic...
...Jacob's is nothing if not cerebral...
...Foi en la France", published five years before the war, shows an ardent vers libriste returning to traditional rhythms...
...Polyeucte", he goes on, "has had no real influence on the French mind...
...He is positive while Gide is negative, he is gradual while d'Aurevilly is abrupt...
...Whereas philosophy, reserved for mature minds, is postponed to the end of one's studies, they made us gaze, at the age of thirteen, upon the high summits of theology I'1 Moreover, his father was an unbeliever, and all his mother's piety, pitted against the aridity of his teaching and the indifference of his father, proved unavailing...
...From such versatility a certain unevenness must necessarily result...
...And Gheon, meditating over Dupouey's life, appreciated the purity and the loftiness of it...
...he says...
...it is the account, the rationale of a slow yet inevitable surrender to forces that transFebruary 3, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 349 cend our material life...
...Before the war, Gheon was a minor poet of the Gide group...
...In his Temoignage d'un Converti, Gheon scarcely touches upon the aesthetic side of the question...
...C'est fait...
...Huysmans is a greater artist, Peguy, a greater poet, Rette, a subtler technician...
...Even then, before his conversion, he was not far removed, in the matter of literary doctrine, from the critic who later writes: "In its supreme form, art should be the homage rendered by man to the Divine...
...Finally, with yet other work, he reaches the great mass of the people under conditions corresponding to those that governed the mediaeval miracles, mysteres, and soties...
...he recalled that what had always moved the men of his race was poetry that had in it a prayer...
...He contributed to the Ermitage...
...And Barbey d'Aurevilly's sudden realization—"There comes a day when a man must become a Christian or blow his brains out"—is in no way comparable to Gheon's process...
...Lacking in coordination from a literary point of view, his book offers, from a mental point of view, a picture of a perfectly governed situation...
...Its account is of the simplest...
...And try to submit joyfully...
...but it does more...
...it takes life and refreshment from his faith...
...He recounts the experience in his remarkable book, L'Homme Ne de la Guerre: Temoignage d'un Converti, an account of how he weathered the Yser-Artois campaign of 1915...
...LeCardonnel's, much as Rette's, but deeper and sounder, was intellectual...
...On the contrary, his work sprang from his conversion...
...The tribulations of war, personal sorrows, disappointment, and anguish were not what moved him...
...This fact marks him and his literary endeavor as quite different from other recent converts...
...he admired Gorky, Chekhov, Hamsun...
...he was content to sing his country's homage...
...For a long time he thought of this man, practically a stranger, yet to him the supreme friend, a saint, a sudden manifestation of divinity to lead him into higher ways...
Vol. 3 • February 1926 • No. 13
