The Noble Art of Letters
308 THE NOBLE ART OF LETTERS WHEN Dr. Johnson was asked whether a man ought to write for money he replied that only a fool would write for anything else. But though the Doctor was basing his...
...The public has forgotten them, and the critics are attempting with more than a little difficulty, to unravel a series of complex new aesthetic doctrines...
...Perhaps, however, it has lacked vigor and so must live quietly...
...Yet he is always best, it seems to us, in those sketches of France which glide into his novels so regularly and serenely...
...Bazin has understood why Catholicism must be heroic, but he has also found out why Pius X desired that "his people should pray with beauty...
...Again Bazin appears as a traveler to Italy (his Italiens d'Aujourd'hui is still a first-rate book, available in translation) to Palestine and even to Canada...
...The "purpose aspect," so inseparable from fiction of that period, was sometimes a poignantly phrased advocacy of the country as against the city, or of the family as opposed to lawlessness, but was generally to be found in a purity of fervor and aspiration...
...With these we have no intention of vying...
...You may believe if you will that his work has always reckoned emotionally with dominant nationalistic and class feeling in conservative France, but that is no satisfactory explanation of its consistent ability to renew its youth, its freshness and its simple power so amazingly as the years go on...
...That he found his strength in what others believed to be limitations is evident from this profession of moral confidence: "Courage may be beautiful, effort is not necessarily painful and oppressive, and money is never the better part of a wage earned...
...others have rejoiced in the opposite development...
...And anybody who wishes to discern the peculiar texture of his art need only turn to this book and observe the vision of the desert that is conjured up...
...There was no endeavor to follow Bourget in the use of hard logical outlines to batter home a thesis, but rather an unflagging suggestion that life may be noble and beautiful, even if it exacts sacrifice...
...Rene Bazin is the only man we know of who has lost and gained several diverse publics...
...Who reads those stories nowadays...
...To be sad with hope is," he declares, "the whole formula of life and of the greatest art...
...For several reasons a similar compliment may be paid to Rene Bazin, whose silver jubilee as a member of the French Academy has recently been observed with any number of complimentary dinners, addresses and editorials...
...Nevertheless Mauriac, as modern as anybody, finds that the neglect of Bazin is "most unjust" to a "very fine achievement...
...It may be helpful, however, to bear in mind the commentary which Bazin's writing affords on the literary output of the past forty years...
...Here was an art of poetized observation...
...Is it not, however, the truth to which we hope to return...
...Lyric narrative dealt with only the contour of an emotional experience, and circumscribed that with deftly intertwined shreds of local color...
...He is not a biographer of saints but of those men in whom contemporary holiness seems incarnate...
...The book was a triumph, and Rene Bazin once more had an audience that was larger than the whole of his country...
...That doctrine may be superior to our tortured time...
...Few novelists have ever lived through so complete a reversal of public opinion regarding their work...
...Ability to evoke a landscape, a milieu, in such a way that it seems both visible and lovable is the power behind those Alsatian novels— Les Oberle and its sequel—which drew so glowing a tribute from French patriotic sentiment...
...One must turn rather to a very genuine nobility of personal outlook and artistic sensibility...
...His earlier stories—La Terre Qui Meurt and Donatienne may serve as examples—appeared at a time when the pleasant naturalism of Alphonse Daudet was the vogue and attained to almost equal popularity...
...But though the Doctor was basing his remarks upon personal experience, it would never have occurred to him to deny other than pecuniary motives to the profession...
...It is a real place, of sand, mountains and Arabs, but it is also a landscape discerned in a dream, unforgettable and appealing as it was to the Pere de Foucauld himself...
...This point of view colors also his more immediately religious writing...
...The short Pius X is, unfortunately, merely a kind of obituary essay, but the Pere de Foucauld is one of the century's truly great, revealing, original books...
...Johnson was asked whether a man ought to write for money he replied that only a fool would write for anything else...
...It is as simple a recipe as nature itself, though of course as a nature redeemed...
...Doumic pays tribute editorially to a life and a work, "one of which is worthy of the other, and the perfect harmony existing between which is a beautiful and moving example...
...Bazin himself channelized his most important gift into two virgin literary territories...
...When he came upon the materials for this life of the "Saint of the Sahara," Bazin must have shouted with sheer literary joy...
...Indeed he was the eighteenth century's best exemplar of idealism stoically upheld...
...Many men have passed from unstinted popularity to oblivion...
Vol. 10 • July 1929 • No. 12
