Mauriac's Tragic Mood
WRIGHT, GORDON
Mauriac's Tragic Mood CAIN, WHERE IS YOUR BROTHER? By Francois Mauriac Coward-McCann. 156 pp. $3.75. Reviewed By GORDON WRIGHT Professor of History, Stanford University "It would be deceit...
...Yet it is heartening to rediscover how often the values of a great Catholic moralist can parallel those of non-Catholic humanists, and to recognize once again how much the various spiritual families of the free world possess in common...
...There is also a curiously ambivalent essay on the Germans, stressing the "total subversion of the German spirit" in the Nazi era, and offering no clear prescription for the treatment of "this strange and monstrous patient...
...and a less convincing attempt to analyze Hitler as an unsuccessful artist diverted into politics...
...there is only a pervasive mood, consistent with all of Mauriac's past writing, but perhaps more intense and tragic in tone...
...Mauriac's grim and somber mood will not appeal to all tastes, nor will his prescription for salvation...
...Only in the Soviet case, argues Mauriac, does that law prevail in absolute fashion...
...Some of Mauriac's musings are directed toward individuals rather than Man, or toward precise events rather than the universe...
...One senses constantly the fervent faith that protects Mauriac against despair...
...How many of Mauriac's readers need to be shorn of such illusions may be open to serious question...
...There is a perceptive portrait of Marshall Pétain, "a tragic figure wandering eternally halfway between treason and sacrifice...
...against clericalism, which diverts religion from its true objective...
...Mauriac's dream, though perhaps less easily achieved, is more appealing...
...a brief sketch of de Gaulle, whose "absence of demagogy disconcerts our people," unaccustomed to having their leaders show them so much respect...
...We are in a world which is, to be sure, criminal but one that is also penetrated by Grace": This is the leitmotif of the work, a leitmotif almost Manichean in spirit...
...Mauriac reminds us, a bit ironically, of Ernest Renan's favorite dream: Some day a handful of scientists will hold the secret of planetary destruction, and will thus compel mankind to obey their beneficent rule...
...without Grace, there would be only "the dungeon of a world with no exit...
...Western leaders are restrained to some degree by their spiritual heritage of humanism and Christianity...
...There are warnings against the restrictive term "Western bloc" as a substitute for "Europe...
...against the danger that France may succumb to "the complacent immobility of Narcissus...
...against the thesis that all powerful empires —Anglo-Saxon as well as Soviet— are fundamentally alike, and will submit to no law save that of selfinterest...
...Mauriac describes his reflections as "my partial, incomplete effort to illuminate the inner kingdom with regard to particular people, events, or circumstances that define my own life's drama.' There is no common theme to bind the essays together...
...At any rate, these brooding essays would be likely to shake the most complacent of escapists...
...Homus homini lupus—and yet the human wolf must be saved...
...Reviewed By GORDON WRIGHT Professor of History, Stanford University "It would be deceit and madness," says François Mauriac in this new volume of essays, "for a writer to let those who read him believe that we live in a reassuring and well-proportioned world...
...Behold the return of the time when the earth was peopled with giants: it is the hour of the human hero, the hour of the creature having the modest proportions of a man...
Vol. 45 • August 1962 • No. 16
