François Mauriac and the Classical Tradition

Abstract

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: French 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 period 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 Valéry and Gide were not wanting; Le Crève-Cœur provided the best war poetry our tremendous modern conflicts have thus far occasioned; and François Mauriac published yet another novel.