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.