There are people to whom _Le Grand Meaulnes_ seems a simple and insignificant story, just as there are people who inhale in vain the most exquisite fragrance of flowers, or, to keep within the sphere of art, find only trivial the music of Mozart which transports others beyond the earth. For, as Racine said, in defending his _Bérénice_ from critics who could see nothing in it but bald simplicity, all creation is out of nothing. And while Jehovah on the seventh day beheld everything he had made as very good, for an unseeing eye it may still have been chaos.

That is why it has seemed worth while to trace the career of Alain-Fournier with some care. It is worth while, that is, to give the reader the clue to the process of creation here achieved. Fournier disliked intellectual abstractions; he moved in the sphere of the intangible. Yet he was an acute critic with the most precise knowledge of the subtle course of his own mind. Although receptive to outside influences, he only admitted those that were akin to his own temperament. He knew from an early period his exact aim, and the exact equipment he possessed for attaining it, although he was not at first sure of the path by which it was to be reached. The letters written to Rivière from school days on to maturity--besides being one side of a most notable record of friendship--form a fascinating document of the sensitively self-conscious evolution of an original artist and are a real contribution to the psychology of art.

The posthumous volume of Fournier’s fragments is entitled, in accordance with the headings of some of them, _Miracles_, and that title chances to indicate the nature of his work. In a supreme masterpiece of literature which describes and symbolises what is called ‘miracles,’ it is told how the divine artist may turn simple water into wine, or make a little everyday bread suffice to feed a multitude. Such always is the miracle of the finest art, stupendous only in its simplicity. _Le Grand Meaulnes_ holds us, not as a brilliant achievement of rural romance such as George Sand accomplished in the same region of France with _La Mare au Diable_, nor as a fantastic fairy-tale allegory such as Theodore Powys has presented superbly in _Mr. Weston’s Good Wine_. Alain-Fournier put forth no magnificent effort. He remained true to his early maxim of the unity of life and art. It is possible to say that there is nothing in _Le Grand Meaulnes_ from one end to the other but the trivial details of real life as its author had known life. Only they had fallen slowly from childhood on to a peculiarly sensitive and vibrant organism and when at last they were transformed into art a miracle was achieved and the water had become wine.

We realise the fidelity to his own life of the episodes and the atmosphere in Fournier’s novel when we read the correspondence. Not only is he himself in the narrative all through, so that, as he once remarks, he hardly knew whether he was Meaulnes or young Seurel or Frantz or the writer of the book, but we may note how in the smallest details he seeks to come as close as he can to his own personal life. The place-names of the book are, with little or no change, those around his early home. So are the personal names; Fournier’s father was Auguste, and Meaulnes, after some changes, was finally called Augustin; Uncle Florentin, with his large family and large shop, corresponds to the real Uncle Florent of Nançay (‘the land of my dreams’), as described in Fournier’s letters. The sounds and sights and odours that sank into the sensitive spirit of the real youth--all the traits of this remote and lonely spot of old France--live again transposed in the novel. Nor must we conclude that Alain-Fournier was merely a regional novelist. His outlook was too wide for this; his alert intelligence and emotional sensibility were equally alive in the totally different atmosphere of cities. He projected a novel in which he would do for Paris, his later home, what he was doing in _Le Grand Meaulnes_ for his early home; he had planned, and even begun, several novels, and a fragment of one (_Colombe Blanchet_) has been published.

Rivière has somewhere remarked that it is not easy to describe the method of Fournier in words that might not equally apply to the method of Maeterlinck’s early plays. The methods are, however, totally different. Maeterlinck’s structures were of romantic material, heightened by the skilful use of silence, even (to use the phrase of Villiers) a _crescendo_ of silences. Fournier’s structure was severely realistic in every detail, and it was the interstices of the structure itself that were subtly interpenetrated with dream-life. Rivière, always a severe critic of his friend, told him in early life that he had too much ‘sensiblerie,’ that he was inclined to be sentimental, and to find everything ‘touching,’ too much in the vein of Dickens’s _David Copperfield_ and Goncourt’s _Germinie Lacerteux_. That certainly was the danger for Fournier; but he was saved by his own acute self-criticism, in spite of his profound contempt of the intellect, and, above all, by his instinct as artist, for, as he himself replied to Rivière, ‘sensiblerie’ could not come in where perfect art was attained. All his life he was haunted by dreams, but it was his good fortune to be instinctively aware that, as Paul Valéry has put it, ‘to tell one’s dreams one must be infinitely awake.’ Fournier has been called the brother of Gérard de Nerval, and it is probably true that Nerval is the one figure in French literature with whom Fournier may be instructively compared. Gérard de Nerval was a fascinating and original dreamer, but there was this profound distinction that he was never fully awake and his final suicide was the natural outcome not only of his life but of his art. Fournier himself found Gérard de Nerval’s _Sylvie_ rather conventional and artificial. But it must be remembered that Fournier in spite of his eager interest in all that books may yield, had a deep distrust of ‘literature,’ and felt that it was his own business as an artist to hold aloof from it. ‘Every effort to bend my thought to literature, ancient or modern, is vicious.’ While as to abstractions and formulas, ‘the formula must unroll itself as slowly as life.’ But this attitude involved neither an insensitiveness to what others were doing--that must already be clear--nor any egotistic concentration on himself. ‘The novel that I have carried in my head for three years’ he wrote as early as 1905, ‘was at first only me, me, and me, but it has gradually been depersonalised and enlarged and is no longer the novel which everyone plans at eighteen.’ And, again in the same year, he explains that his aim in seeking to express tangible life in the form of a novel, is to produce, not himself, but ‘the rich treasury of accumulated lives’ he already held within him in the form of a moving ‘dream’--and such dream must embody everything in the vision of the people described which is not mere social or animal mechanism. With all his vivid sensibility to the subtlest facts of real life it was by his ‘dream’ that Fournier was led, and that dream, as he explained, was at once the reality of the past and the desire of the future, since we are made of old memories, and impressions that are unconscious, so that Desire is Recollection. ‘Behind every moment of life,’ he wrote in 1907, ‘I seek the life of my Paradise; behind every landscape I feel the landscape of my Paradise. I am content.’ Or, as in another mood he puts it: ‘If I have been childish and weak and foolish, at least I have, at moments, had the strength in this infamous city to create _my life_, like a marvellous fairy-tale.’

In every poet--in the heart of everyone who shares in the poet’s spirit--there is a certain restless homesickness of the soul for which each seeks to find his own expression; Poe, for instance, in _To Helen_, Shelley over and over again, and once at least in the record of a personal experience, _Epipsychidion_. Alain-Fournier was similarly inspired by his own life, and if we seek in prose an expression of this nostalgia of the soul we can perhaps nowhere find it so well expressed as in a book which may now be counted among the permanent human possessions, _Le Grand Meaulnes_.

HAVELOCK ELLIS

This Introduction is mainly based on Jacques Rivière et Alain-Fournier, _Correspondance 1905-1914_ (1928), the Introduction by Rivière to _Miracles_ (1924), and a booklet by E. Pilon, _Alain-Fournier_ (1920).

THE WANDERER