586
PARTISAN REVIEW
own conscience, essentially Protestant, though Mauriac sees her always
in terms of Catholicism. The other important personality in the book is
a young boy too "bad" to be Evil; he so scrupulously avoids both pietism
and even the ordinary requiremen ts of faith that we know, as is usually
the case with religious novelists, that he will turn out to be acceptably
devout. I am at a loss to understand the ease with which religious writers
claim blasphemers for their own. They seem to arrive at this paradox
by a kind of primitive psychology rather analogous to the assumption
that the more arrogant a person appears the more likely he is to be
suffering from feelings of inferiority. In a note on Rimbaud in
God and
Mammon
Mauriac shows the same gift for legerdemain. After quoting
Rimbaud as saying, "Happily this life is the only one ... " he goes on to
imply that Rimbaud not only had faith but faith of a rare sort.
About Gerard Hopkins' translation I am not equipped to comment
except to say, and no doubt irrelevantly, that I felt a mind like Mauriac's
would express itself in the language of this translation. The placid style,
the occasionally tender wit, the general niceness of the writing, seem
in
harmony with the quality of the author's imagination and point of
VIeW.
Another Catholic writer, Georges Bernanos, has in his novel
Jo y,
now appearing for the first time in English though written in 1929,
attempted to create a character who experiences mystical rapture and
an exceptional closeness with God. This is, I should imagine, the most
tempting situation for the religious novelist and it is certainly the most
difficult fictional undertaking. The orthodox mystical experience is so
rare that the novelist cannot hope for recognition on the part of the
reader; he can only hope for belief. He tries as an artist to create an
alive literary character, but the experience of a mystic is in its very
nature beyond ordinary human capacity and instead of character we get
description of a state of mind. Bernanos has indeed made Mademoiselle
Chantal, a young girl of profound sanctity, more interesting than most
imaginary mystics simply by putting her in a middle-class environment.
For instance, she likes to drive a car at great speed; has a natural apti–
tude for the pleasures of bourgeois living, for managing a rather lux–
urious household, and for surprising sympathies and enthusiasms. How–
ever, it is not the details of her personality or her place in society that
Bernanos cares for. His attention is directed to the strange quality of
her inner life, her achievement of absolute grace and purity, and these
qualities can be conveyed only by statements and assertions which, though
written with great delicacy, have very little novelistic power. The most
intriguing aspect of the story is the fact that the girl's simplicity seems
sinister to the other characters and in the end she is murdered by a
household servant.
On the evidence of this novel I cannot agree with Rayner Heppen–
stall's statement in a recent issue of PARTISAN REVIEW that Bernanos is
