PERMUTATIONS OF A MYTH
955
Today" Mr. Campbell makes what is such a definitive statement of the
whole
raison d'etre
of his work that it must be quoted:
The descent of the Occidental sciences from the heavens to the
earth (from seventeenth-century astronomy to nineteenth-century
biology), and their concentration today, at last, on man himself
(in
twentieth-century anthropology and psychology), mark the path of a
prodigious transfer of the focal point of human wonder. Not the animal
world, not the plant world, nor the miracle of the spheres, but
man
himself is now the crucial mystery.
(The italics are mine.)
William Troy
THE PERPETUAL DREYFUSARD
JEAN BAROIS. By Roger Martin du
ell
rd . Viking Press. $3.50
Jean Barois
was published by the
Nouvelle Revue Franfaise
in 1913, thirteen years after the last convulsions of the Dreyfus case.
The
Affaire
was dead, as Peguy maintained with some bitterness; it
could no longer divide France. The spirit of many disabused intellectuals
who had given themselves to the case (a commitment, which, for a
few, like Peguy, like Bernard Lazare, was an attempt to raise morality
over politics by the force of individual conscience) had been reduced to
vain and singularly old fashioned literary attitudes. The N.R.F., already
the most powerful new force in French literary life, represented, by
definition, a departure from
"La litterature combattante."
The church
had become officially reconciled, while the conversion of such figures as
Claudel and Peguy tended to subdue the free-thinking movement,
with all its paraphernalia of crises and torments.
Roger Martin du Gard, an atheist, and an N.R .F. hopeful at thirty–
two, made a second novel out of two late-nineteenth-century phenomena,
the general loss of faith between 1880 and 1906, and the Dreyfus case.
Martin du Gard's naturalistic style, reminiscent of Zola's, and his belief
in what his hero defines as "that slow but glorious progress of humanity
towards a better world," stamp him as a creature of the late nineteenth
century. As a novel,
Jean Barois
appears today to be a minor literary
work, but as a tract it is quite exceptional, especially for its 150
some pages that deal
with
the Dreyfus case as the
crise de conscience
that so altered the course and composition of the French intellectual
class.
Jean Barois
is an intellectual's breviary of idealism, whose heroes
