Martin T urnell
,
THE CRITICISM OF JACQUES RIVIERE
When Jacques Riviere died in 1925 at the early age of
thirty-eight, European literature was deprived of one of the ablest
and most interesting minds of our time. He was known to a small
l
circle
in
England and America as the distinguished editor of the
Nouvelle Revue Franfaise
and as the author of a number of re–
markable critical essays which had appeared in its pages; but it
can safely be said that his criticism has never had the attention it
deserves
in
Anglo-Saxon countries or perhaps in his own. The reasons
are not difficult to discover. Riviere was prominently associated with
the religious revival in France and after his death he became a sort
of cult. Pious hands unearthed and published a large number of
letters, an unfinished novel and fragments of theological speculation.
The result was that the theologian almost completely overshadowed
the literary critic. His very original studies of Racine and the French
romantic novel formed part of a public debate in which he took
part
with Ramon Fernandez and were published under the discour–
aging title of
Moralisme et litterature;
and it was not until he had
been dead for nearly twenty-five years that his finest essays were
rescued from the files of the
Nouvelle Revue Franfaise
and made
available in book form.
"His critical works," wrote Mr. T. S. Eliot in the memorial
number of the
Nouvelle Revue Franfaise,
"combine a precision which
is
free from rigidity with intellectual suppleness and finesse. For a
mind like mine, which is too prone to measure everything by rules
derived from a dogmatic conception of literature that tends more
and more to become rigid and formalist, the critical method prac–
ticed by Riviere is an excellent discipline."
It
is an admirable descrip–
tion of Riviere's peculiar virtues. Weare sometimes moved to com-
