In fragrant shade through many sad and solitary hours. Long, long ago you laid upon the gate That I had barred a shy, beseeching hand. I did not move who could not understand, Beneath an indifferent moon You passed-about you strewn Were petals of a passion-flower tossed on some wind of fate. THE JOURNAL OF A MODERN FRENCHWOMAN1 BY DOROTHY MARTIN Amorous soule, ambitious soule, covetous soule, voluptuous soule, what wouldest thou have in heaven? What doth thy holy amorousnesse, thy holy covetousnesse, thy holy ambition, and voluptuousnesse most carry thy desire upon? All our life is a continuall burden, yet we must not groan; A continuall squeasing, yet we must not pant. Donne's Sermons. THE premature death of Marie Lenéru, the French playwright, in September, 1918, closed a life in which passionate longing and passionate despair had been essential elements. Not that she had paraded her sufferings. Rather in her distaste for heroics and petty grumblings she had striven to keep silence in a measure hardly compatible with her own mental comfort. She had desired before everything else a life tense with thought and emotional experience "to have read every book, smelt every flower, caressed every animal, lived among every race, to have tasted all the joys and all the sorrows, known all admirations and all clear thoughts, to be in death only an outer peel which drops, drained and twisted, from the hand of the master" and an unhappy destiny had for her made that ambition even less than usually attainable. Les Affranchis, which was produced by M. Antoine at the Paris Odéon in 1913, is the first and the best known of her plays. Like the rest, it is a drama of ideas and is full of the sense of power and will-bent thought which she herself gives. In it she dramatized her belief that where thought is most vital there also is passion strongest. All great emotions, she declares, spring from the brain: "I have such an adoration of intellect because I have discovered, against established prejudice, how much it adds to the affections.' Philippe Alquier, the hero of Les Affranchis, is a philosopher of 1 Le Journal de Marie Lenéru. destructive views and undoubted sincerity, intellectual, abstract; he is also a man capable of deep emotion. His wife, Martha, interests herself admirably in everything, home, society, relatives, children, all except one thing which she neglects, his intellectual life and interests. When Hélène Schomberger, who is on the point of completing her cloistral vows, arrives with Martha's sister, the Abbess, it is she who fills the intellectual gap. Philippe and she read together, study together, walk together. When Martha protests, Philippe brings himself to face the situation, which before he has shelved. Hélène pleads that it is not necessary for her to leave, cannot they go on as before? Has he any right to commence her transformation and then leave the work unfulfilled? They study secretly at night. Martha finds them. Her great grief is that Hélène fills just the one place where she has been wanting. If they had sinned vulgarly, she could have found it easier to forgive but there is nothing on which she can seize. And yet she knows their love and they do not deny. She sends the Abbess to Hélène. Philippe leaves them together. Former discipline answering an inner need for renunciation and self immolation, together with suspicion of all earthly happiness, especially when it is gained at the price of another's, win the day. Hélène resolves to complete her vows. Marie Lenéru declares that Hélène and Philippe are not Nietzschean-she says that what they have of his doctrine is also earlier than he. It is the "Be ye creatures of desire" of St. Theresa. They are ascetics, and for that reason passionate souls: they have the lively intellect and deep emotion which, she maintains, are only two different aspects of a unity. In the journal, recently published in book form for the first time, the temperament which has put much of the essence of its own conflicts into the character of Hélène is revealed in extenso. Marie Lenéru was born in Brest in 1845. On her father's side the family had long been connected with the navy; he himself was a naval officer. Marie seems to have been a merry child, beloved of all who knew her. Her early diary, commenced when she was eleven, although it reveals much of her happy childhood, gives many most significant indications of the woman that is to be in its deep preoccupation with questions of conscience, of duty to God, one's neighbour and oneself. In it she discusses her sins and among them her propensity to lie, which she defends on the artistic grounds of the added interest it gives to her stories-forewarning of the dramatist as well as of the moralist to come! At thirteen, after an attack of measles, she is threatened with the loss of her hearing. The diary becomes irregular and finally ceases at the age of fifteen. After that follow her black years, when hearing finally leaves her and her sight is also threatened. The diary is recommenced in 1893, when she is eighteen; the child has gone and the woman, apprenticed to life by three years of silence and suffering, appears. It is curious that this diary was published at the moment when for the first time Barbellion's Journal of a Disappointed Man was formally introduced to the French public by an article in La Revue de Paris;1 for in some ways the two diarists are much alike, physically in their bodily disabilities and sufferings, temperamentally in their ambition and belief in their own destiny, intellectually in a mutual passion for probing life, he in all its length and breadth, she rather in its profundity. But there are deep abysses between them and in many ways they seem to inhabit different worlds, so that sometimes it is hard to believe that both belong to the twentieth century and that both, though not always in the same way, are typical of it. Out of the "disordered miscellany" of the mind of an "incurable dilettante" Barbellion has produced a work of art of passionate intensity which not only embodies the spirit of his time but seems to foreshadow that of the future; out of the "conscious and avowed will to fame" of a "passionate ascetic" Marie Lenéru has brought forth a work uneven, faulty, obscure in places, but with an extraordinary power revealed in the depths of its gloom, in its gleams of piercing penetration, in the unrelieved seriousness with which it confronts life and death. In the first instance Barbellion and Marie Lenéru approach journal writing from an entirely different standpoint. On Barbellion it was enforced in childhood by his love of nature and the inward compulsion to note down all he saw and heard in the wonderful outdoor world to which he was already as a boy devoted; on Marie Lenéru it was enforced by the hand of discipline, for she 1 Le Journal d'un Désabusé. Joseph Aynard. was sent to write by her mother, often sorely against her will. Her later diary is commenced as an outlet for extreme mental depression. Into it she endeavors to put all the inward suffering and misery which come to her with her deafness and her endangered sight, her physical "cataclysm". She pours out her despair at the waste of her youth and attractiveness and gaiety, and her passionate regret that her talents are being checked and thwarted. Then she begins to see another side to this "ordeal" which has been forced on her and she becomes grateful to it for driving her into herself and thus developing habits of thought, of reading, of writing, which she might not otherwise have acquired. Writing soon becomes in her mind an instrument of revenge; by it she will retaliate on fate, vindicating her personal value and compensating for her sufferings by literary fame. To fit herself for this task she spends years in reading and contemplation, giving time and energy ungrudgingly; but ever, in moments of discouragement when the way seems too long and the end too uncertain, she turns to her diary. Possibly she relies on it as well as on her other writings to bring her the recognition she seeks, for she says "I will not try to get this published, but I do want it to be publishable." The journal is not her whole self revealed, but her cry of pain at physical affliction, mental depression, unsatisfied ambition. Other things are for the most part excluded; her gaiety and wit can scarcely be guessed from it, and all the miscellany of life, blunted for her by deafness and eyes which must wear blue glasses, enters into it hardly at all, and then only when she wills it, never crowding in spontaneous, unasked, to fill the pages. The things she wishes to suppress, her sorrows and sufferings, mental and physical, are those which drive her to her diary as confidant. The rest of life is comparatively simple and straightforward to her and finds daily expression through the natural channels of friendship and the staunch, unassailable intimacy of French family life. She has not, one gathers, hosts of repressions to fight, crowds of inhibitions to overcome, like Barbellion, before he can deliver over even an infinitesimal part of himself to public scrutiny. If we are to believe the evidence of the journals, Marie Lenéru's is the outcome of pride and courage which prevent her from showing a |