The Ungrateful Beggar
TRYING to discover the face of an unknown author seemed a virtually impossible task during the war years ; the normal facilities for research had been reduced, and enquiry soon languished to be re-
placed by interests more -capable of being maintained. Among other writers to be shelved was L6on Bloy, whose novel La Femme Pauvre had appeared in English translation in 1939, and concerning whose work nothing had been written. It was freely admitted that Bloy had exerted considerable influence in the formation of a Catholic literary movement in Prance which numbered among its leaders such men as Peguy, Claudel and Jacques Maritain, but in England hardly anything was known about the strange figure who styled him- self in his diary "The Ungrateful Beggar." And in fact, as Mr. Heppenstall has pointed out, nothing had appeared in this country about Bloy with the exception of an essay in a book by Karl Heger and some notes in an issue of Blackfriars. And so the situation might have rested if someone had not noticed that Bloy was born a hundred years ago and deserved some serious criticism for the forty books he had written. Recently two studies which deal exclusively with his life and work have appeared, as well as one which attempts to place him in his correct position in the French Catholic renaissance ; as all three books have been written by his admirers, there are not many points of controversy in the summings-up concerning Bloy's genius and sincerity, though it seems to me that the books themselves differ considerably in their intrinsic merit.
Mr. Heppenstall deals more than adequately with the aspect of Bloy's work which interests him most, his novels, Le Desespere, 1887, and La FemmeTauvre, 1897. He gives excellent synopses of the plots and the philosophical implications involved ; also some well-thought-out notes on the actual quality of the writing and the similarities between Bloy's real and fictional existences. Miss Polemini has written the most readable book on the subject, quotes from all possible sources is argumentative, but, her thought is always easy to follow and her book has all the virtues of a good popular work. M. Beguin, who has written the best book of the three under consideration, presents his theme with an intensity and penetration which have become all too rare in modern works of scholarship. It is from his four essays that we may learn most and gradually there emerges the picture of a man who has rediscovered faith and realises that the suffering and poverty which he has accepted as inevitable are meaningless in themselves, and can only become significant if he should accept some• added and external discipline. He admits to the existence of a time when hatred of God and His church had filled his heart, but nevertheless he had not possessed such unquestioning denial as to render him blind to the problem which must, eventually, confront all human beings • as he wrote in Le Desespere• : "One day there was absolutely noting for it but to die or else lay hold of some mechanism of hope, no matter what the cost. I became a Christian. . . ."
He had not over-dramatised the struggle, for it was very real and could, even then, be scarcely resolved by intercourse with the pro- fessional quarrellers and refuge-seekers in dogma. It remained for Bloy to recreate as a dynamic religious force that which was deteriorating into mere superstition and his voice, diffused by writings possessing what has been called the finest style since Bossuet, convinced all who took pains to listen. For the most part it was his extreme poverty which made Bloy choose words as the weapons in his crusade ; he realised that his language could never be as effective as the deeds of his friend Frere Damien, and he wrote, "I would deem it a grander and more useful existence to be spat upon by a wretched leper whose sores I was clumsily dressing than in this Byzantine search for suitable adjectives and participles." But in his own way, and especially in his relationship with Anne-Marie Roulet, the Veronique of Le Desespere, he effectively used all his powers for good and succeeded in proving a literary theory of the nineteenth century—that prostitution combined with faith begot salvation.
He was prepared for all disappointments, for at the age of twenty- seven he had already written, "In his poor heart man has places which do not yet exist, and suffering enters in order to bring them to life." He gained his disciples by the same means as he had made his enemies, by fearless denunciation and non-compromise. He was politically aware of the German menace to a free European con- science, and was an active antagonist to the Prussian way of life from 1870 right up to his death in 1917; but he knew that salvation could not come about simply, and that awful suffering and poverty had to be assumed before man could be united with God and His Son, who was essentially of the poor. As he himself said, "One must pray, everything else is vain and stupid. One must pray so as to endure the horror of this world, one must pray in order to become pure, in order to possess the strength to go on waiting."
ARTHUR BOYARS.
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