Charles Du Bos

Extract

Charles Du Bos has a particular interest for English-speaking readers from the fact that he, a great Frenchman, was not only partly English but that his sympathies were so largely Anglo-Saxon. Some of the last years of his life were spent in America, though he died near Paris in 1939. Had he lived through the occupation to the present delicate task of ‘rehabilitating’ France, who can say what bearing his unobtrusive influence might not have had on the evolution of French policy? Though ignored in his lifetime by the general public, as Martin-Chauffier says in his introduction to the Byron of Du Bos, “there is scarcely a first-class mind in Europe which does not know him and feel for him the surest and best-founded esteem; ... It is not the least of undertakings to trace his influence on so many writers, so many works, so many matters which have stirred public opinion to passion.”

That so potent a mind was unrecognised by the mass is due to the simple fact that Du Bos did not write what the mass cared to read; such writing, while it finally moulds thought and ideals, does so indirectly and slowly. It might also be thought that he wrote too little. For years Charles Du Bos suffered from a “paralysing” difficulty in writing at all; when he seemed to have overcome it, the first Great War supervened; at its close the same “total inhibition”—a doubt as to his own powers and a resulting scruple in writing—returned to him at intervals. His circle, the most exclusive of French cenacles, attributed his lack of production to a less fundamental cause: Du Bos, they believed, was too gifted in another way—he was a superb talker.