Georges Bernanos

Extract

With the death of Bernanos, France lost more than a novelist. His was the authentic voice of a tradition that is older than a nation and which will surely outlast it. It is true that he wrote novels, and they were supreme in their perception of human destiny, incomparable in eloquence and passion. But the form of them was an instrument, not an end, and the professional critic may readily discover an indifference, even a contempt, for the nicely-ordered ingenuities of fiction. Bernanos was a prophet for whom the novel, or indeed prose as such, happened to be a trumpet to which his own generation might be enticed to listen. He believed in God and he believed in God’s hand at work in the affairs of men. For him the only ultimate truth was the plenitude of divine life, and he looked with an unfaltering vision on a world in which that life was usually ignored, sometimes acknowledged, but which in every case was the arena of a conflict that can end only with the Last Judgment of all. The popular success of the Journal d ‘un Curd de Campagne made a central idea of Bernanos’s familiar to readers to whom Sous le Soleil de Satan or Monsieur Ouine might seem intolerable, unreadable, remote. The huge weight that hangs on moral choice became increasingly for Bernanos a truth to be revealed not merely in the high moments of human tragedy but constantly, at every turn of the head, at every neutral gesture.