Talk:The Little French Girl

Reviews
The New Republic, Sept 10 1924: No more attractive fruit will grow in the fiction orchard this present season than Miss Sedgwick's people. Her French characters have the sweet dry taste of grapes of good vintages; the English, the tart flavor and mellow crispness of apples. Alix who stands between the two groups is a carefully ripened peach. All Miss Sedgwick's products suggest horticulture. Her theme springs from the rich soil of decaying civilization—the mother-lover-daughter pattern which Henry James presented with adroit tenderness in The Awkward Age, and Maupassant more brutally in Fort Comme la Mort. The Little French Girl owes its distinction mainly, however, to its international aspect—its skilful contrast between two races in taste, in manners, in modes of thought and moral habits, delicately woven on the ingenuous background of a child's mind. "A kind, capacious house, promising comfort; but how ugly, thought Alix, as they alighted; 'Combien peu interessante.' " "The talk made Alix think of the thick slices of bread-and-butter that Ruth and Rosemary and Giles were eating, it was so kindly and useful." In The Little French Girl as in Tante and Adrienne Toner, Miss Sedgwick's chief preoccupation is with the symmetry of structure and elegance of style appropriate to literature. Yet more abundantly than its predecessors it lives. Miss Sedgwick apparently cultivates life for the sake of literature, and we shall not dispute her method, the fruit thereof being so pleasant.

The Nation, Oct 22 1924: One is at least free to suspect that the anglomania of Henry James may have been only a halfway house on the road to Gaul. For one so scornful as he of those who are merely déracine a second transplating could hardly, of course, be risked, and so it was in England that he remained rooted; but he was not above a dignified tour and there must have been moments at least when he wondered if the voyage from London to Paris were not only another stage in that journey away from Puritanism and toward Grace one leg of which he had already made. It would have taken him at least another lifetime and many tortuous volumes to decide even in his own indefinite faint way upon the respective merits of the two civilizations, and in the end the puritan still in him might have rebelled against a paganism so thinly disguised as that of France—^or the artist in his soul might have whispered that a way of life regulated so completely by standards exclusively aesthetic must miss the highest art in escaping so completely from the moral conflict. But be that as it may, he was at least still interested; though England was his home he wrote "The Ambassadors," and the question just where, if anywhere, Anglo-Saxon morality had a right of arbitration outside of and beyond the arbitration of taste remained for him, like all questions, undecided, and he never ceased to seek adventure in dim regions where he could balance the claims of the one against the claims of the other.

Miss Sedgwick is, of course, a disciple of James, and she is in addition the most able of them all. So firmly established, however, is her reputation that it would be less worth while to dwell upon the delicacy and keenness of her perceptions than to attempt to discriminate between her and her master; this was the purpose of the reflections above, since with them in mind the distinction is not difficult to make and consists in this, that whereas he had doubts she has none. In her last novel before this one an American girl was taken to England to be groomed into ladyhood and in the present work a jeune fille is snatched like a brand from the burning to be saved from the traditions of her country; but it is English society which stands as the absolute norm by which all other things are judged. The American may bring some crude ore worth the refining and the Frenchmen certain brilliants worthy of a better setting, but it is to England that such valuables must be brought if they are to exhibit their true worth. Upon this as upon other subjects Miss Sedgwick has come to a more clear-cut decision than the mind of her master was ever able to arrive at; the result is that her style can be less tortuously tentative than his—and that she can arrange confrontings of characters and situations in which the issues are more simply drawn. But the result is also that though she is one of the most interesting of contemporary novelists she is not quite so interesting as her master was. We feel as we never felt with James that she has no further real adventures in store for her in the field of international manners because her mind is too clearly made up.

By no means should the impression be given that her analysis is incomplete or unfair. On the contrary it is scrupulously complete. She can, for example, exhibit on the one hand that English absorption in "games" so distressing to the foreigner accustomed to regard them as the most important form of recreation and on the other hand that French habit of calm analysis so instinctive as to make even children seem surprisingly wise, at the same time that she can exhibit traits more flattering to the one or less admirable in the other. But her preferences are clear and, as one might easily suspect, it is the theory and practice of love which turns the balance. In a few pages of magnificent dialogue she confronts a romantic young Oxforder with a wise and weary savant who pleads like a master the Gallic views. To the one love is an exquisite art to be cultivated for the pleasures and pains which it alone can yield; to the other it is a half-exotic religion, exacting strange sacrifices and irrational forbearings. Nor is there for a moment a doubt that Miss Sedgwick prefers even the bungling performers of the religious ritual to the most exquisitely skilful practitioners of the art; and from that moment the problem is solved. Nothing remains but to save the poor little French girl from the traditions of her race.

The purpose of this brief criticism is far from being to say that Miss Sedgwick is wrong, to rebuke her for making a decision and then to make another. It is merely to point out that admirable as her work is it embodies a certain error of technique. In such a novel the source of greatest delight is in that sense which one always has in the case of James of adventuring with a sensitive soul and in balancing nuance against nuance without descending to the commonplace level of judgment. Every new observation is new evidence, swinging the scale now this way and now that but never definitely turning it to one side or the other before the end is reached. Yet Miss Sedgwick, has not, to change the metaphor, kept her problem in solution. She has allowed it to crystalize too early into judgment and as soon as that has occurred the rest, however interesting, has lost one of the elements of its fascination. We have left only the story of the anglicization of a French girl—interesting enough as a story but no longer a spiritual adventure.