Religious experience put at the service of self-reflection

We observe that Du Bos, the virtuoso of conver­ sation, is transformed while dictating into a virtuoso of the monologue. What intoxicated him was to hear himself talk.
The sound of his voice made him sensible of the uniqueness of his ego—  ["that zone of uniqueness in us that quivers, stirs, starts to vibrate and communicates to everything we say those inflections of the voice, that continuity of sound waves, those caressing prolongations of the pedal. . ."]. This should be compared with the early admission (Extraits, 108; 5 Oct.["there are moments when I feel as though caught in my own spell, and I do not succeed in breaking the enchantment"]. At the time Du Bos put down this sentence, he had not yet started to dictate. But strange! when he later came to compare his older, handwritten journals (they go up to 1920) with the ones he had dictated, he found him­ self compelled to acknowledge the higher value of the former:

["the slowness implicit in the very act of writing leads to a degree of artistic perfection which gets lost in a dictated journal so much the more as rapidity is the norm. From the point of view of art, since 1922 . . . I have lost a great deal"].

Of the early, handwritten Diaries13 we possess only the fragments that were deciphered for the Extraits d'un Journal of 1928. Du Bos was right to prefer them to the dictated jour­nals. They have a higher literary quality. That the writer ad­mitted it to himself shows that, within certain limits, he was capable of self-criticism. But these starts were not followed up. He skirted, or so it seems to me, the basic problem. He did not analyze that "headiness" he enjoyed while dictating, did not submit it to "introspection" (Introspections is one of the titles he was considering for the contemplated autobiog­ raphy). He must otherwise have discovered that it was his facility in improvising that intoxicated him; that intoxication of any kind conjures up pseudosublimities, pseudorealities, pseudovalues; and that virtuosity borders dangerously upon psychic automatism, which means running idle. Perhaps he might also have asked himself whether the attitude of im­provised dictation was compatible with the conduct of an inner examination and depth analysis that is supposed to be served by self-scrutiny and that alone can justify it. In order to descend to the bottom of the soul and dive for pearls, a state of composure must have been attained; nothing must distract us from concentration upon the inner vision and from the expenditure of energy necessary to trace it in words— nothing, not even the sound of our own voice. When it is in­ dispensable for heightening the emotional euphoria, we are nearly at the point at which dictation turns into aria and the virtuosity of parenthetical insertions into coloratura (by a strange misapprehension Du Bos spoke of this as the "polyphony" of his Diary). What always drew his mind like a lodestar was self-absorption, the apprehension of pure in­wardness. Can this be achieved otherwise than by silence and solitude? Is it possible to have a meditation a deux? But this was precisely the paradoxical situation in which the later Diary originated. It required the presence of a devoted secre­tary with the understanding and background for such taxing work. Could she resist the spell of the modulations in which exquisite insights were conveyed?

In a man of Du Bos's temperament the return to faith could only aggravate the problematical aspects of the Diary rather than settle them. Does he still have the right to confide his inner states to dictation now that they transcend psychol­ogy and concern religion? Hasn't he been charged with a new responsibility? And won't it have a crippling effect? He feels an obscure urge he had hardly known before: to be silent—  ["to be silent, to conceal my­ self, to burrow into the ground, to resolve my problems only on the vital level, short of and beyond all expression . . ."].
He thinks of himself as a difficult case:  It dawns on him that "simplicity" of spirit will forever elude him— ["the impossibility, in which I suspect that I shall always remain, of once more achieving complete simplicity on the level of the spirit"]. He must surely have been familiar, if not from the Imitatio Christi then from Walter Pater, who makes it his point of departure (in "Diaphaneite" in Miscellaneous Studies), with the ideal of sibi unitum et simplificatum esse. This was denied him. Perhaps it might be attained in an exalted hour while taking a stroll.

Or it might suddenly shine forth at the turn of a solitary path in the woods—not in a library in the presence of a lady taking shorthand. In any event, Du Bos once did advance far enough to encounter silence as a demand. But he was unable to achieve it. The less so as his new adherence to the ritual and tradition of the Church was presenting him with a new emotional richness—"le journal religieux dont chaque matin je porte en moi tous Ies elements" (iv, 183). The ideal would be to write a religious diary every morning ("et de preference avant midi") and a psychological diary every evening.

Of course this idea could not be carried out. But that it could be conceived at all betrays—a want of psychology. From the conversion on, the Diary presents a mesh of the "merely-human" and the religious that cannot be untan­ gled. Du Bos always liked to refer to his intellectual world as his "house of thought."14 Now a new guest has entered this densely populated abode—Faith. One of the old residents is scrupulosity ("la maladie du scrupule"). From this situation new tensions arise. What is my faith? To what extent is it real? "Π est tres probable," replies Du Bos to his own ques­tion,  ["It is very probable that I have at least as much, if not more, faith than nine-tenths of the be­ lievers . . ."]. Is this pride, as he has so often been told? No:

— ["I am convinced that in my case it is not a matter of pride, or at least not only of that"]. How much is revealed by this qual­ification! How prematurely is self-examination broken off here! One has the impression that religious experience is put at the service of self-reflection. When Du Bos is reminded by a verse from the Bible of the commandment to be meek, the result is the following entry:  ["Meekness—what a chapter for 'Introspections' this divided attitude toward it all my life!"]. Which does not deter him from presuming to state in the same dictation: ["I am in the middle of my theocentric period"].

He had learned about Berulle's theocentric mysticism from Bremond's recently published history of French religious sen­ timent and appropriated it with the naivete of the novice. Once he goes so far as to dictate a prayer to God (iv, 157ff.) in which he begs for illumination. Woven into it are a char­acterization of Cesar Franck's music and a quotation from "Thy Claudel."

The diaries that have been published so far end with 31 December 1928. Hence the entire last decade is still missing (Du Bos died on 5 August 1939). Du Bos's religious devel­opment during this phase remains hidden from us. What we can survey is merely the early history of his conversion and the initial reaction to it. What sort of a reaction is it? Pre­dominantly, it involves a greater seriousness toward his own personality, which has after all gained in value through its new experiences. It has become familiar with signs of grace, which are expertly defined by the spiritual director ("en ce moment vous etes l'objet d'une grace actuelle," says the Abbe, iv, 105). This places a heavy weight of responsibility upon the personality, the first fruit of which is the Dialogue avec Andre Gide.

from the book Essays on European Literature by Ernst Robert Curtius