The Heathen are Wrong

Extract

‘I was there when France fell; and I have written this book to mourn her.’ Many English-speaking people were there when France fell, and many have written books, to mourn the collapse of her army, or the dissolution of her political machine, or the capture of Paris, or the surrender of her navy. But the France mourned here, with this pall of many colours and many patterns, is not the agony of events that announced her painful death, but the reality of France, dying beneath the suffering of the last fatal illness : France as men of the French way of thinking loved and understood her. This reality is not widely, or at any rate not fully, understood in England and America; it is not understood what has died, nor what is the loss caused by that death, nor the true nature of the disease from within and the enemy from without which combined to bring about this disaster. These are the three leading strains of Mr. Bagger’s ‘Impersonal Autobiography,’ which he calls ‘an account of the End of Our Time in terms of one man’s life,’ likening himself to a scribe hurrying away from the sack of Cnossus, that most modern and urban of ancient cultural centres, to tell the Egyptians ‘to look to their fences and defences.’ For Mr. Bagger escaped with difficulty to New York, and there they said to him, what they had aid in France : ‘It cannot happen here.’

This is neither a historical treatise, nor a philosophical essay, nor humorous reminiscence, nor a traveller’s diary, nor an epicure’s observations—it is all of these things, and much more. It is much more, because all these kinds of writing are woven together in a lively and powerful narrative, which gaily carries the reader, now along one strand, now another, though it always winds in greater or lesser circles around the background of France.