In the American Jungle by Waldo David Frank

Since Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, French literature has come variously to America for materials and forms wherewith to re-create itself. The greatest instance is still perhaps that of Chateaubriand whose impossible Indians may outlast the too-possible Frenchmen of Flaubert. The sustenance which Stendhal won from contemplation of our scene for the esthetic of his novel of the modern will is less widely recognized. We are aware, however, of how the symbolists transfigured Poe; and more recently of the enthusiastic creation by the Dadaists of a romantic America of cowboys, skyscrapers and jazz. Romantic movements in classicist France are ever forages for nurture rather than voyages of discovery. Like Greece, France is omnivorous and egocentric. In every period of influences her writers are like a family consuming beefsteak. That beefsteak will become, let us say, part of a lanky father, a fat mother, a bad pagan boy, and a noble Christian sister. At this moment, we may behold America turn into Louis Aragon, Valéry Larbaud, and Bazalgette.

Bazalgette's translation and biography of Whitman had a dynamic share in the slow stirring of French letters, away from the Narcissus mood which led to the masterworks of Claudel, Valéry, Proust, toward a new gesture of spiritual excursion whence a good range of fresh romantic stuffs will accrue for the young classicists to work on. His Whitman was a biography that held fairly close to the narrative form, save that a lyrism illumined it and made it speak with emphasis and fervor to the imagination of the French. In "Henry Thoreau," however, Bazalgette stands revealed more clearly: a poet himself, and a prophet, he employs a certain spiritual experience made manifest in America because less assimilated here than the experience of Rousseau and of Tolstoi in their lands; and he makes of it his own spiritual Word for France. This technical analogy between Bazalgette in sophisticated Paris writing of Thoreau, and Chateaubriand in rationalist Paris dreaming of our virgin forests must not be strained too far. Bazalgette is less a poet than Napoleon's noble hater, but he is more historian and critic. His book has the lilt and passage and effect of a packed personal paean; and yet it is perhaps the best of all pictures of our great New England. There is no phenomenal relation between Chateaubriand's America-or that of the Dadaists-and ourselves. Their work is, therefore, not negotiable beyond their immediate needs. But clad in the fine English of Van Wyck Brooks, Bazalgette's "Thoreau" responds to our experience. It becomes an American classic as surely as it is a French one.