Charles Of the Boss
Charles Of the Boss (1882 - 1939) is a French writer and a literary critic within the meaning of the 19th century whose work primarily consists of sound Journal and of critical texts.
Biography
He was born with Paris on October 27th, 1882 from a French father and an English mother. He profits from a very European formation with stays with Oxford, Berlin and Rome. Young person, it is able to read in the text of the authors like Thomas Carlyle, Henry James, John Ruskin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Rainer Maria Rilke.
Into 1927, it is converted with Catholicism.
He dies in That-Saint-Cloud, on August 5th, 1939.
Its career
Charles Of the Boss, is not really a literary critic with the direction where it today is heard, he does not seek to detect the fault of a work, to highlight the strong points of them and the weak points, chooses its family of spirit and does not treat the “innovations”. Its approach of a creator or a literary work, musical, plastic or philosophical is not purely intellectual. Large reader of traditional and its contemporaries of which he was often the friend, his method is an absorption, a diving in the depths of the feelings which the reading, the listening and the contemplation get to him which combine in the perception of the authors or works. What he seeks, it is " the âme" work, which is invisible, its spirituality. He wants to like without judging, to follow his intuition.
In spite of a chronic disease its activity in the world of the edition of the years 1920 and 1930 is important: translator, director of collections, preface writer, author of notes for the literary NRF and several reviews, lecturer, author of partially improvised public courses, organizer of the Decades of Pontigny, collaborator of Jacques Schiffrin for the editions of the Pleiad which will be taken again by the editions Gallimard in 1933.
Of English mother and practitioner German and Italian, between the two wars, it is the frontier runner in France of the literature of English language traditional and contemporary but so German and Russian, as a preface writer or a translator.
Its tests relate to:
- Denis Amiel, Baudelaire, Henri Bergson, Bernanos, Paul Claudel, Benjamin Constant, Georges Duhamel, Andre Gide, Maurice of Guerin, Pierre Parcelled out, Eugene Marsan, François Mauriac, Prosper Mérimée, Anna de Noailles, Blaise Pascal, Marcel Proust, Jules Fox, Jacques River, Paul-Jean Toulet, Paul Valéry… for the French language;
- Robert Browning, Lord Byron, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Walter Lord's Prayer, William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lytton Strachey… for the English language;
- Stefan George, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Friedrich Nietzsche, Novalis, To groove Maria Rilke… for the German language;
- Mikhaïl Lermontov, Anton Tchekhov, Leon Tolstoï… for the Russian language;
- Ernest Slipper, Claude Debussy… for the music.
The friendship animates its life and its work. Inseparable from its perception of the work about which he speaks either that he meets the contemporary author or that the dead author does not become by the reading a true friend. Among its contemporaries, Andre Gide, Groethuysen, Gabriel Marcel, Paul Le Bourget, Edith Wharton, Marcel Proust belongs to those with which it maintains the frequent exchanges which nourish its interior work permanently.
One cannot evoke Charles of the Boss without speaking about religion and spirituality. Christian worked by the doubt, his religious feeling is inseparable from his esthetic experiment and conversely. The absolute to which it is granted reveals in the depths where resound bronzes parents of a metaphysical problem or an artistic question.