In the république des instituteurs, Emile-Auguste Chartier was sovereign. He signed himself “Alain.” His was, unquestionably, a commanding presence in European moral and intellectual history. His influence permeated French education and significant elements in French politics from 1906, the year of Dreyfus’s rehabilitation, to the late 1940s. Alain’s prose possesses unsurpassed economy and clarity. His stoic integrity held generations of pupils and disciples spellbound. Comparison with Socrates became routine. Alain was “the sage in the city,” the Maître des maîtres. In addition to philosophical and political writings, in addition to essays on the arts and on poetry, such as his elucidation of Valéry’s La Jeune Parque, Alain published autobiographical reflections. L’Histoire de mes pensées of 1936 is a jewel. As are his meditations on war in Mars.

Yet the very name of Alain is virtually unknown in the Anglo-American world. Hardly any of his writings have been translated. Why should this be? I have no good answer. There is, no doubt, a problem of context. Alain’s Propos, the succinct but often highly wrought memoranda of which he published some five thousand in the daily or weekly press from 1906 to 1936 – there is a hiatus between 1914 and 1921 – touch on “universals”; but they do so with incisive reference to the immediate, to the political, social, ideological, or artistic occasion of the day. Alain’s brevities assume shared knowledge. For any outsider, for French readers after the second world war and the young today, the informing circumstance has faded. Alain’s texts, moreover, were resonant with his teaching voice. With the distancing, with the disappearance of the man, the life-giving force may have drained from the page. Nevertheless, so much wisdom and warmth of feeling endures. Again: why the blank in British and American awareness? (Lessons of the Masters, George Steiner)