TENDENCIES IN FRENCH LITERATURE

BY GEORGES LECHARTIER

It seems premature yet to look for the essential changes which the Great War has brought into literature, as it undoubtedly has into other forms and conditions of life, in France. It does not appear, at first glance, that any considerable change has recently taken place in French literature. The same names of authors are printed on the covers of the same magazines. These names, however, are not as numerous as they were before the summer of 1914, since many of them, including some of the best known, are now written on small wooden crosses on the battlefields of the Aisne and the Marne. Thus is written the name of Péguy, one of the youngest and most promising poets of the new school; so is that of Ernest Psichari, who in his last book, L'appel aux Armes, seems to have foreseen and foretold his own glorious death. But the roll of honor is too long to be fully recounted here.

Most of these young men belonged to the new school of literature, which was founded by a young professor, newly out of the Ecole Normale, the school where the intellectual élite in France, after having passed a very difficult examination, undergo a wonderful training in Arts or in Science before being appointed to professorships in one of the Universities. This young man, Romain Rolland, author of the much-discussed pacifist book Au-dessus de la mêlée, had scarcely left the Ecole Normale after being graduated when he became the editor of Les Cahiers de la Quinzaine, a magazine which soon led him to pecuniary bankruptcy. Around these Cahiers, an élite of young intellectuals began to meet, and a new literary formula found its expression among them.

The inspiration of this new literature was usually obscure or foggy in itself; and it was often made more so by the recondite character of its expression. Too often the writer indulged in

or sought for some symbol, which was supposed to summarize a great number of high truths, deep thoughts and rare sentiments. And it did not matter if the plain truth were lost in the symbolism. This school, so much opposed to the French genius, of which the formula is clearness, harmony, moderation and measure, does not seem to have survived the war. And although Paul Claudel, who is to-day the best representative of it, has some late admirers and some very young disciples, it seems to have yielded its ephemeral vogue to still less worthy and more ephemeral groups, such as Dadaism, which is to Literature what Cubism is to Art-a depressing parody, of which the less said the better.

Real French literature, which has always found its better expression in classicism and in realism, the latter not to be misunderstood for naturalism,-is now as ever presented in the old and best-known magazine La Revue des Deux Mondes, the conservative review Le Correspondant, and the more advanced magazine, La Revue de Paris.

The inspiration which is now dominant in the articles, notably in the novels, published by these magazines, presents a characteristic departure from that which prevailed before the war. From the realist, dogmatic, social and almost eventless type of the spring of 1914, and after the great success of the master-novel of Paul Bourget, Le Demon de Midi, this inspiration has in the last two years become romanesque, sensational and decidedly individualist. Study has yielded to imagination, reality to extravagant fiction, analysis and observation to action. No better illustration of this is to be found than in the last book of Paul Bourget, Un Drame dans le Monde, first published in La Revue des Deux Mondes.

In Le Demon de Midi, the whole story presented by Paul Bourget was, through some pictures of country and Parisian life, the normal development of normal characters in a situation of everyday life. No thrilling episode, almost no excitement, was to be found. The plot was smooth, devoid of sensation. How very different is his Un Drame dans le Monde! Of course there is still the basic and-in his novels-almost essential triangle. But this is only the means of studying a character caught in the storm of passion, incited and nearly forced through ex

traordinary circumstances to commit a low and abject crime (murder of an old relative to get her money), and then seized by the anguish and agony of remorse. It is in fact the subject of the great novel of Dostoievsky, Crime and Punishment, transferred to high society in Paris in the year 1920. The only difference is that in the Russian story the centre of interest is in the fears of the murderer that he will be caught by the police and be sentenced to death, while in Paul Bourget's novel it is in the internal and neverceasing remorse of the culprit who, secure from all suspicion, is terrorized by her own conscience as by an ever-present and ceaselessly-calling judge or executioner.

A woman who belongs to the smart set of Paris, the elegant and attractive Countess Odette de Malhyver, "tall and slender, with an extremely aristocratic profile, where every feature told the race," knowing no other rule than the customs and tolerance of her social circle, is deeply in love with the elegant and handsome Xavier de Larzac, who, heroic in the war, since peace has been signed professes in his club to hate war and to despise heroism. He had been infatuated with the fascinating Odette for a long time before the war, but is now seriously engaged in flirting with a society butterfly, the very rich and charming Cecile Machault. Odette's husband, the Count of Malhyver, is a half-dreamer, half-scientist or laic apostle, comrade of heroism in the trenches and always the friend of Xavier. Educated by the war, he believes now that every man, every citizen of a country, has a duty toward his country. He is anxious to fulfill his new duty created by peace, which he sees in the traditions of his family; he wishes to live with his peasants, socially helping and morally leading them, in the land of his forefathers. He is confirmed in his resolution by the fact that he has just learned that, through his wife's extravagance and his own carelessness, and because they have maintained their old train de vie in the new and high cost of living, they are half ruined.

But the views of Odette on the subject are entirely different. She wants to stay in Paris because the man she loves is in Paris. And no consideration, however social or moral, can divert her from this aim. Then a means of avoiding country life and simultaneously the dreaded ruin is offered to her, from which

she at first recoils. She has been called to the bedside of an old, narrow-minded and very rich aunt, who, as she knows, has disinherited her. She is left alone to pass the night in the sick room. She knows that the will which contains her fate is somewhere there, and she has every reason to believe that there is no copy of it. If the will is destroyed, of course she will inherit; and this means that she will stay in Paris with Xavier.

The scene of the hesitation, of the repulsion, then the quick succession of decisive actions, looking for and finding the will, throwing it into the fire, is a masterpiece of art. So is the following scene, when Odette suddenly perceives that her aunt, momentarily a helpless paralytic, has seen her act; she realizes that as soon as the old woman recovers the use of her tongue she will denounce her; and she concludes that the only way to safety is to pour an overdose of digitalin into the beverage that has been prepared to soothe the invalid's pain and help her to sleep. In a mad fit, Odette mechanically pours the poison, refills the bottle with water, and flies from the room. Everything goes as she expected. The nurse gives the poisoned beverage. The old woman dies. Nobody suspects that the death has not been natural. Odette inherits.

Then commences the slow, relentless gnawing of remorse, made acute and alive by every detail of Odette's everyday life. She has a son, the very sight of whom, the son of a murderer, brings a new pain to her. The conversation, the mere presence, of her husband, with his lack of suspicion, she cannot bear. But her remorse reaches the climax when she discovers that her beloved Xavier is false to her for the sake of the captivating Cecile, and that he loves her no more; and she realizes that the haunting crime which she perpetrated for his sake and love was committed in vain. It seems to her that she has filled up the measure of abjection and misery when, after a highly dramatic interview, in which she at last confesses what she has done, the man who has been the direct cause of all only tears himself from her, orders her out, and shrieks to her, "Go! Go! You fill me with horror!"

Her punishment begins. She flies to the old castle, where her husband lives with her son. And there we witness, through

small daily events or through the diary written by the utopian, blind and straightforward husband, the progress, slow and sure, of the incurable pain and agony, until Odette can bear the suffering no more, and until she is morally and physically obliged to confess to her husband both her crimes. There the interest of the book ends. Why the super-husband forgives, and how Odette strives to merit that forgiveness by staying for the remnant of her life in the old country home, devoting herself to the education of her son and to moral and social improvement of the rural population around her, we do not greatly care.

Such an extended analysis of Paul Bourget's book may not appear useless if we consider, first, that it was the book of the year in France and has supplied themes of conversation in most of the drawing rooms and social meetings in Paris and in the provinces, and second, that it illustrates better than any other example the new tendency of French literature toward sensation and action. Of course this new tendency could be found and just as easily pointed out in many other much-read novels of yesterday and of to-day; such, for instance, as La Resurrection de la Chair and La Chair et L'Esprit, by Henry Bordeaux. It is still better emphasized in Pierre Benoit's L'Atlantide. In a book of an entirely different inspiration, Saint Magloire by Roland Dorgeles, is a similar indication.

M. Dorgeles is the young author of Les Croix de Bois, a book published during the war which, because of its presentation of war scenes as seen by a soldier in the trenches, appealed immediately to the sentiment and to the very heart of the French public and carried the author to fame. His second book was, of course, waited for with great curiosity. It is always a much to be dreaded experience for a young author to come again before the public when his first appearance has proved such a success. Nobody is, as a rule, inclined to indulgence and the easy sentence, "This second book is not, by far, comparable to the first," seems to be the general verdict. M. Dorgeles was lucky enough, until now, to avoid this criticism and so, if his friends refrain from the first and somewhat excessive admiration which they showed, Saint Magloire may remain as one of the good books of this year.

Saint Magloire is the story of a man of medium standing in