so widely discussed; rarely, too, had the average literary man
cut so prominent a figure in the public eye or had his theories
so widely proclaimed and discussed. They were to point out the
way to new destinies. There had been a great regeneration of
nationalism (a " renaissance of French pride," as one writer put
it), while a religious revival was also in the air, and side by side
with these facts a hundred more or less significant " isms " and
scores of leading and general ideas battled in the intellectual
arena. French authors mostly develop in harmony with the
thought of their times in a manner not usual with Anglo-Saxon
writers. The renewed interest in English literature, which has
been a notable feature of post-war letters, had also already begun,
but the authors now claiming attention are of another school.
The period 1010-20 was marked by a burst of very varied talent and the more or less complete disappearance of literary schools. The most significant of all the new movements was the nationalist one the love of the land and of the dead, the cult of energy and heroism. At the head of this was Maurice Barres (b. 1864), whose influence on youth before the World War had its sequel in the great role he played during the struggle. Through his individualism and his nostalgic, Barres is the heir of the great Romantics, though a disciplined Romantic; in the preponder- ance of thought over imagination which we meet with in him, in the purity and nobility of his prose, he is attached to the purest classical traditions. A spectator of all the political turmoils, from the Panama scandals and the Dreyfus case to the World War, which have shaken France and the French, Barres in a series of interesting works of high quality did his best to interpret and explain them for his contemporaries, and this he continued in his L'Ame Fran$aise pendant la Guerre and subsequently in La Genie du Rhin, in which, with a tumultuous enthusiasm reminis- cent of Michelet, he celebrates the great river which is not the river of any one country. It was a great completion of Barres's work during the war, beginning with Colette Baudoche.
New members of the French Academy include M. Joseph Bedier (b. 1864), the historian and critic of the origins of French literature, whose romances, founded on certain of the old sagas, such as Le Roman de Tristan et Iseull and Perceval, ou le Saint- Graal, contain some of the finest writing produced of late in France. During the war he was at the front as historian, one of the results being his work L'Effort Franqais. Rene Boylesve (b. 1867), the mondain novelist, has been called a writer of pretty stories stories which he loves to tell and tells charmingly. He has two styles the novel of provincial life, in which he is a sort of " little Flaubert," and his sentimental and psychological novels, which are not devoid of licentiousness. He likes to imagine love-nests and iSth-century parks, with labyrinths and statues, as settings to gallantry. On the other hand, he has a great respect for tradition, and he orders and organizes the movement of his novels, keeping affairs of the heart and affairs of the mind rigorously apart. The reticence of his novels of pro- vincial life make up in a way for the libertinage of the others. Henry Bordeaux (b. 1870), another new Academician, who published a number of war books (Le Fort de Vaux, La Bataille devant Souville, appreciations of the lives of young heroes, such as Guynemer, the aviator, etc.), Is in his novels a painter of the torments of the heart, who has given a distinguished place in literature to Savoy. In his Pays Natal he proclaims his wish to restore to the French provinces the original beauty and in- tellectual vigour which they have lost, and to restore also the spirit of the family, for " a man only preserves his terrestrial existence and greatness through his origin and his hopes." La Peur de Vivre shows the beauty of action, of life accepted with all its duties and responsibilities the nobility of sorrow and the beauty of sacrifice.
If the new men in the Academy as out of it were mostly highly prolific, the " old hands " were comparatively silent. Only some small volumes issued from the pen of the veteran Anatole France (see 10.775), who, disgusted with the German intellectuals' espousal of the causes of the war, in spite of his age offered himself as a volunteer to the Government " to carry a gun." In one of these, Le Petit Pierre, he goes back again to
reminiscences of his boyhood. Paul Bourget (see 4.331) published Le Sens de la Mart, besides Anomalies, a volume of short stories of scientific or psychopathological bent, and Ecuyere, a dramatic story, in his early manner, though it differs from much of Bour- get's work in snowing an aristocrat with an ignoble soul in contrast to others of humbler birth.
It was Paul Bourget who made the notable declaration that during war-time the writer should stick to his writing that he would accomplish more good in so doing than if, in some burst of enthusiasm, he changed from thought to activity. This, in effect, was the reply made to Anatole France by the French Govern- ment. Indeed, the litterateur played an important part in France during the war, not only in keeping up the moral of combatants and civilians, but in proposing ideas, offering counsel, suggesting projects. The writer's imagination often came to the aid of the soldier's science. Paul Adam (b. 1852) was prolific in suggestions to the high army authorities, and was, long before the fact, responsible for putting forward ideas that were sub- sequently adopted. Men like Maurice Donnay, Richepin (b. 1849), Barres busied themselves in keeping the civil population hopeful and consoled. Numbers of these writers were at the head of "war works," and Maurice Donnay (see 8.417), the author of Lysistrata and Education de Prince, besides producing a number of works of more or less fugitive interest, in a delight- fully humorous one-act comedy showed how the needy " poilus," before returning to the front after their " permissions," were provided by society ladies with socks and shirts and " spoiled " by elderly gentlemen with pipes and pipe-lighters.
Marcel Prevost (see 22.312) turned from graceful writing on femininity to more serious (or at any rate more topical) subjects Man cher Tommy and La Nuit Finira. M. Prevost founded after the war a new literary review on the style of La Revue de Paris, called La Revue de France. Edmond Rostand (see 23.754), whose death occurred in 1918, published Le Vol de la Marseillaise during the war; La Derniere Nuit de Don Juan, in which the brilliant versification met with in Cyrano and Chanleder is unimpaired, though, as in those works, somewhat disfigured by calembours and tricks of phraseology, was published post- humously. One distinguished writer laid down his pen entirely all through the war to take up more active work Eugene Brieux, who devoted great organizing ability to the care of the blind.
The Academy, as a direct consequence of the war, opened its doors to a number of men not purely or not even at all devoted to the cult of letters. Georges Clemenceau had been indeed the author of a number of works of fiction Le Grand Pan, Le Voile de Bonheur, etc.; Marshal Foch was known as a good military writer; and from Marshal Lyautey, the governor- general of Morocco, came a valuable work on Morocco, pub- lished about the same time as his election.
Among the older men outside the Academy, Henri Duvernois, the author of Gisele, a very fine conleur, kept up the tradition of the Maupassant school; and Abel Hermant (b. 1862) joined to the classical purity and elegance of his French a gift of humour, satire and irony, in his novels and his chroniques of Parisian life.
Claude Farrere (b. 1876), like Pierre Loti (b. 1850), a naval officer and also a Turcophil, had, unlike the Academician, em- braced the Mussulman faith, yet in spite of this in his novels he is particularly interested in modernism and the cosmopolitan society of oriental capitals. His work is of the most varied character, and the period under review saw from his pen Betes et Gens qui s'aimercnt, La Derniere Deesse and Les Condamnes d Mart, a novel of " anticipation " a la H. G. Wells.
The death of Paul Adam (see 1.172) in 1920 removed one of the most remarkable, supple and prolific of French writers. At first a violent impressionist and naturalist, he became in turns mystic and sociologist, and set himself especially to writing novels founded on the ideas of the time. His work is so copious that it has been said to resemble overgrown vegetation; Remy de Gourmont described him as a " magnificent spectacle." The thought is fatigued in trying to follow him, and his style is crab- bed and often incorrect. But as a whole his work gives an im- pression of immense power, his metaphors convey great and
