teeming ideas. In his later manifestation a symbolist, delighting in esoteric significances, he became a disciple of ruthless in- dividualism, preaching the doctrine of force and energy his ideal of the strong man armed. His latest works written just before his death Reims deiiaslte and Le Lion d' Arras called forth by the destruction of the war, are magnificent tapestries of life and colour teeming with both and breathe an ardent passion for the spirit that built up the French cities.
A singularly individual writer is Marcel Proust, a Prix Goncourt winner, translator of some of Ruskin's works, author of Du Cote de chez Swan, A I 'Ombre des Jeunes Filles enfleur, and other works showing psychological analysis pushed to the extreme. His writings are much discussed in France; and he has many admirers abroad England and Holland particularly.
Among the men who might be said to be " in the running " in 1921 for academic honours, Marcel Boulenger (b. 1873) is one of the most notable classic writers and stylists of the day, preserving as he does the traditions of style of the 1 8th century, with all the subtlety of analysis of Stendhal. Among his recent works are La Cour, a novel of the General Headquarters Staff, La Belle et la Bete, Marguerite. Edmond Jaloux (b. 1878) is the author of a number of novels (Fumees dans la Campagne, Au-dessus de la Ville, L'Incertaine, La Fin d'un Beau Jour) which place him in a high rank among psychological romanticists, chiefly with a Parisian setting. The brothers Jean and Jerdme Tharaud, who before 1914 had, in La Tragedie de Ravaillac, tried with brilliant success a new style of his- tory treated with the methods of romance, and in La Fete Arabe added one more to the growing number of works dealing with the native population of France's north African colonies, have produced, among other works, A I'Ombre de la Croix, and Les Grands Seig- neurs de V Atlas, dealing with phases of Moroccan life. Of the two sons of Edmond Rostand who inherited the literary gifts of their father and mother, two works have issued from the pen of Maurice Le Page de la Vie, poems, and Le Cercueil de Cristal, which shows eminent qualities of fancy and observation. His elder brother Jean, whose bent took a scientific and sociological turn, is the author of a pamphlet of very advanced thought against wealth.
J. H. Rosny aine (see 23.739), member of the Goncourt Academy, and one of the most prolific of writers, has produced Le Film Geant, and other works in which this versatile bookman tries that rare form of romance in French literature, the novel that deals with scientific wonders. Les Pures et les Impures is a study of female life since the war, while Torches et Lumignons is a series of impressions of his contemporaries and Parisian life generally. Another highly prolific writer, Paul Margueritte (see 17.706), who died in 1919, has been called the " Thomas Hardy of the modern French novel," and certainly he was greatly influenced by English literature. Jouir and Le Sceptre d'Or were among his last works. Pierre Veber (b. 1869), a novelist and dramatist of vigorous talent, has produced L'Homme qui tiendit son Ame au Diable, a curious sort of modern Faust who succeeds in outwitting his Satanic Majesty or rather falls in love with a Parisian work-girl who does so and La Vue de Personnages obscurs.
Louis Bertrand (b. 1866), a disciple of Zola and Flaubert, repre- sents a curious phase of modern France in professing to disdain literature and prefer activity. A native of Lorraine, he has lived a great many years in north Africa, and nearly all his books are studies of the Mediterranean and the countries round it. His recent works continue this tendency, and apart from one or two novels the scenes of which are laid on the French Mediterranean coast, in Spain (L'Infante and Le Rival de Don Juan), or Attica (Bains de Phalere), he teaches the French the joys of limitless horizons such as they find in their colonies, and he revels in the virile joys of abund- ance and prosperity, the panoply of form and colour. ' To perform a pompous act," he says, " is to touch closely for an instant life and poetry, and, in a temporary exaltation, proclaim oneself superior to one's surroundings and to others to participate in the glory of the world." His Pepete le Bien-Aime is a naturalistic romance of African life, curiously contrastable with his St. Augustin of before the war.
The romance of adventure has, as a matter of fact, for some years past been highly popular in France, and some of the best young writers have devoted themselves to this genre. Most of them have come strongly under the influence of R. L. Stevenson, Conrad, and other English writers of the same school, most of whose works are translated. Pierre Benoit's Atlantide, which was awarded the literary prize of the French Academy, attracted exceptional attention on account of the charge levelled against the author of having plagiar- ized Sir Rider Haggard's She. Koenigsmark, Pour Don Carlos are others of this writer's romances. Le Lac Sale is a romance of Mor- monism, while the scene of La Chaussee des Geants (The Giant's Causeway) is laid in Ireland one of the indications of the way in which life outside their own frontiers has come to interest the best French writers. Among the most prominent of the younger writers of adventure stories, besides Benoit and Farrere, may be mentioned Pierre MacOrlan (b. 1883) (Le Chant de I'Equipage, etc.), Rene Bizet (b. 1887) (La Sirene hurle), Louis Chadourne (Le Maitre du
Navire), Cyril Berger, Edmond Cazal, Maurice Renard, all of whose work shows strong inspiration from the English and the fascination of seafaring life and adventure over sea and land.
Quite a number of writers also have turned for inspiration to the lowest ranks of society the Paris apache and the dregs of the humanity of big cities, and some remarkable studies of character and low humour are the result, such as Cri-Cri by Cyril Berger, Grain d'Cochon, by Maurice Dekobra (b. 1885), La Negresse du Sacre Cceur by Andre Salmon, and several works by Francis Carco, one of the choicest of French humorists.
Rene Benjamin (b. 1883) may also be called a humorist, but he is more he was in 1921 the leading satirist in France and a master of fierce irony. The author of a fine war-book, Gaspard, a masterpiece of French humour, he has also produced a series of satires on the administration of justice, on the great educational institutions, on society during the war (Sous le del de France) and since (Amadou, Bolcheviste) . His Major Pipe is a series of impressions of contact with the English armies in France a vein that was also successfully tried by Maurois in Le Silence du Colonel Bramble. Among the authors whose inspiration was actually called forth by the war, two or three men stand out preeminently from among masses of war literature, and these chiefly on account of their un- flinching realism. Le Feu, by Henri Barbusse (b. 1875), not only leapt into fame with startling suddenness, but it had a greater suc- cess than any other war " romance " in any country, and has given rise to a number of imitators. Barbusse continued his vigorous study of sociological problems in Clarte and other works. Les Croix de Bois, by Roland Dorgeles, more measured in tone than the work of Barbusse, ; is perhaps the finest of all the books called forth by the war. Side by side with him must be placed Georges Duhamel, who was already known as a critic. He was actively engaged during the war as a doctor, and a book of his called Civilisation, published under a pseudonym, immediately attracted attention through its fierce realism and its critical spirit. In this work and in La Vie des Martyrs he expresses, as he says, " the life and feelings of those Frenchmen my brothers who have in such numbers consented to die without fore- going to express what was so near to their hearts those Frenchmen the greatness of whose soul, whose indomitable intelligence and touching naivete are too little known to the world." Raconteur, critic, humorist and dramatist, there is also a mystical strain in Duhamel, who at times reminds one of Maeterlinck, but a more vigorous and more French Maeterlinck. One of his plays a short one-act fancy shows us a small group of average Parisian bourgeois who suddenly have the idea of taking a" country-house together, discuss their plans for an hour, and finally all come to loggerheads and separate through a criticism of small details, which wrecks the entire scheme. Le G.Q.G., by Jean de Pierrefeu, which has also had a notable success, is a kind of chronicle of the General Head- quarters Staff.
Romain Rolland's (b. 1866) much-criticised anti-militarist work, published during the war, Au-dessus de la Melee, comes more under the head of politics than of literature. Rolland has written the history of a free conscience during the war the history, as one of his critics puts it, of " a poor devil of an anarchist, who thrills with hope when he hears at a distance in the forest the axes of those heroic wood- cutters Lenin and Trotzky." In his Colas Breugnon, which was written before the war, but did not appear until after it, Rolland tried a new style of literature for him, mirthful, Gallic and indeed almost Rabelaisian (" a reaction," he says, " against the constraint of 10 years spent in the flesh of ' Jean Christophe,' which, first made to my measure, ended by becoming too small for me ").
Madame Alfred Valette (Rachilde) (b. 1862), one of the most prominent of women novelists (she has more than 30 novels or plays to her credit), possesses passion, keenness of observation and a vigorous style. Dans le Puits, ou la Vie interieure, however, is not a novel and contains no intrigue, but is a sort of " journal in- time," without much sequence, kept by the authoress during the years 1915-7 (Maurice Donnay and other writers did the same thing). Cast in the form of a series of conversations with a mysterious personage, Rachilde's book is a remarkable effort of self-revelation without hypocrisy or convention. The revelation of the whole thought, it gives, as its title indicates, a true sensation of the interior life surrounded by an atmosphere of nightmare, " such as was lived during the years of agony and suspense and butchery when one felt humanity descending into bottomless abysses."
Among the 419 French writers killed at the war whose work had already attracted attention, and who belonged to one or another of the leading literary groups, may be particularly mentioned Louis Pergaud, a " Prix G<3ncourt," author of De Goupil a Margot, who in his novels showed himself to be a keen student and observer of animals and with a great taste for natural history. Alan-Fournier, a very young author, in his single work, Le Grand Meaulnes, wrote per.haps the finest French adventure book of recent years. It is full of the hopes, romance, friendships and secrets of youth, its fancy and free untamed spirit tinged with melancholy and the timidity of woodland things. Others thus struck down before they had accomplished much were Louis Codet, also quite young, a very fine meridional story writer in the style of Daudet (La Fortune de Becot, Cesar Caperau, etc.); Paul Acker (b. 1874), author of Le Desir de Vivre and other novels; Lt.-Col. Driant (b. 1855), the hero of Ver-
