FRENCH LITERATURE

Dominion, Volume 13, Issue 72, 18 December 1919, Page 5

FRENCH LITERATURE

DISASTBOUS RESULTS OF WAB. A sombre picture is drawn of the future of French literature in the French supplement to "The Times." "The wax had lasted hardly a year before the young writers .wero worse than decimated. The deaths of Emilo Clermont, Ernest Psiohari, Alain Founder, and Emilo Nolly, which followed hard upon ono another, 6comed to indicate that a malign destiny had resplved that the break between the past and tho future of tho French novel should be catastrophic and complete Even for the ingirained sceptio it was .at times impossible to believe that theso deaths were fortuitous. "Tho fact that they wero all novelists was almost incidental when compared with the fact that they were all novelists of a half-achievement of a very particular kind. ■ If .anyone with a tolerably intimate acquaintance with tho work of the young Frenoh novelists had been asked lo choose at the beginning of 19M the half-dozen from among wihom the next great French novelist would arise, these four would have been among his choice. "They were not obviously _ more clover than their contemporaries; indeed, it is because they wero .perceptibly less occupied with being clever that their choice was so certain. They were, halfconsciously, indeed, preoccupied with something quite different. Individual as they wore, one could detect a common impulse in them all; they were turning instinctively from tho barron scopticism, and the still more barren dogmatism of tho preceding generation, to grope after an ideal. Clermont and Fournier were working towards an ideal conception of lovo: Psichari and Nolly towards an ideal conception of life. They were not in the least ohildish; in many ways they wero curiously adult and disillusioned, even old; a good- deal older, for instance, than any English novelists of a liko age, "Except for a certain lack of technical dexterity in thoir work, it might have been difficult to deduce that they woto young men. But their work was strikingly different from what had gone immediately before thorn; thero was not a trace of cynicism in it. It would'be too inuoh. to say that they believed in their ideal, savo perhaps in the case of Psicliari'e 'Voyage du Centurion'; fclvcy sympathised witji the ideal, and curiously .enough produced a stronger impression than any downright conviction would have done of the certainty of future achiovement. They appeared, like Malvolio, to think :highlv of tho soul; and confirmed readers of modern French novols will understand how that hijh esteem of humanity seemed to fall liko rain upon tho parched earth in the year before the war. "The nature of tlio catastrophe which befell French literature in the death of theso four men becomes more evident if one considers the preponderant placo occupied by the novel in French literary achievement. » ■ . "The account we have given of modern French literature is necessarily inconclusive. The raos.t impressive feature of ill is the catastrophe in which tho nascent struggling' idealism of the years before the war has been involved. All the actual or potential leaders of the younger generation in 19U wero idealists. Of tho few that remain one or two havo sought consolation in the Catholic Church; but in general it cannot be said that tho religious revival expected by many, is evident in literature. "There is more envious sympathy with religious faith than actual religions faith. "If we dare to prophesy, we would say that tho signs point to a yet longer period of irony and scepticism than the one which followed 1870.