THERE are perhaps two reasons why the younger generation of French writers is given to collective introspection and absorbed in speculation upon tendencies. The first is the economic fact that one of the easiest and least costly methods of procuring copy for a revue jeune is to conduct an enquête; the second is that for better or worse the French logical mind is prone to develop a mania for literary classification and a disregard for the essential characteristics of the subject matter of the classification — literature. Consequently, it is very difficult to derive any real information from so extensive an inquiry as that of MM. Picard and Muller (“Les Tendances Présentes de la Litterature Française”. Basset. 3 fr. 50). Even if the classification into grandiose schools, Unanimistes, Paroxystes and the like, is admitted by the writers themselves, the labels tell us nothing, for they are concerned with the accidents rather than the essentials of literature; much as though we decided to base our own literary criticism upon a division of modern Poets into those who eat bacon and eggs for breakfast and those who do not. Chaotic classification is a delusion and a snare. More satisfactory, because more restricted and definite, is the inquiry conducted by M. Emile Henriot in Le Temps (” A Quoi rêvent les Jeunes Gens”? Champion. 2 fr.); yet even here, if we consider the replies as a whole, the result is negative. The young French writers of to-day have completely broken with Symbolism; and if the contributors to M. Henriot's symposium are unanimous in affirming that there is no “new school”, they are unanimous no less in denying the gods of the nineties.
The desire for novelty at all costs is no longer characteristic of young French literature; and the generation which expressed this desire in vers libre and sought its models in America, in Germany, in Flanders, in any country save France itself, is past. It is true that any evolution from the artistic position taken up by Mallarmé was of itself doomed to sterility; but other causes than
a mere aesthetic impossibility have been at work. It would be difficult to overestimate the literary importance of the foundation of the political organisation, L'Action Française, with its royalist and Catholic programme and its watchword “France for the French.” The immediate cause of the Action Française was the Dreyfus trial, and though English opinion was practically unanimous in supporting Dreyfus and condemning anti-Semitism, there can be little doubt that on purely nationalist grounds the French agitation against Dreyfus was justified. A French nationalist policy, such as that adopted by the Action Française demands that France should remain a Catholic country and that its government should not rest in the hands of naturalised Jews or other aliens. Although it may seem that the growing popularity of such a party has no immediate connection with the literary tendencies of modern France, the connecting link is supplied by two individuals, Maurice Barres and Charles Maurras. Catholic in their sympathies, nationalist in their politics, classical in their literary descent, Maurice Barres as the creative artist, Charles Maurras as the critic, enjoy an influence which becomes every day more widespread. From Charles Maurras descends the most powerful of the younger critical groups today, that of the Revue Critique. The political programme of the Action Française is translated into literary terms. Alien influence must be excluded from French literature; a return to the truest French tradition, to Racine, Pascal, Lafontaine, Stendhal, to Villon and to the Pleiade, must be exacted by the new criticism. We have only to compare Charles Maurras' latest book, “La Politique Religieuse” (Nouvelle Libraire Nationale, 3 fr. 50), in which the Catholic anti-alien policy is argued with the author's accustomed purity of style and language, with “Les Disciplines”, by M. Henri Clonard (Rivière, 3 fr. 50), the chief critic of the Revue Critique, to see how close is the connection between the classical renaissance in politics and in literature. The authority of M. Maurras is quoted again and again in M. Clouard's book; the very subtitle, “La Necessité littéraire et
sociale d'une renaissance classique” reads like a phrase of the master's. The burden of the argument is pure Maurras. Romanticism must be forgotten, and the German prophets who preached it rejected for the true French tradition. “An imagination,” says M. Clouard, “can very well be happy and brilliant, a point of view picturesque, a sentiment beautiful. But if you substitute them for analysis and experience where there are no other possible intermediaries between man and reality, you are mistaken and deceived on every hand”. Analysis and experience — they are the old characteristics of French classicism and the ideals of the renaissance in France today.
It is symptomatic that a recent number of the Revue Critique was entirely devoted to Stendhal, in whom the analytic genius of French literature reached perhaps its highest development; while soon after Les Marches de Provence devoted a whole number to the consideration of fantaisie et fantaisistes. The Fantaisistes form a new school of French poets, with this striking difference from the generality of schools, that they have no programme or propaganda, no pseudo-philosophical theory of life on which to wreck their poetry. “Fantasy” in the sense in which the Fantaisistes use it for their watchword is a quality of temperament and not an aesthetic dogma; it is the faculty of analysing experience with an irony that verges on cynicism and an introspection that verges on egotism. In short, “fantasy” has always been an eminently French quality, in spite of the fact that its literary expression has been borne down for centuries by foreign influences, Spanish in the seventeenth century, English in the eighteenth, and German in the nineteenth. The terrible irony of Villon, the titanic imagination of Rabelais — these are the purely French products of fantasy. Jules Laforgue was a genius of the same mould. To this essentially French tradition many of the most significant of the younger generation attach themselves, P. J. Toulet, Tristan Dereme, Francis Carco, Jean-Marc Bernard, Jean Pellerin, to name the most significant; and to this tradition belong three
