20? 



kiss again with tears. If M. Lemaitre has struck forth no new line, developed no new 

 faculty, at least he has lost nothing of his wayward originality. But M. Anatole France 

 (see E. B. x, 775) has gone on from strength to strength. He has never produced a more 

 brilliant book than L'es Dieux ont soif, which, in its neat light form, is a psychology of 

 the French Revolution a psychology in action, with no visible apparatus of historical 

 or philosophical knowledge but singularly penetrating and illuminative. Age has 

 weakened none of the charming and redoubtable arts of the author of I'Orme du Mail. 

 He is terrible or delightful, gay or sinister, exquisite or harshly, tragically moving, turn 

 by turn. The same unparallelled style, supple, opulent, exact and sober, adorns the 

 same philosophy as the loveliest flower may hide the brink of an abyss. For the mind 

 of M. France is full of contempt for human nature, derision of human destiny, and a 

 sombre cynical satisfaction in contemplating lust and frenzy and horror. It is not 

 unlike the mind of Swift. And yet M. France has looked on life and has seen that it 

 was good. Like his philosopher Maurice Brotteaux, " il admire la nature en plusieurs 

 de ses parties, et specialement dans la mecanique celeste et dans 1'amour physique." 

 He might also add that he admires the complication of the human character, and finds a 

 secret pleasure in verifying its paradoxes and disharmonies. His Evariste Gamelin 

 will recall to the reader familiar with the history of the times that strange figure of 

 Francois Sergent, most candid of mortals, most ferocious of revolutionaries, an im- 

 placable Jacobin, a delicate artist, who organised the September massacres and also the 

 picture gallery of the Louvre, and who, all his life, was the faithful and devoted lover of 

 one woman. But instead of the honest Mme. Sergent, Anatole France has given his 

 Jacobin, for a vis-a-vis, a woman whose wiles, whose frailties, whose successive sin- 

 cerities, remind us of the beautiful wife of Greuze, the daughter of the printseller. 



Somewhere at the feet of M. France (children of nature and not grace), opposite to 

 that band of idealists of whom we have already spoken, we must place a group of 

 unconventional young writers whose extreme right would include the delightful poet 

 Francis Jammes (whose Georgiques Chretiennes have the charm of Pan, on his pipe, 

 mimicking the church-bells), while their extreme left extended to the gifted Charles 

 Louis Philippe, who died prematurely at the very opening of the period under considera- 

 tion. There is Madame Marcelle Tinayre, who has never quite recaptured her first 

 delicate mastery in La Maison du Peche, yet who in L'Ombre de V Amour shows a sombre 

 magnificence of style, and a violent poignant beauty of her own; there is Colette Willy, 

 the actress, whose Vagabonde is a brilliant study of the eccentric sphere of the 

 music halls; there is Marguerite Audoux, the dressmaker, whose Marie Claire 

 was so astonishing a revelation of idyllic charm, primitive grace and exquisite 

 poignancy. Before the prose of a Marguerite Audoux, as before the painting of her 

 friend Madame Marval, the skilled artist, suddenly humbled, remembers a theory 

 dear to Browning that the real man of genius should rise untaught. Their ignorance at 

 all events is bliss. 



And somewhere we must place the literary manifestations of the drama, too various 

 to co-ordinate. We must note the metamorphosis which, in Le Tribun, has made of 

 M. Paul Bourget (see E. B. iv, 331), a successful playwright; we must recall the brilliant 

 reception given to Rostand's theatrical fairy tale of Chanteder (see E. B. xxiii, 754); we 

 must direct the reader to M. Charles Peguy's ample and powerful Mystere de Jeanne 

 d'Arc (the English reader may imagine Walt Whitman turned a Christian mystic, and 

 endowed with ten thousand-fold his original flux of words), and we must point out the 

 original talent of Mademoiselle Marie Leneru in her Afranchis. All these four writers 

 join at different points the camp of the idealists. (MARY DUCLAUX.) 



GERMAN LITERATURE 



There is a peculiarly incalculable element in the German literary movement of the 

 last generation; in spite of its being guided and preached at to an excessive degree by the 

 critics, it has persisted, time and again, in freeing itself from their leading-strings, and 



1 See E. B. xi, 783 et seq. , " 



