THE YOUNG REVIEWS
Paris, February, 1920.
WHEN among us a reader of literary tastes wishes to obtain a bird's-eye view of the literature of the moment, to see it mapped out with all its currents, he thinks of the reviews. I mean by that not the old-established reviews, which after all are no more than magazines of the first class, but the living, active, combative reviews, which are the organs of groups, of literary and intellectual parties.
While the old reviews, in France as in England or in Germany, continued faithfully during the war to provide their usual articles on contemporary affairs, all the young French reviews found themselves cut off, the greater part of their staffs having been mobilised. Since the war they have reappeared, new reviews have been born, and important additions are announced for the spring. But, taken as a whole, the complexion of the world of the new reviews shows an aspect sufficiently different from what it had before the war and above all from what it had twenty years ago.
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The Nouvelle Revue Française has begun publication again since June 1st. The members of its pre-war staff meet again intact, because for the most part they belonged to a generation which reached, or had just passed, its fortieth year in 1914. The most important among them, the figure round whom the group was first assembled, was André Gide, and, like Gide, most of them had gone through the Symbolist Movement between 1890 and 1900. But they were no longer at the age of enthusiastic and violent prejudices; they cared much for analysis and intelligence and sought above all to see clear. Hence came their taste for psychological detail and for the literature of introspection, of which Jean Schlumberger produced poignant examples and which made the Nouvelle Revue Française the natural country of Marcel Proust. Hence also, and above all, the importance of its critical work, and that state of attentive and impartial clairvoyance which it has constantly striven to preserve. This clairvoyance did not exclude ardour or passion; the influence of Péguy, still more that of Claudel, was obvious in the fiery intellect of Jacques Rivière, now the editor of the review.
Unlike other reviews with an æsthetic bent, the Nouvelle Revue Française did not confine itself to the defence and the illustration of some definite artistic method. It welcomed, like the Mercure and the Revue Blanche of old days, everything which seemed to it interesting, original, and bearing the marks of authentic art. Obviously, for it, the centre of the artistic landscape was filled by the most illustrious of the whilom Symbolists, those who devoted themselves in solitude to build according to those mysterious ideal diagrams, drawn by Mallarmé upon a heroic and legendary sand: Gide, Claudel, Valéry. But the review became the home also of Charles Louis Philippe, that master of sorrowful tenderness and rending pity—of Pierre Hamp, who, in his stories of industrial life, has drawn the world of labour with a power frequently humorous and sometimes as original as Constantin Meunier's; of Jules Romains, the picturesque and powerful creator of "Unanimist" prose and poetry.
The Nouvelle Revue Française has emerged from its five years' concealment with the same characteristics. It still attempts to be a milieu of pure art and disinterested literature. But it is almost impossible, in France, for artists to-day to divest themselves of political preoccupations. They are divided, often fiercely, over this problem: "Should French thought to-day preserve or abandon its war attitude? Should it remain defiant towards the foreigner and subordinate everything to the continuance of the intellectual struggle against Germanism?" The editors of the Nouvelle Revue Française, who are divided on that question, endeavour in their review itself to elucidate it by discussions amongst themselves.
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The Revue Critique des Idées et des Livres has also just reappeared. It was the organ of a younger generation than that of the Nouvelle Revue Française, and that is why the majority of its old conductors no longer respond to the call. More than twenty of them, and notably Pierre Gilbert, who was the heart and soul of them, were killed in action. As its name indicates, this review is above all concerned with criticism. You find in it few poems and no novels. The young men who united around it aimed at restoring to French literature a classic discipline, and fighting all the remains of romanticism from democracy to symbolism. That is why the review published special numbers dedicated to Richelieu, to Stendhal, to Mistral, and on the occasion of Rousseau's centenary a special number of another kind, remarkably violent, devoting to execration the Genevese whom they held to be the father of French romanticism and the Æolus of all the storms.
The Revue Critique des Idées et des Livres was profoundly influenced by Charles Maurras. It was the literary organ of the ardent, patriotic generation aroused in France by his influence and that of Maurice Barrès. Nevertheless, some months before the war it broke away from L'Action Française; or rather it was that paper, the organ of M. Maurras, which declared itself unable any longer to commend without reserve the tendencies of the Revue Critique. This cleavage arose out of some articles in the Revue Critique which praised the philosophy of M. Bergson. Now L'Action Française had opened war long before on Bergsonism for reasons which were not philosophic. That is why the Revue Critique, although still benevolently watched by M. Maurras, was considered by him as a lapse from orthodoxy.
In its resurrected form it has kept its classical tendencies, its taste for pure criticism, the intellectual discipline which made it subordinate everything to the national point of view. But on the other hand it shows an inclination to broaden, to become more elastic, to take a less rigid and combative attitude than of old. Although most of its editors are friends of M. Maurras and L'Action Française, it preserves its intellectual autonomy intact and is no longer attached to a political party. Its rôle seems to be to revive the old tradition of French classicism. It maintains especially those discussions on the problems of the day and the eternal problems, those intelligent and passionate debates which have always given so much animation to young French reviews.
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A new review, the work of which will often be in accord with that of the Revue Critique des Idées et des Livres, is announced for the month of March, and that announcement has already aroused much interest. This is the Revue Universelle, the organ of the "Parti de l'Intelligence." This party, which might well have found a less naïve title, is a nationalist group which proposes to keep the intellect of France in the channels of national tradition and civic vigilance. It includes almost all the monarchists of the Action Française, but also a certain number of patriotic writers who are not royalists, including Camille Mauclair, Daniel Halévy, Edmond Jaloux, Henri Ghéon, and Henri Massis. It has been founded in opposition to the "Clarté" group of Romain Rolland, Henri Barbusse, Georges Duhamel, and Pierre Hamp, which unites intellectuals with socialist and pacifist leanings. It is, in the world of letters, a resurrection of the old leagues of the "Patrie Française" and the "Droits de l'Homme," which flourished at the time of the Dreyfus affair. But up to the present the majority of French writers have not enrolled themselves in either body.
The title of the Revue Universelle is based on the desire of the "Parti de l'Intelligence" to make it an organ for propagating French intellectual influence abroad, for ensuring the dissemination and establishing the primacy of the classic culture which is bound up with the French genius. The Revue Universelle will attempt to give to French nationalism, which has hitherto confined its propaganda to France, an influence over the world. It is patently a difficult enterprise and one essentially a little paradoxical. But it will certainly be very interesting and will deserve to be closely watched abroad. The Revue Universelle will be directed by the clearest and strongest head amongst contemporary French students of foreign politics, M. Jacques Bainville. The names of the chief members of the "Parti de l'Intelligence" assure from the start a staff of the first order. The "Clarté" group has not yet announced its intention of founding a similar organ.
In the spring there will appear a review in French which will fill a place at present empty: the Revue de Genève, whose editor will be M. Robert de Traz. This will be a review essentially European, which will aim at giving an exact picture of intellectual Europe to-day, and will examine objectively æsthetic, political, religious and moral, national and international tendencies. Its founders believe that an authoritative position is assured.
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Most of these reviews are or will be reviews of ideas. In contrast to what was the case twenty years ago the reviews which are devoted to new and bold artistic manifestations remain on a lower level. Before the war the Phalange was a very live and picturesque review around which were grouped a number of the old-time Symbolists and newer writers, from Francis Viélé-Griffin to Guillaume Apollinaire. Almost all the young made their débuts in the Phalange. It is regrettable that its director, M. Jean Royère, has decided not to revive it after the war.
The literature which is attached to Futurist and Cubist art has for organ the review Littérature, rather slender but curious. During the war there began to appear a very sumptuous Cubist review of literature and art, L'Elan, which was very interesting but did not survive its fourth number.
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It does not come within my present scope to refer to the old reviews, which are well enough known to English readers. But I must mention that in the last year a new one has been added to these, the Minerve Française, classical and traditional in tenets and of an excellent literary standard. Finally, as for the weekly papers, half way between the dailies and the reviews properly so called, they are not so important in France as in England. L'Opinion and L'Europe Nouvelle are at present the most alive; those and the Revue Hebdomadaire, which is in another category.
In fine, the young French reviews to-day are preoccupied with ideas first and art second. It is difficult for them, even when they are willing, to avoid a definite orientation towards politics and the problems of politics. They are the natural voices of a generation which is prevented by actual events from indulging in detached speculations. But that period of transition will pass and will no doubt soon help forward a movement in France for the recovery of the precious privileges of spiritual liberty.
ALBERT THIBAUDET