What were the controlling factors in young French literature up to the greatest marking date of modern history, 1914? The philosophy of Henri Bergson is one; that philosophy, full of poetic impulsion, graceful phrasing, and charming evocations; a feminine, nervous, fleshless philosophy, though deriving, as it does, from an intellectual giant, Emile Boutroux. Maurice Barrès is another name to conjure with; once the incarnation of a philosophical and slightly cruel egoism; then the herald of regionalism, replacing the flinty determinism of Taine with the watch-words: Patriotism, reverence for the dead—a reverence perilously near ancestor-worship—the prose-master Barrès went into the political arena, and became, notwithstanding his rather aggressive "modernism," an idealistic reactionary.
He is more subtle in his intellectual processes than his one-time master, Paul Bourget, from whom his psychology stemmed, and, if his patriotism occasionally becomes chauvinistic, his sincerity cannot be challenged. That sincerest form of insincerity—"moral earnestness," so called—has never been his. He is no more a sower of sand on the bleak and barren shore of negation. Little wonder he is accepted as a vital teacher.
Other names occur as generators of present schools. Stendhal, Mallarmé, Georges Rodenbach, Rimbaud—that stepfather of symbolism —Emil Verhaeren—who is truly an elemental and disquieting force—Paul Adam, Maeterlinck, the late Remy de Gourmont—who contributed so much to contemporary thought in the making—Francis Jammes, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, Renard, Samain, Saint-Georges de Bouhelier, Jules Laforgue—and how many others, to be found in the pages of Vance Thompson's French Portraits, which valuable study dates back to the middle of the roaring nineties.
II
When we are confronted by a litany of strange names, by the intricate polyphony of literary sects and cénacles, the American lover of earlier French poets is bewildered, so swiftly does the whirligig of time bring new talents. Already the generation of 1900 has jostled from their place the "elders" of a decade previous: you read of Paul-Napoléon Roinard, Maurice Beaubourg, Hans Ryner—a remarkable writer—André Gide, Charles-Louis Philippe, of Paul Fort, Paul Claudel, André Suarès, Stéphane Servant, André Spire, Philéas Lebesgue, Georges Polti (whose Thirty-six Dramatic Situations deserves an English garb), and you recall some of them as potent creators of values.
But if London, a few hours from Paris, only hears of these men through a few critical intermediaries, such as Arthur Symons, Edmund Gosse, and other cultivated and cosmopolitan spirits, what may we not say of America, a week away from the scene of action? As a matter of fact, we are proud of our provincialism, and for those who "create"—as the jargon goes—that same provincialism is a windshield against the draughts of too tempting imitation; but for our criticism there is no excuse. A critic will never be a catholic critic of his native literature or art if he doesn't know the literatures and arts of other lands, paradoxical as this may sound. We lack æsthetic curiosity. Because of our uncritical parochialism America is comparable to a cemetery of clichés.
Nevertheless, those of us who went as far as the portraits by Vance Thompson and Amy Lowell must feel a trifle strange in the long, narrow street of Florian-Parmentier, with its alternations of Septentrional mists and the blazing blue sky of the Midi. This critic, by the way, is a staunch upholder of the Gaul. He will have no admixture of Latin influence. He employs what has jocosely been called the "Woad" argument; he goes back not to the early Britons, but to Celticism. He is a sturdy Kymrist, and believes not in literatures transalpine or transpyrenean. He loathes the "pastiche," the purveyors of "canned" classics, the chilly rhetoricians who set too much store on conventional learning. A Frank, a northerner, and the originator of Impulsionism is Florian-Parmentier. In his auscultation of genius, La Physiologie Morale du Poète (1904), may be found the germs of his doctrine. This doctrine seems familiar enough now, as does the flux of Heraclitus and the Becoming of Renan, in the teachings of Bergson. Unanimism has had some influence. M. Florian-Parmentier does not admire this movement or its prophet, Jules Romains. Unanimism. Ah! the puissant magic of the word for these budding poets and philosophers. It ought to warm the cockles of the heart of critics.
And then the generation of 1900—Alexander Mercereau, Henri Hertz, Sébastien Voirol, Pierre Jaudon, Jacques Nayral, Fernand Divoire, Tancrède Visan, Strentz, Giraudoux, Mandin, Guillaume Apollinaire—all workers in the vast inane, dwellers on the threshold of the future. The past and present bearings of the Academy Goncourt are carefully indicated. Thus far nothing extraordinary has come from it. Balzac is still the mighty one in fiction. Thus far the names of Anatole France, Paul Adam, the brothers Rosny, Pierre Mille—a brilliant, versatile man—still maintain their primacy.
Thus far, among the essayists, Remy de Gourmont, Camille Mauclair, Maeterlinck, Romain Rolland, J. H. Fabre, Jules Bois—now sojourning in America and a thinker of verve and originality—and Henry Houssaye, hold their own against the younger generation.