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.