The war novels of M. Bourget, Le Sens de la Mort, Nemesis, are mediocre, though showing always the same technical qualities of solid construction. But he has written a short nouvelle of profound beauty, Le Justicier, on a great theme of human peace and reconciliation within a divided family; and this sketches perhaps the general lines of to-morrow's reconciliations on our torn planet.
Among the innumerable books written by combatants, in which novels abound, no novel has achieved the powerful interest of certain collections of letters and journals which render, without literary modelling, fresh, authentic, and actually seen impressions. The generation which has lived through the war as an immediate and tragic reality has not written and certainly will not write the novel of the war. The Thackeray, the Balzac, the Tolstoi of to-morrow have probably been born, but are hardly out of the nursery.
The two forms of the novel preferred by the young generation of to-day are the novel of adventure and the little novel of irony and sentiment. Neither has yet produced any great result. The first, after a year, is already out of fashion, and the second will probably follow it in a few months. And the writers of value who have passed through these phases are now passing through some other.
The English novel of adventure has been in favour in France for some time. The novels of Wells have found here for twenty years, like those of Kipling, great numbers of ardent readers. Before that, a long time ago, in symbolist circles, it was the fashion to speak with the greatest admiration of Stevenson. And the novels of Chesterton, the influence of which was visible in André Gide's Les Caves du Vatican, have been appreciated by a narrower, but select, circle. Nevertheless it was only during the war that the younger writers were tempted systematically to compose romantic novels of adventure. The two novels of M. Pierre Benoit, Königsmarck and l'Atlantide, are clever books, in which old methods are enhanced by a true novelist's temperament. An Englishman will find little in them which Stevenson, and even Rider Haggard, have not already given him. The Maître du Navire of M. Louis Chadousne seems to introduce in addition a note of irony which shows that the author writes to amuse himself and does not believe in his adventure. And this note of irony is still more obvious in Le Chant de l'Equipage of M. Pierre Mac-Orlan, which parodies the novel of adventure. The French novelist is a rationalist who pretends to believe in his mystery and does not believe in it. Between the adventure of the English novel and the adventure of the French novel there is the same difference as between the ghost in Hamlet and the ghost which Voltaire brings on to the stage at full noon, without deceiving anyone, in Semiramis. The novel of adventure proves to have been a season's fashion which those who launched it abandon in the following season.
What I have called the little novel of irony and sentiment has had a longer, a more vivacious, and a more durable existence. It is almost peculiar to French literature and produces every year a good harvest of agreeable books. It is generally an invertebrate composition, made up of humorous episodes and reflections, the slight daily impressions of a man of letters, delicate and fatigued, in Parisian surroundings. It is, as it were, the chronicle-novel of French literary life.
A great number of the works of M. Abel Hermant belong to this style, and among them, in particular, the Anglo-French novel, half of Paris, half of Oxford, which he is now publishing, and the first two parts of which are called L'Aube Ardente and La Journée Brève (the latter in course of publication in the Revue de Paris). These are, like M. Hermant's books, the elegantly but frigidly written compositions which come only from a literary and conventional atmosphere and appear to have been developed in the author's mind as in an artificial incubator.
The true novel of this sort comes into existence under freer and more fanciful conditions than obtain in the intelligent and tidy, though somewhat melancholy, manufacture of M. Hermant. A young writer, who died a score of years ago, Jean de Tinan, produced masterpieces in Pense-tu réussir? and Aimienne, which have not been surpassed. To-day this type of novel has a right and a left—elegance on the right and Bohemianism on the left, the latter as a rule being more picturesque and more highly flavoured. On the right there is what one might call, using the word in the sense in which it is used by historians of mediæval literature, a littérature courtoise—I mean a literature of the court with some refinement and some sensuality. Here the author describes his little amatory adventures, endeavouring to relieve their inevitable banality with a certain piquancy in the introduction of portraits of his men and women friends, chosen among an elegant society. Les Papiers de Cleonthe, by M. Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, and Le Diable a l'Hôtel, by M. Emile Henriot, which have just appeared, though they fall sometimes into banality, make agreeable reading. On the left there is the little Bohemian novel, which deals with Montmartre as ancient stories dealt with Miletus. Its characters are artists and their more or less interesting friends, young women and their more or less interested friends. The novel of Montmartre, in which style Charles-Louis Philippe wrote the earliest masterpieces, is practised to-day in the most agreeable fashion by M. Francis Cares, author of Bob et Bobette, M. Mac-Orlan, author of La Clique du Café Brebis, and M. André Billy, the author of Scènes de la Vie Littéraire. Nevertheless these sometimes shady cabarets, where boredom is chased away, must not be confused with the higher spheres of literature.
*****
The French novel, regarded as a whole, is at the present moment going through a crisis. The qualities of original, free, and vigorous creation which were the causes of success from Balzac to Maupassant have become rare. The novel no longer produces those real and living characters round whom, as Taine said, it is possible to walk. But it is remarkable for qualities of intelligence.
Alphonse Daudet somewhere makes a distinction between creative novelists and essayist novelists. The distinction is very just. We lack to-day creative novelists, but we have a number of essayist novelists. Our contemporary novelists are very intelligent persons, who are often admirable in their knowledge of human nature, but who rarely succeed in making it live. It is nevertheless probable that there is nothing to be gained by retracing our steps. We shall no doubt reach something new by continuing to the end this exercise of the intellect, by applying it to an increasingly profound and refined psychological analysis. If we take examples from the English novel, the sign-post of our French novel of to-day would not be such a name as that of Dickens or of Eliot or of Kipling but rather that of Meredith. This is what is indicated by the great success now enjoyed by two complex and delicate writers, M. Marcel Prevost and M. Jean Girandoux. A l'Ombre de Jeunes Filles en Fleur and Simon le Pathétique are both novels of rich and fugitive personalities, who are absorbed in the contemplation of themselves, and who thus find a real world of inward adventures. It seems that the French novel is now moving by choice in this direction, and that the public is assisting the movement. This should not be astonishing in a country which has always regarded psychological analysis as the supreme goal of literature.