The experience of the Great War seems so far to have left little mark on French literature, and the reader of current French novels, poetry and drama will often find himself wondering what the cause of this may be. He will discover in French political and social life enough evidence of the fact that France in the last seven years passed through a terrible war and emerged devastated, robbed of hundreds of thousands of her sons, but unbroken and proud. In literature, however, so the observer will often think to himself, all this appears to have changed nothing. On the stage, in fiction and poetry, we might be in 1914, before the shadow of the disaster was to be seen or thought of. England, Italy, Germany even, have, in their imaginative and intellectual life, ‘reacted’ more thoroughly to the war than has France, most terribly stricken of them all.

Without criticising this ‘stationary’ character of contemporary French literature or in any way assuming that it will be permanent, we can readily find a reason for it. More than any other of the belligerents France lost her young intellectuals in the great struggle. The men through whom she speaks to-day, in her art and literature, are very often those who were accepted classics already in 1914, incapable of radical change or departure from the style they have made their own. The young writers who should now be writing alongside of them, and eventually succeed them, are dead.