dency to redundancy and repetition, and, as in so many men of talent in this generation, there is occasionally an undeniable slovenliness of diction, probably the result of over-hasty production. There are graver faults than these, however. The brilliancy of his analysis often masks faulty assumptions; his characters act from strained or insufficient motives; his women are too neuropathic to rouse a sympathetic interest. They are too irresponsible, too much the creatures of their emotional instincts, the instruments of nature, without discipline or morality. This moral pathologist ignores all healthy states. Of a helpful marriage of true minds, the novels of Prévost make no mention. and take no heed. He is the brilliant but morbid and sterile representative of a decadent literary movement, not the virile sower of the future's seed.

Paul Margueritte1 had a less promising literary birth, but a much more healthy development. His early work was naturalistic à outrance. No writer of that school has been more minute than he in observation and description of the details of every-day actions. At first he sometimes abused this talent, descending to Rabelaisian details and episodes of Saphism that go about as far in the analysis of dirt as it is granted to any writer to penetrate who does not leave his æsthetic. sense behind. His early work shows also a disposition

1 Born 1860. Son of the general whose heroic death at Sedan is commemorated in Zola's “Débâcle." Fiction: Mon père, 1884; Tous quatre, 1885; La Confession posthume, 1886; Maison ouverte, 1887; Pascal Gafosse, 1889; Jours d'épreuve, 1889; Amants, 1890; La Force des choses, 1891; Sur le retour, Le Cuirassier blanc, 1892; Ma grande, 1893; La Tourmente, 1894; Fors l'honneur, 1895; Simple histoire (Nouvelles), 1895.

Criticism

Pellissier, Littérature contemporaine: Lemaître, Contemporains, v. 30.

to introspective revery; but in later books these tendencies are restrained by a riper mind and clarified by a cleaner taste, and his art is dignified by a higher purpose and a deeper sense of the responsibilities of literature to morals.

vous, uneven.

With this growing seriousness his work becomes more attractive, but his style continues restless, nerIt proceeds by fits and starts, suggests the eager searcher rather than the confident guide, though it flashes often with penetrating observations. Margueritte feels profoundly the unsolved enigmas of life, but he has come to reject the sedative of pessimism. Haunted, as he tells us, by a sentiment of mystery from childhood, he has been one of the first to suspend judgment, has balanced for a time between an instinctive assertion of the will that characterizes all healthy youth, and a morbid wonder breathed from the miasma of his determinist environment that made him question at times whether we were not "involuntary actors and powerless witnesses of the slow indefinable evolution of ourselves."1 But at his best and at last he has had the courage to proclaim that no one has a right "to leave a great responsibility to chance or destiny," that "the greatest misfortunes come from lack of will;" 2 and in those words he has found the disease and shown the remedy for the neuropathic culture of modern France.

It is inspiriting to see this son of one who won immortal renown by a glorious death, enfranchising himself by the power of his own genius from mental anæmia and moral lethargy. His "Pascal Gavosse" ends with a call to work. "Jours d'épreuve " in its

1 Alger l'hiver, 1891.

2 "Force des choses" and "Jours d'épreuve."

study of the humbler aspects of bourgeois life has laid aside Flaubert's contempt for Dickens' sympathy with that "lowly happiness, narrow and resigned but sure," despite poverty and disappointed ambition. "La Force des choses" is even more tonic in its healthy morality, and if in "Sur le retour" he has indeed returned to a more artificial psychology and tried to throw a new light on the old observation that "crabbed age and youth cannot live together," he recovers his healthier tone in "Ma grande," a sound, clean story of loving jealousy in which he has involved a delightful parody of the Symbolists. This same strong, hopeful note rings through his latest novel, "Fors l'honneur," and suggests the evolution from the present chaos of a new, profounder, purified realism from which shall spring a healthier literature than could have been hoped from debased Naturalists, intense Psychologists, canny Egoists, moon-struck Symbolists, or Bohemian Decadents.

INDEX.

EMBRACING authors, with the dates of birth and death and the titles of the
more important works. The article and its compounds are treated as integral
parts of names, but not of titles. The preposition de is neglected in both cases.