ABSTRACT
Since the flickering out of symbolism a few years ago, there has been a singular dearth of fresh initiative in French literature. The French themselves do not seem sure whether the present is merely a period of pause before the starting of some new movement, or whether they are definitively entering the stage of Alexandrian impotence. Even the novel, the literary form that flourished above all others in the last century, is showing signs of exhaustion. When I inquired of a distinguished Frenchman last year as to the outlook for the novel, he simply replied: C'est fini. Meanwhile, amidst the existing lassitude, we may note curious symptoms of dissatisfaction with the nineteenth century, and its aftermath in art and literature. It was in France, in the writings of Rousseau, that certain romantic and naturalistic points of view first found powerful expression. It is in France, the most intellectually sensitive of modern nations, that we now see the beginnings of reaction against the fundamental postulates of Rousseauism. Few books have been more talked about of late than M. Lasserre's brilliant and virulent attack on French romanticism. Rousseau is not merely an ancestor of romanticism, according to M. Lasserre, he is a complete embodiment of it; and Rousseauism M. Lasserre defines as an 'integral corruption of the higher parts of human nature.' If M. Lasserre's opinion of Victor Hugo in particular is to gain currency, the worshipers of Hugo have done well to make haste and celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Légende des Siècles, for by the time of the hundredth anniversary the glory of Hugo will have become a mere memory, like that of Ronsard in the seventeenth century.
