Such was the condition of France after 1870; the country was mentally tired; it had become a land without a leader. The best among its imaginative writers could give no help. They staggered for a while, as if stunned by the bludgeoning of the disaster. Then, as the first effects passed off, they reëntered their old paths which led them into a purely literary field, remote and ever remoter from the destinies of their nation. It is not within the power of men already mature to make headway against a national catastrophe. Zola, Flaubert, Anatole France, and Maupassant, needed all their strength to keep themselves erect on their own feet. They could give no support to their nation. Their experiences had made them skeptical; they no longer possessed sufficient faith to give a new faith to the French people. But the younger writers, those who had no personal memories of the disaster, those who had not witnessed the actual struggle and had merely grown up amid the spiritual corpses left upon the battlefield, those who looked upon the ravaged and tormented soul of France, could not succumb to the influences of this weariness. The young cannot live without faith, cannot breathe in the moral stagnation of a materialistic world. For them, life and creation mean the lighting up of faith, that mystically burning faith which glows unquenchably in every new generation, glows even among the tombs of the generation which has passed away. To the newcomers, the defeat is no more than one of the primary factors of their experience, the most urgent of the problems their art must take into account. They feel that they are naught unless they prove able to restore this France, torn and bleeding after the struggle. It is their mission to provide a new faith for this skeptically resigned people. Such is the task for their robust energies, such the goal of their aspiration. Not by chance do we find that among the best in defeated nations a new idealism invariably springs to life; that the poets of such peoples have but one aim, to bring solace to their nation that the sense of defeat may be assuaged.