pages the condition of the French novel on the morrow of the war. Beyond doubt it is passing through a moment of mediocrity. This is not because its public is beginning to break up. Publishers and readers demand novels. In default of genuinely new novels many old ones are reissued and read again and cheap reprints are swarming. Every new novel in which any grain of originality can be perceived is discussed and brought into the light and sells satisfactorily. And yet nothing so far has told us of the appearance of the Flaubert, the Zola, the Maupassant of to-morrow. Naturalism proves to have been the last great school, massive, compact, and powerful, of the French novel. Well, the survivors of the naturalist movement, such as MM. Céard, Hennique, Descaves, have ceased to write novels or else, if they still write them, have given up completely the methods of naturalism, and seek, without success, to adapt themselves to new tastes. It is not, however, impossible that in a little time from now naturalism in several ways may again be somewhat in fashion. There is a tendency among young writers and critics to revise the judgment given in the case of Zola, as the judgment on Dickens has been revised in England, and to consider that the poverty and emptiness of his last books has unjustly thrown a shadow on the profound and powerful works of his maturity. Those works, born of the war, which have been most favourably received, have been on the whole inspired by naturalist methods of observation and composition. The European success of _Le Feu_ is due in large part to the fact that the author applies to the great war the point of view and the methods of Zola. It was also from the point of view of the story of a squad that Zola wrote _La Débâcle_. So far the novel of manners and psychology born of the war has only been attempted by writers of the older generation, that which knew the masters of the naturalist novel, which lived their life, which took part, from one side or another of the barricade, in their struggles.