One may doubt of the wisdom of a social theory which, seeing the stain on our vesture, would simply turn it wrong side out. The stain may go right through. The world may prove no stronger and no saner if you set it upside down. I am not M. Barbusse’s political convert. But I admire him for his reaction, his revolt against that which most of us so readily accept--the sufferings of the unknown mass. It is well that there should be writers who rouse and reveal, though their trumpet notes be harsh and unmodulated--well there should be those who shake the sleepers from their sloth and bid them save their neighbours and themselves, building anew, lest the pillars of the temple fall and crush us all in their ruin. In _Clarté_ the ideas of M. Barbusse are explained at full length: abolition of inheritance, universal disarmament, universal equality, universal Republic in the Federation of the World. In this book (which concerns the life of a clerk in the office of a factory, who marries, goes to the war, and returns to look at his wife and society, with not unkindly but disenchanted eyes)--M. Barbusse has lost his coarseness, but also that biting acid which imprinted on our remembrance the scenes of _Le Feu_. In his feminine characters--in the old aunt, in Marie, the wife, in the little blind girl whom every one pities and for whom no one cares--he shows a new quality of tenderness. What will he give us to-morrow? GEORGES DUHAMEL Like Henri Barbusse, M. Georges Duhamel has found his great opportunity in the events of the war. Before 1914 we knew him as a young writer of promise in only too many directions. He had written a play, _À l’Ombre de Statues_, which Antoine produced at the Odéon Theatre, and which was (with Marie Lenéru’s _Affranchis_) the chief success of Antoine’s heroic voyage of discovery in the perilous tracts of unknown youthful genius. M. Duhamel was also just coming into notice as a poet and especially as a critic of poetry in the columns of the _Mercure de France_. We liked his young uncompromising voice and the deliberate way in which he said that he was proud to be born in the century which produced a Paul Claudel. He had as yet published no novel. But the mobilisation revealed his capacity as a doctor, and it was as an army-surgeon that he joined the forces.