THE NOVEL OF CHILDHOOD EDMOND JALOUX, ANDRÉ LAFON, G. DES VOISINS, MARCEL PROUST, ETC. Two of the pastoral novels we have just considered, _Charles Blanchard_ and _Marie-Claire_, are novels of childhood; and the first two volumes (the most beautiful) of _Jean-Christophe_ come into the same category; when we examined the works of René Boylesve, we found that the hero of two of his most touching stories is a little boy; Anatole France is even now writing the history of ‘Petit Pierre’; Francis Jammes has consecrated a whole volume to the observation of his baby daughter; and there is Mæterlinck’s exquisite _Oiseau Bleu_. And here are several other writers who, in the last half-dozen years, have written novels of conspicuous beauty and reputation concerned with little children. When I came to live in France, some thirty years ago, the novel of childhood was supposed to be a product of English manufacture, almost exclusively. It was much admired, for the French are a nation of child-lovers and a people of psychologists; but it was generally supposed that Anglo-Saxon blood was needed to relate the youth of a Maggie Tulliver or a David Copperfield. In those days the French yellowback, in six cases out of ten, was a love story; in the other four it was a social novel. Is it the philosophy of Bergson, his glorification of instinct, sensibility, intuition, that has changed all that? The novel of childhood is now one of the most frequent, the most admired of French romances. Not the mere observation of childhood; not the sole charm of reminiscence, always popular because it aureoles our faded foreheads with the light of other days: ‘Ah! so I used to think! Even so was I!’ It is rather a careful reconstruction of the point of view of a young boy--except Marie-Claire, I remember no girls in the novel of childhood!--and his first impressions of the mysteries of life: love, sin, pain, madness, death. These novels of childhood are, in fact, studies in psychology. Dickens perhaps began it--Dickens always so beloved in France. Yet Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Little Nell, if they suffer from the world’s oppression, suffer rather than reflect or observe. The theme was really inaugurated, I think, by Mr Henry James, some fifteen years ago, in _What Maisie Knew_, the impression made on a child by the mysterious iniquity of its elders.