René Boylesve is not one of the greatest names in contemporary French literature--not a name to conjure with. No one has ever compared him to Pascal or Dante, as (to our stupefaction) they compare Claudel; no one has said of him, as it has been said of Péguy, that he is greater than Victor Hugo. And it is as well: this discreet and moderate artist would find no charm in immoderate praise. But we may say without fear of contradiction that he is one of the most readable of contemporary novelists. ANDRÉ GIDE André Gide is one of the acutest, one of the most sensitive critics of the Twentieth Century. His review, _La Nouvelle Revue Française_, has been no less indispensable to the development of our younger writers in France, than the _English Review_ to the Georgian authors across the channel. Instead of Masefield, of Conrad, André Gide has fostered the talent of a Charles-Louis Philippe, of Marguerite Audoux. But this critic, so perspicacious, so alert, so abreast of his times, is, at the same time, a novelist, apparently of another generation. The Nineteenth Century in its decline--the dear, delightful, decadent Nineteenth Century--with its dreams, and its nihilism, and its irony, and its delicate disenchantment--the Nineteenth Century which already seems such worlds away!--remains incarnate still in the novels of André Gide, hardly less than in those of France, or Régnier, or Pierre Loti. He has the same sense of beauty, the same regret for some ante-natal magic never since re-found, the same perfection of form, or rather a perfection almost equivalent in its transparent and insidious grace, in its purity, in its rare elegance: few writers of the Twentieth Century are elegant! And, like Anatole France, Gide, in his latest work, is full of a bitter contempt, a mordant, an almost impious derision of human nature. Evil is, in his eyes, the mortar that binds together our earthly tenement; a necessary condition of our being; man is a creature made of dust and mud. But I will not speak of his later books. Of the dozen volumes he has produced, no one is negligible, and at least three, _Paludes_, _L’Immoraliste_, and _La Porte Étroite_, have qualities for which one may suppose survival. _Paludes_ has a charm of youth and decadence too different from our serious age for me to praise it here; but _L’Immoraliste_ and _La Porte Étroite_ are as much in earnest as the Twentieth Century can demand, and yet they are not of it!