In a word, since 1905 a fresher, a more tonic air has been blowing across the housetops of French art and literature. Science is too positive. Every monad has had its day. Pictorial impressionism is without skeleton. Mysticism is coming into fashion again; only, the youngsters wear theirs with a difference. Even the Cubists are working for formal severity, despite their geometrical fanaticism. Youth will have its fling, and joys in esoteric garb, in flaring colours, and those doors in the narrow street called "Perhaps," do but prove the eternal need of the new and the astounding. Man cannot live on manna alone. He must, to keep from volplaning to the infinite, go down and gnaw his daily bone. The forked human radish with the head fantastically carved has underpinnings also; else his chamber of dreams might overflow into reality, and then we should be converted in a trice to angels, pin-feathers and all. What were the controlling factors in young French literature up to the greatest marking date of modern history, 1914? The philosophy of Henri Bergson is one; that philosophy, full of poetic impulsion, graceful phrasing, and charming evocations; a feminine, nervous, fleshless philosophy, though deriving, as it does, from an intellectual giant, Emile Boutroux. Maurice Barrès is another name to conjure with; once the incarnation of a philosophical and slightly cruel egoism; then the herald of regionalism, replacing the flinty determinism of Taine with the watch-words: Patriotism, reverence for the dead--a reverence perilously near ancestor-worship--the prose-master Barrès went into the political arena, and became, notwithstanding his rather aggressive "modernism," an idealistic reactionary. He is more subtle in his intellectual processes than his one-time master, Paul Bourget, from whom his psychology stemmed, and, if his patriotism occasionally becomes chauvinistic, his sincerity cannot be challenged. That sincerest form of insincerity--"moral earnestness," so called--has never been his. He is no more a sower of sand on the bleak and barren shore of negation. Little wonder he is accepted as a vital teacher. Other names occur as generators of present schools. Stendhal, Mallarmé, Georges Rodenbach, Rimbaud--that stepfather of symbolism --Emil Verhaeren--who is truly an elemental and disquieting force--Paul Adam, Maeterlinck, the late Remy de Gourmont--who contributed so much to contemporary thought in the making--Francis Jammes, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, Renard, Samain, Saint-Georges de Bouhelier, Jules Laforgue--and how many others, to be found in the pages of Vance Thompson's French Portraits, which valuable study dates back to the middle of the roaring nineties. II