The war novels of M. Bourget, _Le Sens de la Mort_, _Nemesis_, are mediocre, though showing always the same technical qualities of solid construction. But he has written a short _nouvelle_ of profound beauty, _Le Justicier_, on a great theme of human peace and reconciliation within a divided family; and this sketches perhaps the general lines of to-morrow's reconciliations on our torn planet.
Among the innumerable books written by combatants, in which novels abound, no novel has achieved the powerful interest of certain collections of letters and journals which render, without literary modelling, fresh, authentic, and actually seen impressions. The generation which has lived through the war as an immediate and tragic reality has not written and certainly will not write the novel of the war. The Thackeray, the Balzac, the Tolstoi of to-morrow have probably been born, but are hardly out of the nursery.
The two forms of the novel preferred by the young generation of to-day are the novel of adventure and the little novel of irony and sentiment. Neither has yet produced any great result. The first, after a year, is already out of fashion, and the second will probably follow it in a few months. And the writers of value who have passed through these phases are now passing through some other.
The English novel of adventure has been in favour in France for some time. The novels of Wells have found here for twenty years, like those of Kipling, great numbers of ardent readers. Before that, a long time ago, in symbolist circles, it was the fashion to speak with the greatest admiration of Stevenson. And the novels of Chesterton, the influence of which was visible in André Gide's _Les Caves du Vatican_, have been appreciated by a narrower, but select, circle. Nevertheless it was only during the war that the younger writers were tempted systematically to compose romantic novels of adventure. The two novels of M. Pierre Benoit, _Königsmarck_ and _l'Atlantide_, are clever books, in which old methods are enhanced by a true novelist's temperament. An Englishman will find little in them which Stevenson, and even Rider Haggard, have not already given him. The _Maître du Navire_ of M. Louis Chadousne seems to introduce in addition a note of irony which shows that the author writes to amuse himself and does not believe in his adventure. And this note of irony is still more obvious in _Le Chant de l'Equipage_ of M. Pierre Mac-Orlan, which parodies the novel of adventure. The French novelist is a rationalist who pretends to believe in his mystery and does not believe in it. Between the adventure of the English novel and the adventure of the French novel there is the same difference as between the ghost in _Hamlet_ and the ghost which Voltaire brings on to the stage at full noon, without deceiving anyone, in _Semiramis_. The novel of adventure proves to have been a season's fashion which those who launched it abandon in the following season.