BOTH M. Maurice Genevoix and M. Joseph Delteil-winners of the Goncourt and Vie-Heureuse Prizes, respectively -are comparatively young men; as indeed they should be, if the purposes of the two awards are kept in mind. The Goncourt Prize is awarded by the ten members of the Académie Goncourt, and is naturally destined for young and comparatively unknown writers in the naturalistic traditions of its founders. The VieHeureuse Prize which was formerly awarded to Romain Rolland for the earlier volumes of Jean Christopheis voted on by a committee of French women writers, and, like the other prize, usually falls to a young novelist.

Raboliot is the novel for which M. Genevoix has been thus signalized. It is a careful and studious piece of 'regional' fiction, its setting laid on the edge of the valley of the Loire in Central France, where the author is entirely at home, being himself a native of Châteauneuf, near Orléans. To prepare himself for writing it, the author, in true Goncourt fashion, spent months among the natives of the the natives of the Sologne district, most of whom are poachers in a kind of semi-legitimate way. He had already written a novel, Remi des Rauches, in which he recorded with equally painstaking fidelity the life of the fishing people of the Loire, familiar to him from childhood. Still earlier he had written four or five books based on his experiences at the front, of which the most widely read is Sous Verdun. He turned, indeed, to the

task of writing Remi des Rauches in a mood of boredom with the material he had thus been exploiting so freely.

M. Joseph Delteil, who is even younger than M. Genevoix, is in a

MAURICE GENEVOIX [Les Nouvelles Littéraires]

different narrative-tradition: without being less realistic or less willing to see the earthy side of human life, he is proudest of his kinship, remote as it may be, with Rabelais, he gives freer rein to the fantastic and the grotesque. His book based on the life of Joan of Arc was severely mishandled by orthodox critics as flagrantly sacrilegious, but M. Delteil, who has had a Catholic education, defends himself as not having intended to write a book about the saint but about the woman; and plenty of critics have justified him.

His latest novel, The Five Senses, is a humorous and fantastic tale in which the author parodies the novel of adventure with all the resources of the modernist writer of fiction. A plague breaks out in Paris with such devastating effect that the President is forced to declare a medical dictatorship, and the heroine Eléonore, formerly a goose-girl, now an official of the Institut Pasteur, becomes dictator. In this rôle she decides to order a general exodus of the population to the North Pole to escape the infection, and on shipboard the superficial conventions of civilized society slip off one by one, leaving the characters of the book free to act as they would in a state of nature. The intent of this device is obviously satirical, and M. Delteil has made the most of his opportunities. Naturally he has been reproached by many critics for his indelicacy, and The Five Senses is probably not a book for the innocent. On the other hand, it is said to have the saving grace of sustained and healthy humor; and no critic has denied that in sheer literary quality it is a brilliant piece of work.

*

RECENT RUSSIAN LITERATURE

THE Volia Rossii, a strongly antiSoviet but well-informed magazine published in Prague, prints in its latest issue two extensive articles on the most recent Russian literature. These articles deal chiefly with the writings of men who have, whether of their own free will or not, taken the Bolshevist catechism as their law.

'In the beginning of the Bolshevist régime,' says the writer, 'the Soviet fiction-writers, almost without exception, delighted in painting the new hero: a man in a leather jacket, a relentless fighter for the Communist ideal, the ruler, the dictator — a true

contrast to the type, so often painted in pre-Revolutionary literature, of an irresolute intellectual wrapped up in his doubts and anxieties. The background was a fiery one, and lent itself admirably to representation - rebellion, revolution, mob scenes, civil war. In the beginning, of course, this was close enough to the facts. Revolution did create a new type of hero in the most out-of-the-way corners of Russia. But very soon the painting of these scenes and types became as stereotyped as that of romantic heroes. Take, for instance, the heroes of Ehrenburg, with their high probity and mathematical mercilessness - Ehrenburg, who always rushes headlong in pursuit of the latest fashion.

"Then came disillusion. Instead of pure Communism, the N. E. P., or New Economic Policy, with its incitement to profiteering, struck its roots in Russian soil. The dazzling panorama of street barricades from which the world revolution was being proclaimed gave way to the everyday red tape of Soviet government offices, energetic offensives to devious compromises, revolutionary fighters to officials that looked suspiciously bourgeois. And instead of the fantastically perfect cities they had dreamed of, the Russian Communist writers saw their age-old, terrible Russia - a hostile element, firm as a rock in its primitive

ness.

'All this filled them with terror. Those who keep track of the current of Russian literature to-day will observe the reaction in its general tone of joylessness. Communist writers describe the darkest pictures that life presents; they uncover its most dreadful sores; if we are to believe them, the Russian reality of to-day is a nightmare. Two or three years ago such writings as those of Pilniak, for instance, provoked outbursts of indig

nation from the faithful; they were called "a libel on the Revolution." But a great deal of water has flowed under the bridge since then.'

The article then mentions stories by Anna Karavaeva, Pilniak, Zorich, all descriptive of provincial life under an arbitrary administration. The humorous tales of Artiom Vesely, who tells the story of a half-illiterate fellow and his ascent to commissarial rank, relieve somewhat the pages of the current number of Krasnaia Nov, a literary journal published in Moscow; but the bulk of the pieces in it are characterized by this critic as 'awesome human documents' revelations of administrative abuses, weird realistic pictures of ignorance, savagery, bloodshed.

The critic's last paragraphs are the most significant, for they point to the germs of hope that are to be found in Russian literature to-day- and perhaps in Russian life itself. "The scathing, satirical tendency breaks forth vigorously, regardless of every Communist taboo, every censorship regulation, every government decree.' No such license was possible three years ago. What is being printed to-day could be called real freedom of speech as compared with what prevailed in those very recent times. 'After a period when boundless and shameless praise of Communist achievements was the watchword, writers naturally have fallen into reaction and now picture the darkest reality they can find. They overlook the bright spots that undoubtedly exist; but then, it has always been the tradition of Russian literature to struggle against the evils of the day by revealing and satirizing them.'

A DANISH ACTOR-MANAGER

'IN all of Great Britain, since the Irish Free State considers itself apart,

-and in all of the United States, the theatre is in the hands of merchants. Playwrights, producers, and actors all alike are merchants. Artists in the true sense of the word simply do not exist in the Anglo-Saxon theatre. As things are they cannot.'

actor

Whose winged words are these? They might have been uttered by Mr. Shaw in his old cantankerous days, or only yesterday by Mr. George Jean Nathan. As a matter of fact, they were used by the most distinguished of Denmark's contemporary actors, Johannes Poulsen, in an interview with a representative of the Daily Telegraph. Poulsen in not a familiar name in English-speaking circles, but on the Continent he is regarded as a producer second only to Reinhardt and as an he is the star of the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen - second to none. He comes of an illustrious theatrical line, for both his father and his uncle were great men in the Royal Theatre of another generation, and his father created for the first time on any stage the principal male rôles of all of Ibsen's plays. So brilliant was his performance in these parts that the great playwright insisted on having the world première of each of his dramas given in Copenhagen instead of in Norway. Johannes Poulsen has inherited this tradition, and is reputed to play Helmer in The Doll's House with a distinction superior even to his father's.

But he is not very sanguine about the theatrical state of affairs in the modern world — outside of Denmark. Not only is the theatre, in his opinion, dominated everywhere by business to the exclusion of high-minded professionalism, but the drama itself, from a literary point of view, is on the decline. 'Of the modern writers for the stage,' he says, 'not one gives promise of turning out anything of lasting value. We

A GOR'KII OF THE BALKANS ROMAIN ROLLAND, like many great writers, has been, as Falstaff would say, not only an artist himself, but the cause that is art in other men. Except for his friendship and encouragement, Panait Istrati, a young Rumanian novelist, would even yet be earning his living by taking photographs on the 'Promenade des Anglais' at Nice. Though born not far from Bucharest, his father a Greek smuggler and his mother a Rumanian peasant woman, Istrati had not lived in his native country for more than twenty years since the time when, as a boy of twelve, he was seized with the Wanderlust and set out on a course of very precarious travels.

Full as those years must have been of misery and denial, they furnished the adventurer with a practically inexhaustible fund of experiences for literary use when, on becoming a protégé of the distinguished author of Jean Christophe, he took to writing the tales and novels that have won for him the title of 'the Gor'kii of the Balkans.' His three books - Kyra Kyralina, L'Oncle Anghel, and La Présentation des Haidouks were all written in French, and now Istrati proposes to return to Rumania to live, to translate these books into Rumanian, and to write henceforward in his native tongue. It appears to be something of a question how popular he

will be with the authorities, since he is known to have humanitarian sympathies; and, in the light of the article that appears elsewhere in this issue, that uncertainty is not remarkable.

Istrati's three books are all in the picaresque vein, and their plots laid in Near Eastern settings, the romantic possibilities of which the author has freely exploited.

A FASCIST ACADEMY

ONE of the measures recently approved by the Italian Cabinet provides for the creation of an Italian Academy, roughly on the model of the French Academy. There will be sixty members instead of the forty French Immortals, however, and they will enjoy an income of thirty thousand lire a year and the right to wear a blue uniform with gold facings. Members will be appointed on the King's or the Prime Minister's recommendations, and thus the Italian Academy will not, like its French model, be self-electing and self-perpetuating. The first academicians will, naturally enough, be d'Annunzio and Marconi; Signor Farinacci will certainly follow soon- but what of Signor Croce? That illustrious critic has all the earmarks of the born academician; but is he likely to be recommended by the Duce?

A CORRECTION

SINCE publishing the translation of a recently discovered manuscript of 'King, Queen, and Jack,' by Hans Christian Andersen, we learn that an English version of the story did appear in the January 1869 Riverside Magazine for Young People. Julius Clausen, the Danish librarian who discovered the manuscript, was apparently unacquainted with the fact that it had ever been printed in America.

A Short History of the British Working Class Movement, by G. D. H. Cole. Vol. I. 17891848. London: Allen and Unwin. 68.

[H. J. L. in the Manchester Guardian] THIS is the first of two volumes in which Mr. Cole proposes to write the history of the British Labor movement in all its varied aspects, from its real origins in the Industrial Revolution down to the present time. The book will mainly interest those who are beginning the study of the subject rather than those who are already acquainted with its outlines. Like all that Mr. Cole writes, it has the great merits of clarity, a firm control of the material, and a definite and consistent point of view. It is not, of course, original; it is built upon the classic work of Mr. and Mrs. Webb, of Max Beer, and of Mr. and Mrs. Hammond. But its materials are freshly handled, and it reads throughout like the book of a writer fully equipped to write in terms of the sources themselves.

Mr. Cole has been so anxious to make his book a system of wide generalizations that it loses a good deal of the play of personality. His figures tend to become the sport of blind, economic forces, and to lose, in consequence, that sense of pungency which gives to history so much of its light and shade. He would doubtless reply that the economic forces have a cumulative effect far greater than personality can hope to achieve. That is, in the main, true. Yet it is important to remember that the men who make movements in their turn also fashion their substance. Not a little of the failure of Chartism was due to the fact that it never produced a single leader of real competence. Mr. Cole has a horror of the tactical skill of Francis Place, the Schnadhorst of his generation; yet the guess may be hazarded that one Place in a political campaign will take it further than fifty men like Orator Hunt or Vincent or even so noble a figure as William Lovett.

It is a pity that Mr. Cole did not devote a little more space to the examination of the political and economic doctrines of the time. His method of separating the Labor movement from other phases of the national life gives it a sense of separateness from the rest of the national life which it did not, in fact, possess. Few of its doctrinaires had a sharp-cut philosophy of their own; and it is significant that then, as now, their intellectual leaders mainly came from a class out

side them. Mr. Cole, moreover, does not men tion Bentham. It would not be difficult to show that not the least of his many great services to the cause of social reform was to devise criteria of social good which, in the hands of the philosophers of labor, were far more destructive of the existing order than the abstract metaphysics of natural right. And nothing shows more forcibly the power of his doctrine than the speeches of men like Brougham and Macaulay. So, too, Mr. Cole discusses some of Disraeli's notions, but has no place for Dickens. Yet it could be argued with justice that the latter did as much as anyone in his time to bring home to men the reasons why amelioration was essential.

Memories and Melodies, by Nellie Melba. London: Thornton Butterworth. 2s.

[The Nation and the Athenæum]

IT would not be difficult to make Melba's life into a fairy story - how there was a poor goosegirl who took a kitchen shovel in her hands and struck open a gold mine in the cabbage patch, and great kings paid her homage, and she lived in silks and finery happily ever afterward. It is true that the facts are slightly less romantic Melba's father was the son of a Scotch farmer, and came to Melbourne with a pound in his pocket and made a fortune. But it is also true that his daughter was so short of funds when she took lessons from Marchesi in Paris that she had only one dress, which she wore week in, week out, in spite of Marchesi's protests.

Then suddenly the mine was discoveredthe bottomless gold mine in Melba's throat. In an incredibly short time she was appearing in Brussels, singing to an incredulous, silent, finally uproarious house, and waking next day to find herself, soberly and solidly, famous throughout Europe. Indeed, every door was open to a woman with that voice; every city in the world clamored to hear it. But the golden voice was lodged, as such voices often are, in a shrewd, businesslike body. She did not penetrate to strange places, nor sing strange songs. 'Home, Sweet Home' rang out almost incessantly in the palaces of kings and millionaires. But once at least the prosperous pilgrimage was interrupted, and she stooped over Sarah Bernhardt on her deathbed. The great actress whispered, 'Ah, Melba . .my golden voice needs me no longer, for I am

...