another direction,
but before these writers there was a precedent in France for this
method, of which perhaps the two chief exemplars were Jules Romains and
Henri Barbusse. Although the two writers have little else in common,
both are intensely conscious of the tremendous, if imponderable, impact
of elemental and universal forces upon personality, of the profound
modifications which natural and social environment unconsciously
impress upon the individual life, and of the continual interaction of
forces by which the course of life is changed more fundamentally than
by less imperceptible influences. Both M. Romains and M. Barbusse
perceive, as the fundamental factor influencing human life, the
contraction and expansion of physical and spiritual relationship, the
inevitable ebb and flow perceived by the poet who pointed out that we
cannot touch a flower without troubling of a star.

M. Romains has found his literary medium in what he calls unanimism.
While M. Barbusse would not claim to belong to the same school, and in
fact would appear on the surface to be at the opposite pole of life in
his philosophy, we shall find that his detachment, founded, though it
is, upon solitude, takes essentially the same account of outside forces
as the philosophy of M. Romains.

He perceives that each man is an island of illimitable forces apart
from his fellows, passionately eager to live his own life to the last
degree of self-fulfilment, but continually thwarted by nature and by
other men and women, until death interposes and sets the seal of
oblivion upon all that he has dreamed and sought.

And he has set himself the task of disengaging, as far as possible, the
purpose and hope of human life, of endeavouring to discover what
promise exists for the future and how this promise can be related to
the present, of marking the relationship between eternity and time, and
discovering, through the tragedies of birth, love, marriage, illness
and death, the ultimate possibility of human development and
fulfilment.

"The Inferno" is therefore a tragic book. But I think that the
attentive reader will find that the destructive criticism of M.
Barbusse, in so far as it is possible for him to agree with it, only
clears away the dead undergrowth which obscures the author's passionate
hope and belief in the future.

Although the action of this story is spiritual as well as physical, and
occupies less than a month of time, it is focussed intense