thought, the French Catholic movement is not uniform; and, in its chief literary exponents, as, for instance, in Claudel and Péguy, it is by no means orthodox. Maurras combines a national Classicism with his Catholicism, and others attempt in other ways to reach a synthesis between Catholicism and various factors of modern life. The influence which these tendencies exerted and exert is considerable and, on the whole, beneficent. Péguy’s death in battle was characteristic. Eloquent witness for modern France in all her intellectual manifestations was, indeed, borne by the large number of young writers who, like him, fell in the war.
By the side of this mainly political Nationalism there arose, out of the older humanitarian and international movements, a realist European movement, activist, energetic and propagandist. It included, on the one hand, writers like Romain Rolland, Suarès, Claudel and Péguy, to whom, in this respect, the poet Jules Romains may be added; and, on the other, Jaurès, who strove in the same way for a more concrete internationalism on the basis of a new patriotism, not a patriotism inspired by a spirit of revenge but by the ideal of a positive association of all nations in an harmonious whole. Most of these various personalities and leaders in French thought had one thing in common—a yearning for activity that was, in effect, a more or less definite protest against the abstract intellectualism of the Positivist heritage and against the scepticism which found its most artificial expression in Anatole France. To this protest Bergson’s attitude, in his “Intuition and Philosophy,” is akin. In him, as in Gide, Claudel and Jaurès, the watchwords are “élan vital-ferveur-ardente sérénité-effort.” Sorel raised the note to “violence.” In this I see more than the French were conscious of—the influence of German psychology with its “Activism” and “Emotionalism,” from Kant to Nietzsche and after.
I descried in the Entente, in the effective alliance of France with England and Russia, and subsequently with America, a practical expression of this European tendency of French minds. Strong Russian influences were at work in it as well as German, Scandinavian, English and American; and the question arises whether the unhealthy element in Romantic decadence will be overcome by this active striving for comprehension and by the effects of the war.
The best and precisely the most modern minds are well aware of the problem of decadence and regeneration. They
