RENÉ BAZIN

Among the modem French writers of fiction, René Bazin makes a particularly strong appeal to the Anglo-Saxon reader. In common with most Frenchmen he has the gift of style, an artistic sensé of the beautiful in form; but he differs from many of them in the fastidious choice of his subjects and in the delicacy of their présentation. A 'realist' in the best sensé of the word, that is to say, a faithful portrayer of men and things as they are, he is by nature inclined to see the good that is in them no less, nay, rather than the bad, whUe the refinement of his nature défends him against the temptation to picture the merely low and debâsed. He may be best described as a realistic optimist.

His first writings, indeed. Ma Tante Giron (1886), Une Tache d'encre (1888), suffered from an exaggeration of this optimism, and are rose-water taies with which to while away a summer hour, rather than enduring works. But he was not slow to strike a higher strain, and with Les NoëUet (1891) he opened the séries of pictures of real life among le peuple that has brought him his well-deserved famé. Hère, e.g. in La Terre qui meurt (1899), Donatienne (1902), Le Blé qui lève (1907), he shows us the humble but not ignoble lives of the tillers of the soil — in Gingolph P abandonné (19 14) the lives of the fisherfolk on the coast of Picardy — and he does 80 always with keen insight and truth, with tenderness and sympathy, and with never a touch of coarseness. Two of his novels. De Toute son âme (1897) and Les Oberlé (1901) deal with the wealthy manufacturing class, the latter a pathetic picture of the deep-rooted patriotism still buming