Produced by David S. Miller
TRANSLATED FROM THE 100TH FRENCH EDITION WITH AN INTRODUCTIONBY EDWARD J. O'BRIEN1918
In introducing M. Barbusse's most important book to a public alreadyfamiliar with "Under Fire," it seems well to point out the relation ofthe author's philosophy to his own time, and the kinship of his art tothat of certain other contemporary French and English novelists.
"L'Enfer" has been more widely read and discussed in France than anyother realistic study since the days of Zola. The French sales of thevolume, in 1917 alone, exceeded a hundred thousand copies, a popularityall the more remarkable from the fact that its appeal is based as muchon its philosophical substance as on the story which it tells.
Although M. Barbusse is one of the most distinguished contemporaryFrench writers of short stories, he has found in the novel form themost fitting literary medium for the expression of his philosophy, andit is to realism rather than romanticism that he turns for theexposition of his special imaginative point of view. And yet thisstatement seems to need some qualification. In his introduction to"Pointed Roofs," by Dorothy Richardson, Mr. J.D. Beresford points outthat a new objective literary method is becoming general in which thewriter's strict detachment from his objective subject matter is unitedto a tendency, impersonal, to be sure, to immerse himself in the lifesurrounding his characters. Miss May Sinclair points out that writersare beginning to take the complete plunge for the first time, andinstances as examples, not only the novels of Dorothy Richardson, butthose of James Joyce.
Now it is perfectly true that Miss Richardson and Mr. Joyce haveintroduced this method into English fiction, and that Mr. FrankSwinnerton has carried the method a step further in another direction,but before these writers there was a precedent in France for thismethod, of which perhaps the two chief exemplars were Jules Romains andHenri Barbusse. Although the two writers have little else in common,both are intensely conscious of the tremendous, if imponderable, impactof elemental and universal forces upon personality, of the profoundmodifications which natural and social environment unconsciouslyimpress upon the individual life, and of the continual interaction offorces by which the course of life is changed more fundamentally thanby less imperceptible influences. Both M. Romains and M. Barbusseperceive, as the fundamental factor influencing human life, thecontraction and expansion of physical and spiritual relationship, theinevitable ebb and flow perceived by the poet who pointed out that wecannot 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 infact would appear on the surface to be at the opposite pole of life inhis philosophy, we shall find that his detachment, founded, though itis, upon solitude, takes essentially the same account of outside forcesas the philosophy of M. Romains.
He perceives that each man is an island of illimitable forces apartfrom his fellows, passionately eager to live his own life to the lastdegree of self-fulfilment, but continually thwarted by nature and byother men and women, until death interposes and sets the seal ofoblivion upon all that he has dreamed and sought.
And he has set himself the task of disengaging, as far as possible, thepurpose and hope of human life,