THE CRIMSON BOOKSHELF

NOTHING but unstinted enthusiasm is possible for the first four books of Jules Romains' gigantic undertaking, "Men of Good Will." These four books, (two volumes, in the American edition, of which the second is "Passion's Pilgrims") constitute a sort of prologue to the narrative which is to follow. In the second volume Romains again shows himself absolute master of the kaleidoscopic novel, the peer of Dos Passos at his best and even of James Joyce in the penetration and fertility of his imagination. Threads in the lives of his multitude of characters are picked up at intervals and followed long enough to make clear the peculiar problems of each, both in their relation to individual character and to the general pattern which was Paris in 1908. Always in the background is the "rumble of the distant drum", the cataclysm of 1914. Yet the reader is never made to feel that he is looking back; he is ever at the very wellhead of the deluge.

There is Quinette and his intellectual criminality, moving in the inner circles of revolutionary intrigue. There is Sammecaue: his connivings as the representative of ruthless capitalistic monopoly and his struggle with the frigidity of his best friend's wife. Wazemmes and Haverkamp are still on the scene, wrapping their tentacles around Parisian real estate; and the sensitive liberal, Gurau, and his rationalized surrender to the corruption of the oil cartel. The two most interesting figures, however, are the young students, Jallez and Jerphanion, the one attempting to recapture the purity of his love for Helene Sigeau, and the other just emerging from the crises of adolescence and still struggling in the tolls of youthful lust. Both of them are seeking, amid the disillusionment of the decade before the war, some rock on which to build their lives. There are countless other characters: a fake critic, a great poet, a great statesman, and the dog Macaire, an hour of whose life, set down in six pages, gives us as vivid a picture of the canine world as all of Virginia Wolf's "Flush."

Dominating all the other motifs, industry, politics, crime, letters, society, are the themes of pure love, which are orchestrated in the story of Jallez' struggles; and those of lust, culminating in the lyrical description of Jerphanion's tortured search for physical love in the streets of Paris, "kingdom of the carnal Eros." Romains is equally sympathetic and equally successful in his treatment of either phase.

Inextricably bound up with the lives of all is Paris herself, her streets, shops, her people and classes. We have met with no finer piece of writing in many