exposition of his special imaginative point of view. And yet this
statement seems to need some qualification. In his introduction to
"Pointed Roofs," by Dorothy Richardson, Mr. J.D. Beresford points out
that a new objective literary method is becoming general in which the
writer's strict detachment from his objective subject matter is united
to a tendency, impersonal, to be sure, to immerse himself in the life
surrounding his characters. Miss May Sinclair points out that writers
are beginning to take the complete plunge for the first time, and
instances as examples, not only the novels of Dorothy Richardson, but
those of James Joyce.

Now it is perfectly true that Miss Richardson and Mr. Joyce have
introduced this method into English fiction, and that Mr. Frank
Swinnerton has carried the method a step further in 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