Chapter I

Paul Bourget has said of him: "Among the young people who have entered literature since 1880 Maurice Barrès is certainly the most celebrated.... One must see other than a decadent or a dilettante in this analyst ... the most original who has appeared since Baudelaire." Bourget said much more about the young writer, then in his twenties, who in 1887 startled Paris with a curious, morbid, ironical, witty book, a production neither fiction nor fact. This book was called Sous l'Œil des Barbares. It made a sensation. He was born on the 22nd of September, 1862, at Charmes-sur-Moselle (Vosges), and received a classical education at the Nancy (old capital of Lorraine) Lyceum. Of good family--among his ancestors he could boast some military men--he early absorbed a love for his native province, a love that later was to become a species of soil-worship. His health not strong at any time, and nervous of temperament, he nevertheless moved on Paris, for the inevitable siege of which all romantic readers of Balzac dream during their school-days. "_A nous deux!_" muttered Rastignac, shaking his fist at the city spread below him. _A nous deux!_ exclaim countless youngsters ever since. Maurice, however, was not that sort of Romantic. He meant to conquer Paris, but in a unique way; he detested melodrama. He removed to the capital in 1882. His first literary efforts had appeared in the _Journal de la Meurthe et des Vosges_; he could see as a boy the Vosges Mountains; and Alsace, not far away, was in the clutches of the hated enemy. In Paris he wrote for several minor reviews, met distinguished men like Leconte de Lisle, Rodenbach, Valade, Rollinat; and his Parisian début was in _La Jeune France_, with a short story entitled Le Chemin de l'institut (April, 1882). Ernest Gaubert, who has given us these details, says that, despite Leconte de Lisle's hearty support, Mme. Adam refused an essay of Barrès as unworthy of the _Nouvelle Revue_. In 1884 appeared a mad little review, _Les Taches d'Encre_, irregular in publication. Despite its literary quality, the young editor displayed some knowledge of the tactics of "new" journalism. When Morin was assassinated by Mme. Clovis Hugues, sandwich men paraded the boulevards carrying on their boards this inscription: "Morin reads no longer _Les Taches d'Encre!_" Perseverance such as this should have been rewarded; but little _Ink-spots_ quickly disappeared. Barrès founded a new review in 1886, _Les Chroniques_, in company with some brilliant men. Jules Claretie about this time remarked, "Make a note of the name of Maurice Barrès. I prophesy that it will become famous." Barrès had discovered that Rastignac's pugnacious methods were obsolete in the battle with Paris, though there was no folly he would be incapable of committing if he only could attract attention--even to walking the boulevards in the guise of primeval man. Far removed as his exquisite art now is from this blustering desire for publicity, this threat, uttered in jest or not, is significant. Maurice Barrès has since stripped his soul bare for the world's ire or edification.

Wonder-children do not always pursue their natural vocation. Pascal was miraculously endowed as a mathematician; he ended a master of French prose, a hallucinated, wretched man. Franz Liszt was a prodigy, but aspired to the glory of Beethoven. Raphael was a painting prodigy, and luckily died so young that he had not time to change his profession. Swinburne wrote faultless verse as a youth. He is a _prosateur_ to-day. Maurice Barrès was born a metaphysician; he has the metaphysical faculty as some men a fiddle hand. He might say with Prosper Mérimée, "Metaphysic pleases me because it is never-ending." But not as Kant, Condillac, or William James--to name men of widely disparate systems--did the precocious thinker plan objectively. The proper study of Maurice Barrès was Maurice Barrès, and he vivisected his Ego as calmly as a surgeon trepanning a living skull. He boldly proclaimed the _culte du moi_, proclaimed his disdain for the barbarians who impinged upon his _I_. To study and note the fleeting shapes of his soul--in his case a protean psyche--was the one thing worth doing in a life of mediocrity. And this new variation of the eternal hatred for the _bourgeois_ contained no menaces levelled at any class, no groans of disgust _à la_ Huysmans. Imperturbable, with an icy indifference, Barrès pursued his fastidious way. What we hate we fight, what we despise we avoid. Barrès merely despised the other Egos around him, and entering his ivory tower he bolted the door; but on reaching the roof did not fail to sound his horn announcing to an eager world that the miracle had come to pass--Maurice Barrès was discovered by Maurice Barrès.

Egoism as a religion is hardly a new thing. It began with the first sentient male human. It has since preserved the species, discovered the "inferiority" of women, made civilisation, and founded the fine arts. Any attempt to displace the Ego in the social system has only resulted in inverting the social pyramid. Love our neighbour as ourself is trouble-breeding; but we must first love ourself as a precaution that our neighbour will not suffer both in body and in mind. The interrogation posed on the horizon of our consciousness, regarding the perfectibility of mankind, is best answered by a definition of socialism as that religion which proves all men to be equally stupid. Do not let us confound the ideas of progress and perfectibility. Since man first realised himself as man, first said, I am I, there has been no progress. No art has progressed. Science is a perpetual rediscovery. And what modern thinker has taught anything new?

Life is a circle. We are imprisoned, in the cage of our personality. Each human creates his own picture of the world, re-creates it each day. These are the commonplaces of metaphysics; Schopenhauer has presented some of them to us in tempting garb.

Compare the definitions of Man made by Pascal and Cabanis. Man, said Pascal, is but a reed, the feeblest of created things; yet a reed which thinks. Man, declared the materialistic Cabanis, is a digestive tube--a statement that provoked the melodious indignation of Lacordaire. What am I? asks Barrès; _je suis un instant d'une chose immortelle_. And this instant of an immortal thing has buried within it something eternal of which the individual has only the usufruct. (Goncourt wrote, "What is life? The usufruct of an aggregation of molecules.") Before him Sénancour in Obermann--the reveries of a sick, hermetic soul--studied his malady, but offered no prophylactic. Amiel was so lymphatic of will that he doubted his own doubts, doubted all but his dreams. He, too, had fed at Hegel's ideologic banquet, where the verbal viands snared the souls of guests. But Barrès was too sprightly a spirit to remain a mystagogue. Diverse and contradictory as are his several souls, he did not utterly succumb to the spirit of analysis. Whether he was poison-proof or not to the venom that slew the peace of the unhappy Amiel (that bonze of mysticism), the young Lorrainer never lacked elasticity or spontaneity, never ceased to react after his protracted plunges into the dark pools of his subliminal self. And his volitional powers were not paralysed. Possessing a sensibility as delicate and vibrating as Benjamin Constant, he has had the courage to study its fevers, its disorders, its subtleties. He knew that there were many young men like him, not only in France, but throughout the world, highly organised, with less bone and sinew than nerves--exposed nerves; egoistic souls, weak of will. We are sick, this generation of young men, exclaimed Barrès; sick from the lying assurances of science, sick from the false promises of politicians. There must be a remedy. One among ms must immolate himself, study the malady, seek its cure. I, Maurice Barrès, shall be the mirror reflecting the fleeting changes of my environment, social and psychical. I repudiate the transcendental indifference of Renan; I will weigh my sensations as in a scale; I shall not fear to proclaim the result. Amiel, a Protestant Hamlet (as Bourget so finely says), believes that every landscape is a state of soul. My soul is full of landscapes. Therein all may enter and find their true selves.

All this, and much more, Barrès sang in his fluid, swift, and supple prose, without a vestige of the dogmatic. He did not write either to prove or to convince, only to describe his interior life. He did not believe, neither did he despair. There is a spiritual malice in his egoism that removes it far from the windy cosmos of Walt Whitman or the vitriolic vanity of D'Annunzio. In his fugue-like flights down the corridor of his metaphysics, he never neglects to drop some poetic rose, some precious pearl of sentiment. His little book, true spiritual memoirs, aroused both wrath and laughter. The wits set to work. He was called a dandy of psychology, nicknamed _Mlle. Renan_, pronounced a psychical harlequin, a masquerader of the emotions; he was told that, like Chateaubriand, he wore his heart in a sling. Anatole France, while recognising the eloquent art of this young man, spoke of the "perverse idealist" which is Maurice Barrès. His philosophy was pronounced a perverted pyrrhonism, the quintessence of self-worship. A _Vita Nuova_ of egoism had been born.

But the dandy did not falter. He has said that one never conquers the intellectual suffrages of those who precede us in life; he made his appeal to young France. And what was the balm in Gilead offered by this new doctor of metaphysics? None but a Frenchman at the end of the last century could have conceived the Barrèsian plan of soul-saving. In Baudelaire, Barbey d'Aurevilly, and Villiers de l'Isle Adam, the union of Roman Catholic mysticism and blasphemy has proved to many a stumbling-stone. These poets were believers, yet Manicheans; they worshipped at two shrines; evil was their greater good. Barrès plucked several leaves from their breviaries. He proposed to school his soul by a rigid adherence to the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola. With the mechanism of this Catholic moralist he would train his Ego, cure it of its spiritual dryness--that malady so feared by St. Theresa--and arouse it from its apathy. He would deliver us from a Renan-ridden school.

This scholastic fervour urged Barrès to reinstate man in the centre of the universe, a position from which he had been routed by science. It was a pious, mediæval idea. He did not, however, assert the bankruptcy of science, but the bankruptcy of pessimism. His book is metaphysical autobiography, a Gallic transposition of Goethe's Wahrheit und Dichtung. We may now see that his concentrated egoism had definite aims and was not the conceit of a callow Romantic.

Barrès imbibed from the Parnassian poetic group his artistic remoteness. His ivory tower is a borrowed phrase made by Sainte-Beuve about De Vigny. But his mercurial soul could not be imprisoned long by frigid theories of impeccable art--of art for art's sake. _My soul!_ that alone is worth studying, cried Maurice. John Henry Newman said the same in a different and more modest dialectic. The voice of the French youth is shriller, it is sometimes in falsetto; yet there is no denying its fundamental sincerity of pitch. And he has the trick of light verbal fence beloved of his race. He is the comedian among moralists. His is neither the frozen eclecticism of Victor Cousin, nor the rigid determinism of Taine. Yet he is a partial descendant of the Renan he flouts, and of Taine--above all, of Stendhal and Voltaire. In his early days if one had christened him _Mlle. Stendhal_, there would have been less to retract. Plus a delicious style, he is a masked, slightly feminine variation of the great mystifier who wrote La Chartreuse de Parme, leaving out the Chartreuse. At times the preoccupation of Barrès with the moral law approaches the borderland of the abnormal. Like Jules Laforgue, his intelligence and his sensibility are closely wedded. He is a sentimental ironist with a taste for self-mockery, a Heine-like humour. He had a sense of humour, even when he wore the _panache_ of General Boulanger, and opposed the Dreyfus proceedings. It may rescue from the critical executioner who follows in the footsteps of all thinkers, many of his pages.

A dilettante, an amateur--yes! But so was Goethe in his Olympus, so Stendhal in his Cosmopolis. He elected at first to view the spectacle of life, to study it from afar, and by the _tempo_ of his own sensibility. Not the tonic egoism of Thoreau this; it has served its turn nevertheless in France. Afferent, centripetal, and other forbidding terms, have been bestowed upon his system; while for the majority this word egoism has a meaning that implies our most selfish instincts. If, however, interposes Bourget, you consider the word as a formula, then the angle of view is altered; if Barrès had said in one jet, "Nothing is more precious for a man than to guard intact his convictions, his passions, his ideal, his individuality," those who misjudged this courageous apostle of egoism, this fervent prober of the human soul, might have modified their opinions--and would probably have passed him by. It was the enigmatic message, the strained symbolism, of which Barrès delivered himself, that puzzled both critics and public. Robert Schumann once propounded a question concerning the Chopin Scherzo: "How is gravity to clothe itself if jest goes about in dark veils?" Now Barrès, who is far from being a spiritual _blagueur_, suggests this puzzle of Schumann. His employment, without a _nuance_ of mockery, of the devotional machinery so marvellously devised by that captain of souls, Ignatius Loyola, was rather disquieting, notwithstanding its very practical application to the daily needs of the spirit. Ernest Hello, transported by such a spectacle, may not have been far astray when he wrote of the nineteenth century as "having desire without light, curiosity without wisdom, seeking God by strange ways, ways traced by the hands of men; offering rash incense upon the high places to an unknown God, who is the God of darkness." Ernest Renan was evidently aimed at, but the bolt easily wings that metaphysical bird of gay plumage, Maurice Barrès.