Chapter II

He has published over a dozen volumes and numerous brochures, political and "psychothérapie," many addresses, and one comedy, Une Journée Parlementaire. He calls his books metaphysical fiction, the adventures of a contemplative young man's mind. Paul Bourget is the psychologist pure and complex; Barrès has--rather, had--such a contempt for action on the "earthly plane," that at the head of each chapter of his "idealogies" he prefixed a _résumé_, a concordance of the events that were supposed to take place, leaving us free to savour the prose, enjoy the fine-spun formal texture, and marvel at the contrapuntal involutions of the hero's intellect. Naturally a reader, hungry for facts, must perish of famine in this rarefied æsthetic desert, the background of which is occasionally diversified by a sensuality that may be dainty, yet is disturbing because of its disinterested portrayment. The Eternal Feminine is not unsung in the Barrès novels. Woman for his imagination is a creature exquisitely fashioned, hardly an odalisque, nor yet the symbol of depravity we encounter in Huysmans. She is a "phantom of delight"; but that she has a soul we beg to doubt. Barrès almost endowed her with one in the case of his Bérénice; and Bérénice died very young. A young man, with various names, traverses these pages. Like the Durtal, or Des Esseintes, or Folantin, of Huysmans, who is always Huysmans, the hero of Barrès is always Barrès. In the first of the trilogy--of which A Free Man and The Garden of Bérénice are the other two--we find Philippe escaping through seclusion and revery the barbarians, his adversaries. The Adversary--portentous title for the stranger who grazes our sensitive epidermis--is the being who impedes or misleads a spirit in search of itself. If he deflects us from our destiny, he is the enemy. It may be well to recall at this juncture Stendhal, who avowed that our first enemies are our parents, an idea many an insurgent boy has asserted when his father was not present.

Seek peace and happiness with the conviction that they are never to be found; felicity must be in the experiment, not in the result. Be ardent and sceptical. Here Philippe touches hands with the lulling Cyrenaicism of Walter Pater. And Barrès might have sat for one of Pater's imaginary portraits. But it is too pretty to last, such a dream as this, in a world wherein work and sorrow rule. He is not an ascetic, Philippe. He eats rare beefsteaks, smokes black Havanas, clothes himself in easy-fitting garments, and analyses with cordial sincerity his multi-coloured soul. (And oh! the colours of it; oh! its fluctuating forms!) The young person invades his privacy--a solitary in Paris is an incredible concept. Together they make journeys "conducted by the sun." She is dreamlike until we read, "Cependant elle le suivait de loin, délicate et de hanches merveilleuses"--which delicious and dislocated phrase is admired by lovers of Goncourt syntax, but must be shocking to the old-fashioned who prefer the classic line and balance of Bossuet.

Nothing happens. Everything happens. Philippe makes the stations of the cross of earthly disillusionment. He weighs love, he weighs literature--"all these books are but pigeon-holes in which I classify my ideas concerning myself, their titles serve only as the labels of the different portions of my appetite." Irony is his ivory tower, his refuge from the banalities of his contemporaries. Henceforth he will enjoy his Ego. It sounds at moments like Bunthorne transposed to a more intense tonality.

But even beefsteaks, cigars, wine, and philosophy pall. He craves a mind that will echo his, craves a mental duo, in which the clash of character and opposition of temperaments will evoke pleasing cerebral music. In this dissatisfaction with his solitude we may detect the first rift in the lute of his egoism. He finds an old friend, Simon by name, and after some preliminary sentimental philandering at the seashore, in the company of two young ladies, the pair agree to lead a monastic life. To Lorraine they retire and draft a code of diurnal obligations. "We are never so happy as when in exaltation," and "The pleasure of exaltation is greatly enhanced by the analysis of it." Their souls are fortified and engineered by the stern practices of Loyola. The woman idea occasionally penetrates to their cells. It distracts them--"woman, who has always possessed the annoying art of making imbeciles loquacious." Notwithstanding these wraiths of feminine fancy, Philippe finds himself almost cheerful. His despondent moods have vanished. He quarrels, of course, with Simon, who is dry, an _esprit fort_.

The Intercessors now appear, the intellectual saints who act as intermediaries between impressionable, bruised natures and the Infinite. They are the near neighbours of God, for they are the men who have experienced an unusual number of sensations. Philippe admits that his temperament oscillates between languor and ecstasy. Benjamin Constant and Sainte-Beuve are the two "Saints" of Sensibility who aid the youths in their self-analysis; rather a startling devolution from the Imitation of Christ and Ignatius Loyola. Tiring, finally, of this sterile analysis, and discovering that the neurasthenic Simon is not a companion-soul, Philippe, very illogically yet very naturally, resolves that he must bathe himself in new sensations, and proceeds to Venice. We accompany him willingly, for this poet who handles prose as Chopin the pianoforte, tells us of his soul in Venice, and we are soothed when he speaks of the art of John Bellini, of Titian, Veronese, above all of Tiepolo, "who was too much a sceptic to be bitter.... His conceptions have that lassitude which follows pleasure, a lassitude preferred by epicureans to pleasure itself." Graceful, melancholy Tiepolo. This Venetian episode is rare reading.

The last of the trilogy is The Garden of Bérénice. It is the best of the three in human interest, and its melancholy-sweet landscapes exhale a charm that is nearly new in French literature; something analogous may be found in Slavic music, or in the _Intimiste_ school of painting. Several of these landscapes are redolent of Watteau: tender, doleful, sensuous, their twilights filled with vague figures, languidly joying in the mood of the moment. The impressionism which permeates this book is a veritable lustration for those weary of commonplace modern fiction. Not since has Barrès excelled this idyl of the little Bérénice and her slowly awakening consciousness to beauty, aroused by an old, half-forgotten museum in meridional France. At Arles, encompassed by the memory of a dead man, she loves her donkey, her symbolic ducks, and Philippe, who divines her adolescent sorrow, her yearning spirit, her unfulfilled dreams. Her garden upon the immemorial and paludian plains of Arles is threaded by silver waters, illuminated by copper sunsets, their tones reverberating from her robes. Something of Maeterlinck's stammering, girlish, questioning Mélisande is in Bérénice. Maeterlinckian, too, is the statement that "For an accomplished spirit there is but one dialogue--that between our two Egos, the momentary Ego we are, and the ideal Ego toward which we strive." Bérénice would marry Philippe. We hold our breath, hoping that his tyrant Ego may relax, and that, off guard, he may snatch with fearful joy the chance to gain this childlike creature. Alas! there is a certain M. Martin, who is Philippe's political adversary--Philippe is a candidate for the legislature; he is become practical; in the heat of his philosophic egoism he finds that if a generous negation is good waiting ground, wealth and the participation in political affairs is a better one. M. Martin covets the hand of Bérénice. He repels her because he is an engineer, a man of positive, practical spirit, who would drain the marshes in Bérénice's garden of their beautiful miasmas, and build healthy houses for happy people. To Philippe he is the "adversary" who despises the contemplative life. "He had a habit of saying, 'Do you take me for a dreamer?' as one should say, 'Do you take me for an idiot?'" Philippe, nevertheless, more solicitous of his Ego than of his affections, advises Bérénice to marry M. Martin. This she does, and dies like a flower in a cellar. She is a lovely memory for our young idealist, who in voluptuous accents rhapsodises about her as did Sterne over his dead donkey. Sensibility, all this, to the very ultima Thule of egoism. Then, Philippe obtains the concession of a suburban hippodrome. Poor Bérénice! _Pauvre Petite_--_Secousse_! The name of this book was to have been _Qualis artifex pereo_! And there is a fitting Neronic tang to its cruel and sentimental episodes that would have justified the title. But for Barrès, it has a Goethian quality; "all is true, nothing exact."

In 1892 was published The Enemy of Law, a book of violent anarchical impulse and lyric disorder. It is still Philippe, though under another name, André, who approves of a bomb launched by the hand of an anarchist, and because of the printed expression of his sympathy he is sent to prison for a few months. A Free Man, he endures his punishment philosophically, winning the friendship of a young Frenchwoman, an _exaltee_, and also of a little Russian princess, a silhouette of Marie Bashkirtseff, and an unmistakable blood-relative of Stendhal's Lamiel. After his liberation André makes sentimental pilgrimages with one or the other, finally with both of his friends, to Germany and elsewhere. A shaggy dog, Velu, figures largely in these pages, and we are treated to some disquisitions on canine psychology. Nor are the sketches of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Karl Marx, Ferdinand Lassalle, and Ludwig of Bavaria, the Wagnerian idealist, particularly novel. They but reveal the nascent social sympathies of Barrès, who was at the law-despising period of his development. His little princess has a touch of Bérénice, coupled with a Calmuck disregard of the _convenances_; she loves the "warm smell of stables" and does not fear worldly criticism of her conduct; the trio vanish in a too Gallic, too rose-coloured perspective. A volume of protest, The Enemy of Law served its turn, though here the phrase--clear, alert, suave--of his earlier books is transformed to a style charged with flame and acid. The moral appears to be dangerous, as well as diverting--develop your instincts to the uttermost, give satisfaction to your sensibility; then must you attain the perfection of your Ego, and therefore will not attenuate the purity of your race. The Russian princess, we are assured, carried with her the ideas of antique morality.

In the second trilogy--Du Sang, de la Volupté, et de la Mort; Amori et Dolori Sacrum; and Les Amitiés Françaises--we begin an itinerary which embraces parts of Italy, Spain, Germany, France, particularly Lorraine. Barrès must be ranked among those travellers of acute vision and æsthetic culture who in their wanderings disengage the soul of a city, of a country. France, from Count de Caylus and the Abbé Barthélémy (Voyage du Jeune Anacharsis) to Stendhal, Taine, and Bourget, has given birth to many distinguished examples. The first of the new group, Blood, Pleasure, and Death--a sensational title for a work so rich and consoling in substance--is a collection of essays and tales. The same young man describes his æsthetic and moral impressions before the masterpieces of Angelo and Vinci, or the tombs, cathedrals, and palaces of Italy and Spain. Cordova is visited, the gardens of Lombardy, Ravenna, Parma--Stendhal's beloved city--Siena, Pisa; there are love episodes in diaphanous keys. Barrès, ever magnanimous in his critical judgments, pays tribute to the memory of his dead friends, Jules Tellier and Marie Bashkirtseff. He understood her soul, though afterward cooled when he discovered the reality of the Bashkirtseff legend. (He speaks of the house in which she died as 6 Rue de Prony; Marie died at 30 Rue Ampère.) In the succeeding volume, consecrated to love and sorrow, the soul of Venice, the soul of a dead city, is woven with souvenirs of Goethe, Byron, Chateaubriand, Musset, George Sand, Taine, Léopold Robert the painter-suicide, Théophile Gautier, and Richard Wagner. The magic of these prose-dreams is not that of an artist merely revelling in description; Pierre Loti, for instance, writes with no philosophy but that of the disenchanted; he is a more luscious Sénancour; D'Annunzio has made of Venice a golden monument to his gigantic pride as poet. Not so Barrès. The image of death and decay, the recollections of the imperial and mighty past aroused by his pen are as so many chords in his egoistic philosophy: Venice guarded its Ego from the barbarians; from the dead we learn the secret of life. The note of revolt which sounded so drastically in The Enemy of Law is absent here; in that story Barrès, mindful of Auguste Comte and Ibsen, asserted that the dead poisoned the living. The motive of reverence for the soil, for the past, the motive of traditionalism, is beginning to be overheard. In French Friendships, he takes his little son Philippe to Joan of Arc's country and enforces the lesson of patriotism. In his Le Voyage de Sparte, the same spirit is present. He is the man from Lorraine at Corinth, Eleusis, or Athens, humble and solicitous for the soul of his race, eager to extract a moral benefit from the past. He studies the Antigone of Sophocles, the Helen of Goethe. He also praises his master, the classical scholar, Louis Ménard. Barrès has, in a period when France seems bent on burning its historical ships, destroying precious relics of its past, blown the trumpet of alarm; not the destructive blast of Nietzsche, but one that calls "Spare our dead!" Little wonder Bourget pronounced him the most efficacious servitor, at the present hour, of France the eternal. Force and spiritual fecundity Barrès demands of himself; force and spiritual fecundity he demands from France. And, like the vague insistent thrumming of the _tympani_, a ground bass in some symphonic poem, the idea of nationalism is gradually disclosed as we decipher these palimpsests of egoism.