Chapter I: Part 1

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES

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* * * * *

TWENTIETH CENTURY
FRENCH WRITERS

_Frontispiece_

TWENTIETH CENTURY
FRENCH WRITERS

(REVIEWS AND REMINISCENCES)

BY

MADAME MARY DUCLAUX

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1920

Printed in Great Britain

PRE-WAR PREFACE

I meant this book to be an image, a reflection, of the Twentieth Century in France, so far as it is shown in literature during the first fourteen years of its course. But my book is small, the subject is vast: an actual, living movement, a growing generation, is a difficult thing to copy--it will not keep still! And it branches out so wide: there are so many French writers of the younger sort! I am overcome with remorse when I think of the gifted beings whom I have left out!

I remember that child whom Saint Augustine saw, trying to gather the sea into his little shell; like him, I see the waters stretching illimitably: I have only brought away a sample. Yet those who taste it may have some faint idea, if not of the breadth and the numerousness of the literary movement in France, at least of its savour and its quality.

Given the limits of my little volume, I was compelled to make a choice; and there is always some injustice in a selection. Why should some be taken and others left? Why accept Rostand and reject Bataille? Why give Madame de Noailles and say nothing of Fernand Gregh? Why gather up Boylesve and André Gide, neglecting Estaunie, and Sageret, and Paul Adam? If I have Marie Lenéru, why not Sacha Guitry? Choosing Madame Colette, what reason have I for eliminating Madame de Régnier or Madame Delarue-Mardrus? I especially mourn the absence of the Brothers Tharaud, those perfect artists, who preserve the tradition of Flaubert. And there is a great gap in my fabric where I should have put the colonial novel (that flourishing Euphorion, born of the union of Loti and Kipling). Why have I not a line for Henry Daguerches, for Claude Farrère? All these are names to remember.

At least I lay this unction to my soul: if I have not always chosen the most perfect, I have faithfully gone in for the most characteristic.

Having to choose a remnant, I have taken those who, instead of continuing the traditions of the Nineteenth Century, have said a new thing, boldly differing, starting forth on a fresh career of their own. I have ‘plumped’ for the daring apostles of Life, those who cultivate movement and liberty rather than Art; freedom of rhythm rather than classic determinism and classic constraint; all those whose method tends to the condition of music, who say with the Abbess Hildegard (and with Bergson), ‘Symphonialis est anima.’ Such authors as these are emphatically of the youth of the world, and the most difficult for a foreign public to distinguish.

My readers will probably find most of these names new; they may even be disappointed at not meeting with those more illustrious spirits with whom for five-and-twenty years they have been familiar: Pierre Loti, Paul Bourget, Anatole France. These great writers still shed on the Twentieth Century the lustre its predecessor brought them; but they are the glorious past, and our concern is with the future. These younger men are the French equivalents to our Wells, and Galsworthy, and Hewlett, our Granville, Barker, our Synge, and Yeats, our Masefield and our Joseph Conrad, nay, even our Compton Mackenzie and our Lascelles Abercrombie. And my task is rendered more difficult by the fact that France is a twy-creature, of double nature, a sort of two-headed eagle or Rosa-Josepha among nations.

There is, I believe, one of the South American republics which possesses a couple of capitals: one to be used when the Liberals are in power, and one for the Conservatives. France also has a double set of everything, including celebrities: those admired by the _bien-pensant_, and those peculiar to the _intellectuels_. You may be illustrious in one group and barely heard of in the other. Those who adore Anatole France and praise Romain Rolland smile sarcastic at the name of Barrès, and have never opened a book by Paul Claudel. And, of course, it is the same the other way round--only more so.

I have done my best to hold the balance even: to group on the Right my seemly sheep, and on the Left my free-ranging goats, in flocks of approximate number, setting Boylesve over against Jules Renard, and Francis Jammes in front of Charles-Louis Philippe. If my reader discover that which all have in common, I think he may have a fair idea of the trend and the thrust of the spirit of the age--at least, so far as it is manifest in fiction, in poetry, and in the more literary drama, that ‘spectacle dans un fauteuil’ which may or may not be a spectacle for the stage.

What I have not shown him--to my real regret, to my recurrent remorse--is the world of the critics, the intellectual flower of France. I am not speaking of the reviewers; but of critics in the sense that Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Taine, Renan were critics--the moralists, the biographers, the portrait-painters of a soul, an epoch, or a race. In France what branch of literature is more important than such criticism? Who has more charm than Suarès, with his imaginative and morbid studies of great souls? Who forms the mind of a generation more plastically than the brilliant and perspicacious André Chevrillon? Who interprets human nature more intimately than André Gide, or the acute and icy Julien Benda, or the romantic and religious Fortunat Strowski, the historian of Pascal; or the humane and sensitive Daniel Halévy, with his passionate Nietzsche, his strong and suffering Proudhon? These, perhaps, occupy less space in the booksellers’ windows than our novelists and poets, but they are factors as considerable in the education of a race. I salute them, even as, perforce, I pass them by. Perhaps another year I may reserve another book for them.

MARY DUCLAUX.

AFTERWORDS-AFTERWARDS

In August, 1914, this little book was already in the printer’s hands, the last revise corrected, the ‘paste-up’ prepared, ready to appear in the autumn, when certain events, which we all remember, happened with the suddenness of a thunderclap. The season was not favourable to the production of books, and for nearly five years neither author nor publisher gave the volume a thought. The Twentieth Century writer was elbowed out of the field by the Twentieth Century fighter. Alas, too often the one has been buried in the grave of the other, and the young man of letters whose fame and fortune we were announcing has fallen into nameless dust, or lies hidden under one of these innumerable slim gray crosses that spring, like some strange new harvest, on the low hills round Verdun, or along the valleys of the Marne and the Somme.

When, in the Spring of 1919, Messrs Collins returned me my old revise for a last glance ere it finally went to press, I gazed in consternation at the pages which had seemed so reasonable five years ago. Five years? Let us say ten years! ‘Les années de campagne comptent double.’ It was like opening an old bundle of photographs after a great lapse of time--the same mixture of melancholy, and a sort of sad amusement. Look at this absurd youth! Who could have supposed that he would become so famous? And that brilliant creature, dead now, and already half-forgotten. So-and-so, at least, has developed along the lines that we laid down and has turned out just the successful and useful servant of civilisation that we imagined.

In our case, So-and-so is Barrès. He has become all that we thought he might become. Public life and the patriotic duty have absorbed him more and more; he has been to the France of 1914-19 something of that which Lamartine was in 1848. He, more than any, has preached the need of union--‘L’Union sacrée,’ bringing into public affairs a largeness of outlook and sweetness of temper rare in politics,--especially in France. Few of these eloquent pages which day by day he has contributed to the _Echo de Paris_ will remain as works of literature, but, piled up, no longer read, in their accumulation they form a pedestal which certainly heightens the moral importance of the man. Here at least we have the satisfaction of finding our analysis exact. More and more, in these days of storm and stress, Barrès has ‘felt the need of merging himself in something larger and more durable than any individual existence’; ‘no longer the singular, the extraordinary attracts him;’ he finds something pleasant and satisfying in the alliance of courage and the spirit of adventure, ‘with a certain soldierly mediocrity of mind’--and all the more when their conjunction ‘promises the conquest of Alsace-Lorraine.’ Above all, he has given himself heart and soul to ‘the creation of a truly National Party, capable of bringing out of chaos a new organic order.’ Shall we not say of him that, like his heroine, Colette, ‘Il se sent chargé d’une grande dignité, soulevé vers quelquechose de plus vaste, de plus haut, et de plus constant que sa personne’?

Yes, I can re-read the chapter on Barrès with a certain satisfaction.

But, when we come to Romain Rolland, what a falling-off was there! How is it that Romain Rolland, who seemed, if such there was, the very prophet and the teacher of the younger generation, should have proved so much less sure as a guide and a standby than the fantastic and singular Barrès? Always an aloof and solitary spirit, Rolland completely detached himself from his country during the war. In his voluntary exile at Geneva he occupied his hands, and no doubt his heart, with works of mercy, but his mind gave no support to his compatriots. Doubtless the attraction of Germany was too strong: ‘Jean Christophe’ continued to subjugate the delicate ‘Oliver.’ These great international friendships have their perils (and, doubtless, I speak of them in the mood of Bishop Berkeley: ‘There, but for the Grace of God, go I!’) Yet Renan was no less attached to intellectual Germany than Rolland: Renan, who, when his mind crossed the Rhine, ‘crut entrer dans un temple,’ and in 1870-71 France had no firmer patriot than Ernest Renan.

The fact is that Romain Rolland’s genius is not French. The son of the lawyer at Clamecy is French enough by descent and as good a Burgundian as Lamartine, but he ought to have been Swiss by nature as by choice. There is nothing Latin or classic in him. His intense individualism, his moral earnestness, his lyric love of nature, and something querimonious, a scolding tenderness in his voice, remind us sometimes of Rousseau. And never was his high-minded crankiness more apparent than in that untimely pamphlet--‘Au dessus de la Mêlée,’ in which he rubbed it into us so tactlessly that our preoccupations are not his who dwells, unfriended, melancholy remote, above the fray.

This little volume made him probably the most unpopular writer in France. There is a radical misunderstanding which separates Romain Rolland from the young Frenchmen of the war. How has it come about? Hamlet and Harry Hotspur were good friends when we took leave of them in the final chapters of _Jean-Christophe_. Few men of letters had more vividly appreciated the active, ingenuous, hardy generation that was taking its first flights in the aeroplanes of 1912 and 1913. Arrogant, gay and strong, cheerful in their bright materialism (which allied itself so naturally with the most orthodox acquiescence in the creed of their forefathers), the tall and sturdy race of the Twentieth Century pleased Jean-Christophe, because they seemed so prosperous and so happy--and that is, after all, what we chiefly ask of those who are to take our place in life.

M. Rolland liked these young men; still, he expected them to look up to him; he felt himself their moral and intellectual superior, as doubtless he was. But then the war broke out, and what a reversal of values! Most of us, in France, who sheltered behind the brave broad shoulders of our ‘poilus,’ felt our hearts melt with admiration, pity, hope, and love. Not so, M. Rolland.

His attitude has been one of irritable self-defence. First of all that pamphlet, ‘Au dessus de la Mêlée’--and now this new book, published to-day (April, 1919), but finished (M. Rolland tells us) in May, 1914. _Colas Breugnon_ is a study in Rabelais’ vein. But, if M. Rolland’s style is far from perfect when he writes as from the Twentieth Century, what an exasperating gallimaufry it becomes, what a pretentious farrago of lyrism, puns, blank-verse, conceits, and quips, when he assumes the character of one of his ancestors; a certain joiner and cabinet-maker at Clamecy, under the reign of Louis XIII. The rough jokes of the tavern chronicled in the style of Euphues! Romain Rolland maundering of Women, Wine, and Song! The worst of it is that his boozing and his babble do not seem genuine: the professor’s gown peeps from under the starched blue folds of the carpenter’s blouse. It is as though, irritated by the reproach of internationalism and cosmopolitanism, M. Rolland had said to himself, ‘After all, I am neither a Jew nor a foreigner! If Péguy came from Orleans, I come from Clamecy; I have just as good French blood in my veins as he.’ And behold him capering unconvincingly as a Burgundian artisan, drowning his troubles in the bowl.

I wonder if any of my readers remember a French country novel called _Le Moulin du Frau_, which appeared about 1894, by Eugène le Roy, the author of _Jacquou le Croquant_. Here is the novel which M. Rolland has tried to write. It is just the life, day by day, of a miller in Périgord--a man of strong political feeling, a democrat and a philosopher on his way, like Colas Breugnon. But the miller of the Frau, though rustic and plain-spoken, is _not_ coarse, for his author lived all his life amid the peasants of Périgord and Quercy. The French peasant has his faults; he loves to excess his money and his land; but as a rule he is not coarse. I have known a great many, in the country, and, since the war, in hospital; but for coarseness commend me to the country folk of Zola, the man of letters; or those of the author of _Nono_, who is a schoolmaster; or these rowdy village folk of Romain Rolland’s. They lay the rustic varnish on too thick. Beneath this vulgar varnish we discern an image sufficiently touching and quite in Romain Rolland’s stoical vein: That of an obstinate, obdurate, wine-bibbing, and free-loving old cabinet-maker, besotted with his love of art and liberty, who in the end, having lost his savings, his home, his wife, his sculptured treasures, finds himself happier than he ever was before (though bedridden, poor, and a pensioner in his children’s bounty) because he has conquered the only liberty that really matters--the freedom of the soul.

It is impossible to suppose that _Colas Breugnon_ will mark the close of M. Rolland’s career. It is evidently a caprice, a _boutade_, an interlude. In what sense will his talent now develop? His years have just completed their half-century, but he still has some good autumns before him: Cervantes was turned fifty-seven when he published the First Part of _Don Quixote_!

To return to our Twentieth Century writers, Rostand stands the next upon our list. The war has neither augmented nor diminished Rostand. The few occasional poems that he published during its course are of slight importance; one imagines him following the tragic struggle with an attention so deeply engrossed that he half-forgot to breathe, and could not sing. When Victory promised us Peace, the strain relaxed. The fragile enthusiast could draw a deep breath. It was his last. He died, after a brief illness, a few weeks after the conclusion of the Armistice.

Let us turn the page again. Paul Claudel has written a few more dithyrambs in prose, but these five years have increased the volume without changing the character of his work. He is still predominantly the author of the _Cinq Grandes Odes_, of _L’Otage_, of _La Jeune Fille Violaine_, all published some years before the war. He serves his country as Consul in Brazil instead of at Hamburg; still in the full strength of his years, with doubtless other laurels to conquer, he stands out, among the ranks of our writers, a creature of passion and combat, active, emotional, mystic, and material at once--adequate to his age.

Francis Jammes, too, is unchanged, save by the natural process of the years. The Faun turned Friar is now more and more an author for the family circle. He is a candidate to the French Academy, which has just received his successor on our list, René Boylesve. This last writer, at least, has been deeply touched by the war. His fine novel, _Tu N’es Plus Rien_, will remain as evidence of that passionate patriotism--that detachment from all individual interests and, I might almost say, that cessation of all individual existence which made the France of the Great War as rapt, as ecstatic an example of the force of a collective sentiment as the France of the Great Revolution.

And now (after a passing glance at an unchanged, inconspicuous André Gide) we approach the name of Péguy. Péguy was killed in September, 1914, as he was leading his men into action at the Battle of the Marne. And as the flash of a fusee lights up the nocturnal battlefield, so that tragic illumination of his death reveals the true meaning of much that was obscure and easy to misunderstand in his gift. I own that I have almost entirely rewritten the chapter I had given to Péguy. I did not--do not--fully like or appreciate a genius now generally accepted as such in France, but I had composed my first sketch in a mood of freakish pleasantry, which might be permitted towards a man much younger than myself, with a great future before him, but which is not possible in speaking of a poet, dead, who died a martyr and a hero. It is perhaps the fault of a classical education which, if it was not very extensive at least sank deep, (inclining me especially to grace and measure, to something exquisitely right, exactly true)--it is perhaps the fault of a taste nourished on Sophocles and Plato that these ultra-lyrical modern geniuses, with their wild reiterations, their violence, their volume, their hoarse abundance, more often shock or dazzle me than please.... Péguy, Claudel, carry me off my feet, drown me, drench me in their billows full of sand and pebbles, and leave me gasping: ‘Oh, for the well beneath the poplar in the field!’ Yet Péguy and Claudel are the names which must be most profoundly considered in this little book, for they represent a generation. I have placed in Péguy’s train, as witnesses and mourners, his friend Ernest Psichari, his fellow-officer, Émile Nolly, and the two really considerable writers who have risen into eminence during the war: Henri Barbusse and Georges Duhamel.

Three of our four ladies have passed through the time of stress unscathed nor greatly left their impress on the angry world--not that they have not published in due course their poems or their novels. But these novels and poems are chiefly reflections from a mirror fully occupied by their own image. Madame Colette publishes to-day _Mitsou_; the tender irony and charming grace of her style are the same as of old--Mitsou is an enchanting little savage of the music-hall stage--Madame Tinayre has given us a novel which is an agreeable fresco of the day of mobilisation in Paris. Madame de Noailles has scattered a score of lyrics, like a handful of rose leaves and cypress-buds, over the pages of half a dozen reviews, but the terrible enigma--‘Must I grow old like the others? And, if not, must I die?’ is her most intimate preoccupation, and blurs in her eyes the great spectacle of the war.

Marie Lenéru nourished her soul in anguish on the tragic problem: How can it be that the most obvious social duty, the defence of hearth and home, should come to mean in practice, crime and cruelty let loose in the general reversal of all social law? The daughter of a line of sailors, with half a dozen _filleuls_ in the Fusiliers-Marins, she was the most martial of pacifists, but also the most passionate. While embroidering a flag, or tying up a packet for the front, she was busy devising some League of Nations which might prevent the recurrence of the infernal storm. Early last spring she brought me to read a strange, violent, lyrical debate, rather than a play, which she had written. She called it _La Paix_, and hoped it might one day be performed before the Congress. She had wished, indeed, that the Théâtre Français should produce it instead of _La Triomphatrice_. But the House of Molière wisely stuck to its bargain: _La Paix_ was not a piece for war-time.

_La Triomphatrice_ appeared at the Théâtre Français in January, 1918. It did not take the town by storm. The play is too exclusively concerned with the manners and morals of a literary clique, and the question discussed is after all a very secondary question: Can a woman of genius be really happy and beloved as a woman--be as satisfactory as wife, mistress, or mother, as the more receptive non-creative sort? Marie Lenéru thought not. One feels inclined to answer that it does not really matter: there are so few women of genius. But Marie Lenéru debated her theme so passionately that it was impossible to turn an indifferent ear. If the general public remained aloof, the _salons_ and the newspapers were full of _La Triomphatrice_, and recruited every week a wider audience. With Madame Bartet triumphant on the stage, with half the celebrities of Paris in the stalls, Marie Lenéru might feel her hour was come, or at least was at last tremblingly, exquisitely coming, in all its fullness.... She was ambitious....

And then, on the 23rd of March, ‘Grosse Bertha’ began to thunder. The German shells fell in the centre of Paris; on Good Friday a church was shattered, with all its faithful in it; one night, at the Français, actors and audience had to take refuge in the cellars, fortunately spacious. The theatre was closed. The play was stopped in mid-career. Mademoiselle Lenéru herself retired to Brittany. After a long summer’s work and meditation, with more than one play filling her portfolio, she was full of plans for her winter in Paris, when she fell a victim to the epidemic of infectious influenza then devastating Lorient, and died there on the 23rd of September, 1918. Except Péguy, France has lost in the war no writer from whom we hoped a richer harvest. Some day we shall read _La Maison sur le Roc_, _Le Bonheur_, _La Paix_--those plays so full of thought and a sombre passion, which, to my thinking, are meant rather for the student’s chair and the fireside lamp than for the glare of the footlights. A great, active, heroic soul still moves amply through all of them and swells their sails: may they carry down the stream of the century the echo of that voice, ardent and harsh, monotonous, and yet so strangely moving, which was silenced before it had time to deliver its full message.

No such rich promise was cut short by the death of André Lafon, who died of his wounds in hospital early in the war. A shepherd--that is how I see André Lafon--a charming young shepherd strolling down Mount Olympus, to whom the Muse gave, half-smiling, a dew-bespangled branch of laurel; but, ere he could twist it into a crown, the wolf came ravening and made an end of him and it! It is not for his talent that I evoke the memory of André Lafon (though I have read and re-read _L’Élève Gilles_ with singular sympathy, and love the too-slender, charming little book), but few things seem to me more romantic than the destiny of this young man. In the spring of 1912 a solitary, a sensitive, young usher in a school--before the year was out, his name on every lip, his purse swollen with those blessed ten thousand francs of the French Academy’s new Great Prize (which he had wrested from Péguy), and his slim portfolio bursting with letters from publishers. He certainly was not a Byron (it generally is _not_ the genius who ‘wakes to find himself famous’); but that is always a romantic adventure, especially when, two years later, the young laureate fills a hero’s grave. Had he a mother, still young, in some old house in the provinces, to glory in her son’s miraculous achievement, and to mourn the withering of her hopes? I often sit and think of the fate of André Lafon--as delicate and sad as one of his own stories.

The name of Edmond Jaloux (nothing seems to have happened to the writers of Pastoral novels), reminds me that all our brilliant writers are not dead. He has certainly increased in value during the last five years. Two novels, published in 1918, but written on the eve of the war, _L’Incertaine_ and _Fumées dans la Campagne_, prove him in full possession of his gift. His novels are exquisite impressions that somehow hauntingly convey the sense of something round the corner that might please us even more were it not just out of sight. _Fumées dans la Campagne_, especially, is a fine piece of work, subtle, tender, sad. Since _Le Reste est Silence_, M. Edmond Jaloux’s art, while no less brilliant, has gained in depth and refinement. No writer on our list has in a higher degree the æsthetic sense. His landscapes breathe the very spirit of the South. The figures in them are gracious, cultivated beings, whose psychology is full of delicate sentimental complications....

But his voice is the voice of yesterday--or at the latest of this morning: what will the morrow bring forth? The violent realism of Barbusse? the dithyrambs of Claudel? the infinitely delicate divagations of Marcel Proust? or something wholly different and unforeseen? With the signing of Peace we now enter a new era, and there will be new writers, doubtless, to greet the twentieth year of the Twentieth Century.

Ultima Cumæi venit jam carminis ætas
Magnus ab integro sæclorum nascitur ordo.

Now dawns the last age of the Sybil’s sooth.
And lo! the world, transformed, renews its youth!

MARY DUCLAUX.

PARIS, _April, 1919_.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

I. MAURICE BARRÈS 1

II. ROMAIN ROLLAND 34

III. EDMOND ROSTAND 51

IV. PAUL CLAUDEL 68

V. FRANCIS JAMMES 98

VI. RENÉ BOYLESVE 115

VII. ANDRÉ GIDE 126

VIII. CHARLES PÉGUY 135

IX. ERNEST PSICHARI 155

X. ÉMILE NOLLY 164

XI. HENRI BARBUSSE 169

XII. GEORGES DUHAMEL 175

XIII. THE COUNTESS DE NOAILLES 178

XIV. MADAME COLETTE 193

XV. MADAME TINAYRE 199

XVI. MADEMOISELLE MARIE LENÉRU 214

XVII. THE PASTORAL NOVEL 223

XVIII. THE NOVEL OF CHILDHOOD 243

EPILOGUE 257

MAURICE BARRÈS

I

Maurice Barrès is the oldest of all the personages of this little book, which deals emphatically with the young--with the writers of the Twentieth Century, and not with those already famous fifteen years ago. Still, every rule has its exceptions; and it is impossible to imagine the young literature of our days without this man of fifty. Time flies, and never did it seem to me to fly more swiftly than in this moment, when I realise that Barrès must be ranked among the middle-aged. Only the other day, he was that young Deputy, delightfully impertinent, impatient of the ways of his elders, who rose from his bench in the Chamber to propose ‘that the ashes of Jules Simon be transferred to the Panthéon’--Jules Simon being at that moment comfortably seated in the Upper House. May it be long before the ashes of Maurice Barrès are carried to the home of the immortals!

Yet Time has already begun his travesties: the Don Juan of letters, the _enfant terrible_ of politics, is already a sort of Conscript Father, almost a Father of the Church. He, too, in the world of letters, dignifies the Upper House, for he is an Academician. Maurice Barrès is the Chateaubriand of our unfolding age, or, to translate my meaning into English, he is perhaps even more exactly its Disraeli--a Disraeli reversed: an incomparable artist, a brilliant politician, but, in this latter line, something of an amateur. Still we cannot imagine our Barrès stripped of his politics, nor even the literature of our time without the politics of Barrès. His Nationalism, his Regionalism fill and flood the literature of France as fully as Imperialism occupied the English horizons of yesterday. Doubtless we are moving out of the sphere of their influence. But they have nourished the imagination of our younger men.

The Barrès of the Nineteenth Century was less political. Like most of the masters of the present hour, he entered letters as a Symbolist, almost as a Decadent. Immersed in solitary introspection, he at first appeared as the Narcissus of the Inner Life, taking his stand somewhere between Bergson and Mæterlinck. In those days, he asked from politics merely an instigation, a fillip. That strange temperament of his, at once dreamy, lethargic, ironical and intensely passionate, sought in the tumult and the fatigues of Boulangism a spur and a sting, something which should urge and incite him to adventure. ‘J’aime Boulanger,’ he said, ‘comme un stimulant.’ Politics were for this young man an enchanting enterprise, an admirable expense of energy, an inward animation; and, even when he saw the General as he was, the experiment still seemed interesting and poignant.

Barrès was so weary of his own fastidious refinement that his devotion was perhaps enhanced by the discovery that his hero was just an average man. All that excitement and stir which his arid self-culture had not afforded him, he expected from the perpetual agitation of public life; he had exhausted (or thought he had exhausted, for he had not exterminated them from his brain) the philosophers and the mystics; he had done with Plotinus and Loyola and Hegel. Like the hero of _L’Ennemi des Lois_, he exclaimed:--

‘Toujours les choses de l’intelligence! Je les comprends; je n’en
suis pas bouleversé. Ah! des choses qui puissent changer les âmes!’

Barrès had delved down so deep into his conception of the Ego, that he had (so to speak) come out on the other side--at the Antipodes, and felt the need of merging himself in something larger and more durable than any individual existence. No longer the singular, the extraordinary, attracted him, but the normal type. And so, in General Boulanger, a certain pleasant vulgarity, a soldierly mediocrity of mind, seemed charming to this subtle neophyte: he recognised the quality--a cheap chromo-lithograph of Henri Quatre or Lafayette, and he liked his chief none the worse for it. He saved himself from smiling at his own enthusiasm by saying that Boulanger was just the captain to re-conquer Alsace-Lorraine for the French.

But, all the same, Boulanger was more to the young member for Nancy than just a glass of vermouth quaffed at the tavern door. He soon saw that his adventurer was not adequate to the adventure; an absurd conspiracy ended in smoke. But when the last blue volutes had curled away, and left unchanged the face of the Republic, something important remained deposited in the mind of Maurice Barrès: the idea of a party which should embrace all opinions in its scheme for reform, a truly National party, bringing out of chaos a new organic order. Then he opened his Sophocles and pondered the magnificent line which no party leader has ever put in practice:--

οὐτoι συνέχθειν, ἀλλα συμφιλεῖν ἐφυν.

I live to share your loves and not your hates.

And through a maze of errors (for, in my opinion, the political adventures of Barrès were chiefly errors), this noble conception broadened and ripened, dignifying a patriotic traditionalism with such beauties as may spring from the hope of continuity and the sense of order.

A great gulf divides, as we shall see, the Barrès of the Nineteenth Century from the Barrès of the Twentieth. We will not consider in this place that earlier author, the gifted egoist of _Bérénice_, the anarchist of _L’Ennemi des Lois_, the lonely mystic of _L’Homme libre_, the dilettante, the self-worshipper. Let us merely say (in order to explain him) that our author was born in 1862 at Charmes in Lorraine, a man of a mingled race, with a strain of Teuton in him warring with the Celt, and a Rhenish sensibility hampered by a Latin love of rule and law. On his father’s side, he traces his descent to Auvergne, and his relations still live in the little town of Mur-en-Barrez; but his mother’s people all come from the neighbourhood of Nancy in Lorraine.

If we gave a free rein to our imagination, and let ourselves argue from type and talent to a strain of race, we might suppose that, like Montaigne, Barrès had in his stock some Jewish or Marrana grandmother, who gave him his taste for speculation, with something curious, double, and ironical in his outlook; but here, I believe, the genealogists protest.

His first impressions of conscious and public life were of a kind fit to aggravate the inherent melancholy of a sensitive and impassioned nature. He remembers a crowd, all surging towards one point under a hot summer sun, and that point the station; trains passing endlessly, filled with soldiers, thousands of soldiers, drunk, some with wine, some with sheer excitement, and all singing at the top of their voices. And the inhabitants of the little town of Charmes, men, women, and especially the little boys like himself, are striving towards, pressing against, hanging over the barriers and railings of the station, handing across bottles of wine, brandy, coffee, and crying: ‘_À Berlin!_’ as loudly as the soldiers. And then a few weeks later, the retreat: that day of stupefied astonishment in the soaking rain, while horsemen and infantry in wild confusion troop by in a very rage of shamed withdrawal; the soldiers insulting their officers, a General in tears, the linen-clad Turcos shivering in the dreary damp. And then five Uhlans, their pistols in their hands, who ride across the bridge and take possession.

The men of the Barrès family, notable citizens of Charmes, were taken in hostage by the Prussians. The trains that ran the Prussian troops towards the front had a Barrès or so, as hostages, beside the engine-driver. Their lives hung by a thread. And so a proud, timid, melancholy little boy learned early in life what it is to expect the worst, to go in fear, and, out of pride, to dissimulate that fear. The Nationalism of Barrès may be traced to these first impressions. It is as invaders that he hates the Germans: intellectually, he has no quarrel with them.

In a discourse pronounced on the frontier during the war-threatened summer of 1911, he asserted anew all that he owes to the romantic fancy of the Rhine, his real and fervent admiration for the noble genius of Gœthe, his tenderness for the sentimental Schiller, his sense of a deep interior affinity between his own mind and that of Nietzsche. But those terrible memories of childhood have graven in his spirit a certainty of the preciousness (but also of the precariousness, the fragility) of civilisation; a hate and a contempt for the ‘Barbarians’ whose hordes are a perpetual menace; and a feeling that, though every nation has plenty of Barbarians at home, the worst of all Barbarians are the Prussian Uhlans and the Bavarian troopers of a German invasion.

Barrès was the most precocious, I think, of a generation that began to pierce the soil (so to speak) between 1886 and 1890, a generation idealist and sceptical at once, which counts among its glories Bergson, Maurras, Mæterlinck, and (their Benjamin) René Boylesve. At nineteen years of age, Barrès left Nancy and came up to Paris in order to study law: his deluded family hoped to make a magistrate of the ‘Ennemi des Lois.’

But the dreamy youth, silent, timid, yet brilliant, had other aims in view. He had a volume of Schopenhauer in his pocket and a certain number of ideas in his head. He began to write in the young reviews and to show these first essays to his pastors and masters, the two rival librarians of the Senate, Leconte de Lisle and Anatole France. They were extraordinary essays which reflected in nothing the physiological naturalism of the hour--the hour of Zola! They were entirely, exaggeratedly spiritual and interior, and yet full of the dreariest nihilism. They were the essays of a man with a soul, who says in his heart: ‘There is no God.’

Those early essays, those first novels, have nothing to do with the Barrès of the Twentieth Century, save inasmuch as the child is the father of the man. I have dealt with them elsewhere (in the _Quarterly Review_), but some day it will be interesting to take them up again and examine their development parallel to the philosophy of Bergson. It is often surprising, and makes one wonder if the two writers have not, in their philosophy, some common ancestor. But who was he? Was he Burdeau? Was he Ravaisson? Was he Lachélier? Was he Renouvier?

For my present purpose--which is to examine the progress of Barrès, and especially his influence on recent literature, it is enough to say that these first volumes were the work of a man for whom the inner world alone exists. He, who was to become the voice of his province and his race, makes his first appearance as a being released from all ties and all traditions. The hero of _Sous l’œil des Barbares_ has no country, no profession, no family, no local habitation, and no name. The one existence and the one reality are, in his eyes, the Ego,--in other words, his own mind. His sole adventure is the lonely courage of a descent into that Inner Abyss. He might have exclaimed with Leopardi: ‘E dolce, il naufragar in questo mare!’

In the depth of this depth is something deeper still, continuous beneath the difference of individuals, as the mass of the sea is one below the variety of the waves. ‘Penser solitairement, c’est s’acheminer à penser solidairement,’ Barrès exclaimed, half ironically, in _Les Déracinés_. If we sink deep enough into our own souls, we fall into the general soul of all: we find the deep subterranean flood that fills all the fountains of the city!

And so the Egoist discovers that he is not alone, that he is a living cell in a living organism. It is this sense of Life and solidarity which distinguishes Barrès, the man of action, Barrès, the political leader, Barrès, the inventor of Nationalism, the apostle of decentralisation, from the delightful nihilist, the exquisite anarchist, that he was at twenty--and even at thirty years of age. He has gone far since then! Sure, now, of the existence of his race; accompanied in all his thoughts by those mysterious cohorts of the dead and the unborn which prolong the importance of the humblest life; our philosopher bids us lay no stress upon our own experience, and sacrifice, if needs be, the details of our happiness to the welfare of the whole.

Slowly this second manner has developed since the closing years of the last century: between _L’Ennemi des Lois_ (published in 1895) and _Les Déracinés_ (1897) there is a chasm, an apparent disconnection. Something mysterious divides them--something akin to a religious conversion. What is the secret substratum which unites two phases evidently alike sincere? What makes their diversity none the less organic? It is, I think, _the sense of continuity_, the desire to persist and to preserve. The Barrès of _Les Déracinés_ has reached the further edge of youth: he is five-and-thirty years of age.

Many men, on the threshold of forty, find themselves suddenly and terribly alone, in an hour of solemn solstice. So far, they have struggled up the hill gaily, with companions, and always have seen their goal ahead, like a cliff that shines in the sun and masks the horizon. Now on that topmost rock they stand, and now the road slopes downward--the road leading nowhere--which they must follow with diminished strength, in dwindling numbers, to find a tomb somewhere at the foot of the hill. Such an hour, such an experience marks for ever a sensitive nature. Some, then, like Tolstoi, have suddenly renewed the faith of their childhood and reconciled themselves with Christianity for the sake of a promised resurrection. Others build above the abyss a narrow bridge with the hope of the continuance of their race and their ideal. So Barrès will one day write:--

‘J’ai confiance, pour atténuer certaines peines morales, dans un
esprit fait de soumission à la terre natale, de fidélité aux morts,
et de connaissance que tous nos actes entreront dans l’héritage
social.’ (_Amitiés Françaises_, p. 41.)

There is at Bar-le-Duc, in the church of Saint-Pierre, a mortuary statue of the Prince of Orange, by Ligier Richier, that tragic sculptor who left Lorraine to learn of Michael Angelo. The prince lies in the tomb, dead, in all the horror of corruption, his flesh dropping from his bones. But out of that appalling decomposition he lifts his heart intact--his living, his immortal heart--and he is reconciled to perish if that alone survive. So all of us, from the De Profundis of our accepted mortality, raise something we would fain bequeath as an heirloom to the future. Religion is based on such a sense of the persistence and the perpetuity of an ideal. Something, at least, survives; something is incorruptible; Sursum corda! and because of that persuasion of a continuity assured, the sadness of our own sure destruction is tempered with serenity and hope.

II

There exist two great families of literary works. One kind is complex, often diffuse, romantic, representing characters and sentiments too singular to be recognised save by the chosen few; of such are the works of Stendhal, and down to the close of the Nineteenth Century the novels of Barrès belong to this category. But in 1900, with _L’Appel au Soldat_, he will effect his transition to that other group, which instinctively we call classic, dealing with the simple sentiments of general humanity, seen from a great height, plumbed to a great depth. With _L’Appel au Soldat_, Barrès enters the sphere of Gœthe.

If the book please me greatly, it is less for its animated picture of the Boulangist fever, for its portrait of the General (so deeply pathetic in its human weakness), less even for the death of Mme de Bonnemains (though few things are more heartrending) than for an interlude of some seven score pages, _La Vallée de la Moselle_, the simple account of a bicycle tour taken by two young men, natives of Lorraine, from Bar-le-Duc in France to Coblenz, which once was France. But these chapters are written with a freshness and a feeling, a flexibility, an evident sincerity which make them infinitely touching. That Spanish crudity, bizarre, elliptic, which Barrès used to affect, has vanished here. A romantic sentiment is expressed with the ripe calm and in the pure language of a classic. Our Barrès sails his black Venetian gondola along the most harmonious, amplest stream. He has forgotten his impertinence and his perversity, but he has lost nothing of his grace.

Marriage and the birth of a son had, no doubt, much to do with this happy evolution. To a man haunted by the dread of annihilation, a child is an assurance against complete extinction. He is (as the Parsees say in their touching phrase) ‘a bridge’: a bridge across the abyss. A child prolongs our Ego and assures the continuity of all that we inherit from our ancestors. A child, we may say, is the printed proof of our manuscript, safe henceforth, and no longer so unique or so important!

The volume which Barrès wrote for his little son of six years old is a sunlit exception in his writings, as a rule so profoundly melancholy. _Les Amitiés Françaises_ is a First Reader in patriotism, an alphabet of honour. It is an exquisite book and might take for an epigraph the motto of the town of Toul: _Pia, pura, fidelis_. It is the notebook of an observer who is a poet, of a poet who is a philosopher, of a philosopher who is a father; yet even here I distinguish that subtle, poignant note of suffering egotism, as inseparable from Barrès’ work as from that of Chateaubriand. There are moments (as in the anecdote called _Le Trou_) when this mournful undertone rises almost to the pitch of rancour--a rancour almost immediately caught up, it is true, in a passion of tenderness and gratitude. The child, Philippe, shall see the light of the sun so many years after the abyss shall have swallowed up the father!

‘Non, Philippe, tu ne glisseras dans le trou que trente années
après que j’y serai--vingt années après que ta petite maman y sera.
Tant je que demeurerai, jamais Philippe n’ira dans le trou!’

And the same passionate prolongation shows itself at another moment in a tender encroachment, a yearning monopoly, as though the father would engross and captivate the child and make him his, nay, make him _he_!--pour into this new vial the old wine of his own heart, fill the transparent and unsullied vase with the precious vintage which it shall carry safely for one more season, decanted, as it were, from one vessel into another. The child is a new lease of life; the child is a bath of renewal; new eyes wherewith to see things in the old forgotten glamour; new ears with which to hear delicate sounds that this long while have escaped the father’s thickening tissues; above all the child is an innocence, a freshness unspeakable:--

‘Tu vis chacune de mes heures. Avec toi je repasserai par mon
humble sentier. Ô ma jeunesse, ma plus bête et jeune jeunesse, qui
refleurit! Quand j’étais rassasié, voilà que, par cet enfant, je me
retrouve à jeune devant le vaste univers.’

This pater-familias had been the most passionate of pilgrims. Under the correctness and irony of his style there had trembled an exasperated sensibility. Impassioned and methodical, enthusiastic and circumspect, chimerical and positive, two natures had warred in Barrès; their conflict had been at once his torment and his delight; and the most romantic of European landscapes had long been the battlefield of their interior quarrel. On the red and sunburned hills of Toledo, Barrès had mused on the cruelty of sensual passion and on the imminence of death; he had meditated in the cathedral and had read the inscription on a pavement at his feet: ‘Hic jacet pulvis, cinis, et nihil.’ And Venice had dissolved in his veins her enervating beauty. But now it was towards Sparta that he took the road. The very title is a programme--_Le Voyage de Sparte_! (1906).

Of all the glorious memories of Greece there is nothing that so much attracts our traveller as the memory of two foreign visitors--Chateaubriand and Lord Byron; the pathetic rather than the heroic remains his ideal still. Yet little by little Athena draws his soul towards her; first by Antigone, a figure at once pathetic and heroic, faithful to her dead, a holocaust to her race; and next by the tombs of Greece, sepulchres carved over with images of beauty and regret, yet without despair or anguish. They teach that calm acceptance of the inevitable which is more than resignation, which is serenity.

And one day, on the banks of the Eurotas, Barrès discovers a form of beauty novel to his soul, made of measure and ease and grace, without excess or rapture. ‘On y trouve des beautés que l’on peut aimer sans souffrir!’ The sense of the whole, the acceptance of the inevitable, the tranquilness of Art, ‘épuré de tous éléments de désespoir,’ these are conceptions which, if properly assimilated, are a liberal education for a Romantic. Barrès could not say, like Gautier, ‘La vue du Parthénon m’a guéri de la maladie gothique;’ the process was slow and painful, and the inoculation of the antique was followed by a violent and feverish reaction. Between him and that unequalled past there is a solution of continuity; it is a perfection into which he cannot enter, for lack of a few drops of Greek blood in his veins; yet he has had his lesson, which he will not forget, and bears away with him a counsel to ponder in his heart.

‘La déesse m’a donné, comme à tous ses pèlerins, le dégoût de
l’enflure dans l’art. Il y avait une erreur dans ma manière
d’interpréter ce que j’admirais; je cherchais un effet, je tournais
autour des choses jusqu’à ce qu’elles parussent le fournir.
Aujourd’hui j’aborde la vie avec plus de familiarité, et je désire
la voir avec des yeux aussi peu faiseurs de complexités théâtrales
que l’étaient des yeux grecs.’

In this new mood of simplicity and responsibility, Barrès conceived two short novels, companion pictures, lessons in civic virtue; one for a man, the other for a girl: _Au Service de L’Allemagne_ (1905), and _Colette Baudoche_ (1909). The theme of the first occurs already in _L’Appel au Soldat_, where the two heroes examine the situation of a young French Lorrainer under a German government. When the hour comes for his military service, shall the young man desert across the frontier to a land where he is scarce accounted French, or drafted off into the Légion Étrangère? Or shall he bow the neck to the usurper? And to whom shall he owe allegiance in case of war: France or Germany?

The hero of _Au Service de L’Allemagne_ is a young Alsatian, whose very name is a symbol: Ehrmann, the man of honour. He is the son of one of those old autochthonous families who, under German rule, remain at heart profoundly French; whose ancestors have fought the battles of Louis Quatorze and Napoleon; who continue to talk French by their own fireside. In Alsace-Lorraine they are at home; in France, almost as much as in Germany, they are across the border. The French novelist has hitherto taken for granted that his hero should _opter pour la France_; yet in this fashion, without great profit to the mother country, Alsace-Lorraine is being emptied of her French blood.

Let the Alsatian serve his time in a German regiment, says Maurice Barrès; and, afterwards, let him live his life as an Alsatian doctor among Alsatian patients; as an Alsatian manufacturer among Alsatian workmen; let him remain true to ‘La Terre et les Morts!’ Let him march in the ranks with comrades who may be the foes of to-morrow, for his first duty is neither to Germany, which has annexed him against his will, nor to France, which stirs not a finger to let him out of prison, but to Alsace-Lorraine, the home of his race. So Ehrmann invents a new casuistry which, in an impossible situation, satisfies his conscience: he will serve his time in a German corps, reserving the right to desert in case of a war with France. But, even in that extremity, he will be no spy; he will reveal no secret learned during the time of compulsory service; he will observe towards his old colours a loyalty absolute while it lasts, which shall be succeeded by a faithful silence.

The sacrifice of Colette Baudoche, if not more difficult or more meritorious, is simpler and easier to admire. There lives in an old house at Metz an old _bourgeoise_, Madame Baudoche, the widow of a land agent, and her young orphaned granddaughter, Colette. To eke out their narrow means, the two women do a little dressmaking among the neighbours who have known them in happier days, and let their two front rooms. Enters to them a young Prussian schoolmaster at the Lycée (the ‘gymnasium’), and he becomes their lodger. Asmus is a good young bear, a friendly and cordial young bore. It is his first contact with the Spirit of France--with ease, measure, liberty, and grace--qualities which the young German begins by admiring as French, but soon ends by loving as peculiar to Colette Baudoche.

Asmus is the most generous of conquerors, for his heart is filled by a tender admiration for the vanquished. He listens to, looks at, admires all that springs from the trampled soil. His love of Nature--which at first is vague and pantheistic--takes on the tone of France and becomes human, historical, and scientific. His rich but rough nature acquires finer shades and subtler blendings; in fact, little by little, Lorraine recreates the German tyrant in her own image:--