Once upon a time a youth, slim, dark, and delicate, lived in a tower.
This tower was composed of ivory--the youth sat within its walls,
tapestried by most subtle art, and studied his soul. As in a mirror, a
fantastic mirror of opal and gold, he searched his soul and noted its
faintest music, its strangest modulations, its transmutation of joy
into melancholy; he saw its grace and its corruption. These matters he
registered in his "little mirrors of sincerity." And he was happy in an
ivory tower and far away from the world, with its rumours of dulness,
feeble crimes, and flat triumphs. After some years the young man
wearied of the mirror, with his spotted soul cruelly pictured therein;
wearied of the tower of ivory and its alien solitudes; so he opened its
carved doors and went into the woods, where he found a deep pool of
water. It was very small, very clear, and reflected his face, reflected
on its quivering surface his unstable soul. But soon other images of
the world appeared above the pool: men's faces and women's, and the
shapes of earth and sky. Then Narcissus, who was young, whose soul was
sensitive, forgot the ivory tower and the magic pool, and merged his
own soul into the soul of his people.
Maurice Barrès is the name of the youth, and he is now a member of the
Académie Française. His evolution from the Ivory tower of Egoism to the
broad meadows of life is not an insoluble enigma; his books and his
active career offer many revelations of a fascinating, though often
baffling, personality. His passionate curiosity in all that concerns
the moral nature of his fellow man lends to his work its own touch of
universality; otherwise it would not be untrue to say that the one
Barrès passion is love of his native land. "France" is engraved on his
heart; France and not the name of a woman. This may be regarded as a
grave shortcoming by the sex.
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.