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.