The art of Barrès till this juncture had been of a smoky enchantment,
many-hued, of shifting shapes, often tenuous, sometimes opaque, yet
ever graceful, ever fascinating. Whether he was a great spiritual force
or only an amazing protean acrobat, coquetting with the _Zeitgeist_,
his admirers and enemies had not agreed upon. He had further clouded
public opinion by becoming a Boulangist deputy from Nancy, and his
apparition in the Chamber must have been as bizarre as would have been
Shelley's in Parliament. Barrès but followed the illustrious lead of
Hugo, Lamartine, Lamennais. His friends were moved to astonishment. The
hater of the law, the defender in the press of Chambige, the Algerian
homicide, this writer of "precious" literature, among the political
opportunists! Yet he sat as a deputy from 1889 to 1893, and proved
himself a resourceful debater; in the chemistry of his personality
patriotism had been at last precipitated.
His second trilogy of books was his most artistic gift to French
literature. But with the advent, in 1897, of Les Déracinés (The
Uprooted) a sharp change in style may be noted. It is the sociological
novel in all its thorny efflorescence. Diction is no longer in the
foreground. Vanished the velvety rhetoric, the musical phrase, the
nervous prose of many facets. Sharp in contour and siccant, every
paragraph is packed with ideas. The Uprooted is formidable reading,
but we at least touch the rough edges of reality. Men and women
show familiar gestures; the prizes run for are human; we are in a
dense atmosphere of intrigue, political and personal; Flaubert's
Frédéric Moreau, the young man of confused ideas and feeble volition,
once more appears as a cork in the whirlpool of modern Paris. The
iconoclast that is in the heart of this poet is rampant. He smashes
institutions, though his criticism is often constructive. He strives
to expand the national soul, strives to combat cynicism, and he urges
decentralisation as the sole remedy for the canker that he believes is
blighting France. Bourget holds that "Society is the functioning of
a federation of organisms of which the individual is the cell"; that
functioning, says Barrès, is ill served by the violent uprooting of
the human organism from its earth. A man best develops in his native
province. His deracination begins with the education that sends him
to Paris, there to lose his originality. The individual can flourish
only in the land where the mysterious forces of heredity operate, make
richer his Ego, and create solidarity--that necromantic word which, in
the hands of social preachers, has become a glittering and illuding
talisman. A tree does not grow upward unless its roots plunge deeply
into the soil. A wise administrator attaches the animal to the pasture
that suits it. (But Barrès himself still lives in Paris.)
This nationalism of Barrès is not to be confounded with the perfidious
slogan of the politicians; it is a national symbol for many youth
of his land. Nor is Barrès affiliated with some extreme modes of
socialism--socialism, that daydream of a retired green-grocer who
sports a cultivated taste for dominoes and penny philanthropy. To those
who demand progress, he asks, Progressing toward what? Rather let us
face the setting sun. Do not repudiate the past. Hold to our dead. They
realise for us the continuity of which we are the ephemeral expression.
The cult of the "I" is truly the cult of the dead. Egoism must not be
construed as the average selfishness of humanity; the higher egoism
is the art--Barrès artist, always--of canalising one's Ego for the
happiness of others. Out of the Barrès nationalism has grown a mortuary
philosophy; we see him rather too fond of culling the flowers in the
cemetery as he takes his evening stroll. When a young man he was
obsessed by the vision of death. His logic is sometimes audaciously
romantic; he paints ideas in a dangerously seductive style; and he is
sometimes carried away by the electric energy which agitates his not
too robust physique. This cult of the dead, while not morbid, smacks
nevertheless of the Chinese. Our past need not be in a graveyard, and
one agrees with Jean Dolent that man is surely matter, but that his
soul is his own work.
Latterly the patriotism of Barrès is beginning to assume an unpleasant
tinge. In his azure, _chauvinisme_ is the ugliest cloud. He loves the
fatal word "revenge." In the Service of Germany presents a pitiable
picture of a young Alsatian forced to military service in the German
army. It is not pleasing, and the rage of Barrès will be voted laudable
until we recall the stories by Frenchmen of the horrors of French
military life. He upholds France for the French. It is a noble idea,
but it leads to narrowness and fanatical outbreaks. His influence
was great from 1888 to 1893 among the young men. It abated, to be
renewed in 1896 and 1897. It reached its apogee a few years ago. The
Rousseau-like cry, "Back to the soil!" made of Barrès an idol in
several camps. His election to the Academy, filling the vacancy caused
by the death of the poet De Hérédia, was the consecrating seal of a
genius who has the gift of projecting his sympathies in many different
directions, only to retrieve as by miraculous tentacles the richest
moral and æsthetic nourishment. We should not forget to add, that by
the numerous early Barrèsians, the Academician is now looked upon as a
backslider from the cause of philosophic anarchy.
The determinism of Taine stems in Germany and his theory of environment
has been effectively utilised by Barrès. In The Uprooted, the argument
is driven home by the story of seven young Lorrainers who descend upon
Paris to capture it. Their Professor Bouteiller (said to be a portrait
of Barrès's old master Burdeau at Nancy) has educated them as if
"they might some day be called upon to do without a mother-country."
Paris is a vast maw which swallows them. They are disorganised by
transplantation. (What young American would be, we wonder?) Some
drift into anarchy, one to the scaffold because of a murder; all are
_arrivistes_; and the centre figure, Sturel, is a failure because he
cannot reconcile himself to new, harsh conditions. They blame their
professor. He diverted the sap of their nationalism into strange
channels. A few "arrive," though not in every instance by laudable
methods. One is a scholar. The account of his interview with Taine and
Taine's conversation with him is another evidence of the intellectual
mimicry latent in Barrès. He had astonished us earlier by his
recrudescence of Renan's very fashion of speech and ideas; literally a
feat of literary prestidigitation. There are love, political intrigue,
and a dramatic assassination--the general conception of which recalls
to us the fact that Barrès once sat at the knees of Bourget, and had
read that master's novel, Le Disciple. A striking episode is that
of the meeting of the seven friends at the tomb of Napoleon, there
to meditate upon his grandeur and to pledge themselves to follow
his illustrious example. "Professor of Energy" he is denominated. A
Professor of Spiritual Energy is certainly Maurice Barrès. In another
scene Taine demonstrates the theory of nationalism by the parable of
a certain plane tree in the Square of the Invalides. For the average
lover of French fiction The Uprooted must prove trying. It is, with
its two companions in this trilogy of The Novel of National Energy, a
social document, rather than a romance. It embodies so clearly a whole
cross-section of earnest French youths' moral life, that--with L'Appel
au Soldat, and Leurs Figures, its sequels--it may be consulted in the
future for a veridic account of the decade it describes. One seems
to lean from a window and watch the agitation of the populace which
swarmed about General Boulanger; or to peep through keyholes and see
the end of that unfortunate victim of treachery and an ill-disciplined
temperament. Barrès later reviles the friends of Boulanger who deserted
him, by his delineation of the Panama scandal. Yet it is all as dry
as a parliamentary blue-book. After finishing these three novels, the
impression created is that the flaw in the careers of four or five of
the seven young men from Lorraine was not due to their uprooting, but
to their lack of moral backbone.
Paris is no more difficult a social medium to navigate in than New
York; the French capital has been the battlefield of all French genius;
but neither in New York nor in Paris can a young man face the conflict
so loaded down with the burden of general ideas and with so scant
a moral outfit as possessed by these same young men. The Lorraine
band--is it a possible case? No doubt. Nevertheless, if its members had
remained at Nancy they might have been shipwrecked for the same reason.
Why does not M. Barrès show his cards? The Kingdom on the table!
cries Hilda Wangel to her Masterbuilder. Love of the natal soil does
not make a complete man; some of the greatest patriots have been the
greatest scoundrels. M. Bourget sums up the situation more lucidly than
M. Barrès, who is in such a hurry to mould citizens that he omits an
essential quality from his programme--God (or character, moral force,
if you prefer other terms). Now, when a rationalistic philosopher
considers God as an intellectual abstraction, he is not illogical.
Scepticism is his stock in trade. But can Maurice Barrès elude the
issue? Can he handle the tools of such pious workmen as Loyola, De
Sales, and Thomas à Kempis, for the building of his soul, and calmly
overlook the inspiration of those masons of men? It is one of the
defects of dilettanteism that it furnishes a _point d'appui_ for the
liberated spirit to see-saw between free-will and determinism, between
the Lord of Hosts and the Lucifer of Negation. Paul Bourget feels this
spiritual dissonance. Has he not said that the day may come when Barrès
may repeat the phrase of Michelet: _Je ne me peux passer de Dieu!_
Has Maurice Barrès already plodded the same penitential route without
indulging in an elliptical flight to a new artificial paradise?
If his moral evolution, so insistently claimed by his disciples,
has been of a zigzag nature, if _lacunæ_ abound in his system and
paradoxical _vues d'ensemble_ often distract, yet logical evolution
there has been--from the maddest, romantic individualism to a
well-defined solidarity--and without attenuation of the dignity and
utility of the Individual in the scheme of collectivism. The Individual
is the Salt of the State. The Individual leavens the mass politic.
Numbers will never supplant the value, psychic or economic, of the
Individual. Emerson and Matthew Arnold said all this before Barrès.
Incomparable artist as is Maurice Barrès, we still must demand of him:
"In Vishnu-land what Avatar!"