No such rich promise was cut short by the death of André Laf

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES

In the plain text version words in Italics are denoted by _underscores_

and text in bold like =this=.

The book cover was modified by the Transcriber and has been added to

the public domain.

A number of words in this book have both hyphenated and non-hyphenated

variants. For the words with both variants present the one more used

has been kept.

Obvious punctuation and other printing errors have been corrected.

* * * * *

TWENTIETH CENTURY

FRENCH WRITERS

_Frontispiece_

[Illustration: =Mary Duclaux=]

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.