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:--
‘Il y a des petits villages, isolés au milieu des espaces ruraux,
qui, le soir, à l’heure où l’on voit rentrer les bêtes et les gens,
m’apparaissent comme des gaufriers; et je crois que tout être, fut
il barbare prussien, soumis à leur action patiente et persistante,
y deviendrait lentement Lorrain. Bien des générations reposent
là, au cimetière, mais leur activité persiste; elle est devenue
ce groupe de maisons, ce clocher, cet abreuvoir, cette école
qu’entourent les champs bigarrés de couleurs et de formes; et si
l’on entre dans cette communauté, on y vient nécessairement à se
conduire et penser comme ont fait les prédécesseurs.’
On Herr Doktor Friedrich Asmus the land of Lorraine exercises this sort
of transformation the more readily that he adores Colette; and she is
touched by his loyalty and strength. Nature pushes her into his arms;
and old Madame Baudoche can only sigh and say, ‘C’est bien dommage
qu’il soit Allemand!’ The excellent young man sets out on his summer
holidays almost sure of Colette’s accord.
But she is a young maid of the lineage of Corneille, accustomed to
poise her feelings, and to decide less by a passion of the heart than
by a free consent of the mind. For the whole world, she would not
forfeit her sense of honour! And Asmus returns on Commemoration Day,
when all that is French in Metz is met together to attend a service in
memory of the soldiers of France fallen during the siege. During that
service something larger than herself takes possession of the heart
and soul of the little dressmaker. ‘Elle se sent chargée d’une grande
dignité, soulevée vers quelque chose de plus vaste, de plus haut et de
plus constant que sa modeste personne.’ Coming out of church she turns
to the kind and fervent young Prussian who accompanies her: ‘Monsieur
le docteur, dit la jeune fille, je ne peux vous épouser.’
Maurice Barrès also is like his heroic Colette. ‘Il se sent chargé
d’une grande dignité, soulevé vers quelque chose de plus vaste, de plus
haut, et de plus constant que sa personne.’ He has gone far since first
we met him, half-mystical, half-quizzical, rapt in the cult of the Ego.
Now, as we have said, freed from the service of Self, ‘La Terre et les
Morts’ is his watchword.
III
Or rather ‘La Terre et les Morts’ _was_ his watchword, for of late
years the Dead have revealed to him something wider and deeper than
the Land. Let us compare with the perverse charm and insidious
nihilism of his earlier book on Toledo, _Du Sang, de la Volupté et de
la Mort_ (1895), his treatment of the same theme in his recent essay
on Il Greco, and we shall catch the difference. In either volume the
landscape is the same. The scene is arid; the red, steep banks of
the ravine through which the Tagus rolls its tawny floods lead to a
city set in ruin upon its lofty rocks; no site suggests a more ardent
melancholy.
In his young days, Maurice Barrès declared that the traveller entering
Toledo tasted the same harsh and acrid pleasure that he derived from
reading Pascal’s _Pensées_ or from contemplating Michael-Angelo’s
_Penseroso_: in three gulps, it is the same rough and heroic draught.
The melancholy splendour of the scene exaggerates the stranger’s sense
of loneliness. There is an implacable indifference to his needs in
these magnificent ruins, and the yellow rocks repeat the strange device
inscribed upon a brass let into the floor of the Cathedral. Twenty
years ago, this device appeared, in the eyes of Barrès, to declare the
secret of the city. They are singular words to adorn a Christian tomb:
_Hic jacet pulvis, cinis, et nihil_.
But see how differently in 1910 our traveller will read the secret of
Toledo! Now, as of old, the city on its sun-baked height, with the
tawny semicircle of the Tagus at its feet, seems less a dwelling for
men than a dreary highplace of the soul, a sanctuary set apart for
spiritual exaltation. The dry orange tone of the soil and buildings;
the town compact of convents, fortresses, and prisons; the barren
sublimity of the prospect; the violent African heat of the sky; the
vast scent of sun-dried lavender and sage and benjoin, seem proper to
some Holy City of the desert rather than to a European town. And yet in
all this sadness there is a secret pleasure.
‘J’y respire une volupté dont j’ignore le nom, et quelque chose
comme un péché se mêle à tout un passé d’amour, d’honneur et de
religion. C’est le mystère de Tolède, et nous voudrions le saisir.
Mais que donc pourrait nous guider? Toute société a fui de cette
ruine impériale.’
A painter, long dead, a foreigner--Il Greco--is the traveller’s guide.
It sometimes happens that a foreigner surprises the fine evasive spirit
of a place which escapes the native, staled by custom, until he catch
it again through the fresh acuity of a stranger’s glance. It was the
Fleming, Philippe de Champagne, newly disembarked from Brussels, who
discerned the austere heroism of Port-Royal; and a Greek from Candy
came from Venice to Toledo in his twentieth year to surprise the secret
of Spain. He painted the souls of the men and women who breathed the
same air as Saint Teresa and Cervantes.
Through him we learn the secret of Toledo, and Barrès will no longer
tell us that it is the dreary motto: _Pulvis, cinis, et Nihil_; nay,
he assures us now that it is the mystical world beyond reality--the
spiritual life. The Cretan painted the serious, narrow faces, the
bizarre, aristocratic, and elongated persons of his sitters, but
also the constant object of their secret thought: that wonderful,
mysterious, illimitable Other-World, urging and surging just on the
further side of appearances; a world to which they aspire, and ascend,
which seems to suck them up into the eddying whirlpool of the glorious
Unseen.
He loves to paint a double vision: on the lower half of his canvas Il
Greco sets the world he knows: the men of sad and sober visage, of neat
features and pointed beards and ruffs, elegant, honourable gentlemen;
scarcely, perhaps, men of a great capacity; and then above them, only
just barely overhead, a mad world (if you choose to call it mad) a
mystical world at any rate, of rushing spirits, of flooding light,
of joy and fire (_Joie! Joie! Joie! Pleurs de joie!_), a world of
adoration, bliss, eternal peace.
‘Et l’on a dit qu’il était fou!... Attention! Tout simplement,
c’est un catholique espagnol.... Ses toiles complètent les traités
de Sainte Thérèse et les poèmes de Saint Jean de la Croix. Elles
initient à la vie intérieure des dignes Castillans. Aucun livre
n’en donne une idée aussi complète, aussi neuve.’
The faults of Il Greco, his voluntary distortion of the figures that
he represents, their flame-like fragility and aspiration, the lividness
of the painter’s palette are not repugnant to our critic, who is always
willing to permit a sacrifice of exterior truth in order to obtain a
greater intensity of expression. The admirer of Ligier Richier may well
be tender to the errors of Il Greco; fortunate errors, since they are
perhaps a condition of the utterance of a certain spiritual state:--
‘De tels états ne semblent pas compatibles avec la grande civilisation
et par exemple avec l’emploi de chef de gare. Mais ils laissent dans
Tolède une atmosphere où plus d’un, qui ne s’en doute pas, gagnerait à
fréquenter.’
More and more the consideration of these spiritual conditions will
henceforth absorb the attention of Maurice Barrès. The indulgent
historian of Bérénice, the heir of Montaigne, has gradually become
the attentive devotee of Pascal, the commentator of _L’Angoisse de
Pascal_; for Pascal, all sincerity and force and fire, attracts the
myriad-minded, the dilettante Barrès. As he has surprised the secret of
Toledo, so would he master the mystery of this great savant who made so
light of science.
There are points of resemblance between Barrès and Pascal: both
are sons of Auvergne, with something positive and exact in their
imagination, a keen grasp of facts, a hatred of conventions. In
Pascal also, though so fiery on occasion, there is something cold
and harsh. And he, too, knew that _amor dominandi_ which so often
inspired the political combats of Barrès; Pascal, too, in his youth,
was imperious, vivacious, full of bizarre melancholy; he, likewise,
had been a dreamer and a dilettante. And though the ultimate character
of Pascal was a tragic spiritual grandeur, yet almost to the end there
was a freakishness mixed up with it, a love of paradox, a delight
in subterfuges and disguises. Saint as he was, Pascal was prompt to
disdain, proud, full of self-confidence, ardent; he had his vanities
and curiosities. His passionate and avid soul was often unsatisfied,
‘parce que ce gouffre infini ne peut-être rempli que par un objet
infini et immuable, c’est à dire, par Dieu même.’ (_Pensées_, p. 425.)
_Photo: Dormac_ _To face p. 24_
[Illustration: =Maurice Barrès=]
Was it the memory of Pascal that inclined Barrès to collect the
fragmentary legends and souvenirs, even the documents, of a humbler
mystic, half saint and half schismatic, once famous in the region round
Charmes, the little town where Barrès was born and where he still
spends his summers?
Perhaps; but Barrès (whose singular temperament appears to combine the
sense of order with a contempt for law) has always sought an axiom,
a religion, a discipline, which would satisfy an ardent sensibility,
and unite the individual with the brothers of his race and faith,
while yet leaving free that inner Ego which, after all, has nothing to
do with our organisations and arrangements, which transcends reason
and order, being (if indeed anything is) in direct communication
with the Infinite. From the time he wrote _Un Homme Libre_, from the
time he organised Nationalism, Barrès has always sought a rule and a
regulation; but he has never bowed his head to a yoke. Self-discipline,
not obedience, is what he sought--and at one season he sought it in the
ascetic life. But we must not forget that ἀ ςκητής means an athlete,
one who has exercised himself and grown strong; and that which Barrès
has always desired, in religion as in politics, is a perfecting and
augmenting of his own personality.
That way lies heresy! And a heretic is the hero of Barrès’ last novel,
_La Colline Inspirée_.
It is a narration of religious experience (or rather of religious
aberration), and at the same time it is an idyll of a strange
Druid-like poetry, all the native sap and strength of Celtic forests
and high places. Chateaubriand, with his Velléda, Renan, these alone in
France have touched that deepest fibre of the Celtic heart, that dread,
sacred, and yet sweet, that sense of communion with the Invisible, of
which the mystery is deeper than the baptismal font and larger than
the consecrated altar stone. Rome will never entirely wean Barrès
from his devotion to the Celtic divinities of wood and weald. In _La
Colline Inspirée_ he opposes Poetry and Dogma. On the one hand, the
Church, with its venerated hierarchy, its discipline, its universality
and order; on the other, the mystic, the prophet--impatient of all
mediation between the instinct of his soul and the eternal life--the
seer of visions, too often sensual or insane.
Léopold Baillard is a real personage--almost contemporary, since
he died in 1883. He and his two brothers, born of pious peasants in
the dawn of the Nineteenth Century were three priests who dreamed of
restoring, not only in their invisible supremacy but also in their
positive and material prosperity, the prestige and the power of the
native shrines of Lorraine. They were, in fact, as we should say
(only a hundred years too soon), Celtic revivalists. Restorers of
altars fallen into decay, founders of religious congregations, they
were, during the first years of their ministry, the pride and the
miracle of Alsace as of Lorraine. The acropolis of Sainte Odile in
the Vosges and the sanctuary of Sion-Vaudémont in Lorraine became the
property of Léopold Baillard and his brothers, where they founded
convents and hostelries, and instituted an Order of Begging Sisters,
who travelled all over Europe collecting alms. (A happy touch is that
which shows Léopold Baillard in the Imperial Palace at Vienna, asking
a contribution from the Emperor of Austria as Count de Vaudémont in
Lorraine.)
Their enterprise, their intrepid imagination, their financial
audacities awakened the mistrust of a prudent bishop, who refused to
confirm the miraculous cure of one of the Sisters, and subsequently
withdrew his sanction from their quest of alms. It was the axe-stroke
at the root of the Baillards’ prosperity; it was the deliberate
quashing of a new (but a less spiritual) Port Royal. The Baillards
were obliged to sell all their possessions, and, bankrupt in purse
and credit, they were sent into retreat in a Cistercian monastery. In
that place of peace a Cistercian father inconsiderately bade Léopold
Baillard visit in Normandy a wonder-working visionary, Vintras, a
prophet in his degree.
Baillard was a sort of romantic genius--the genius of revolt and
sentiment--a man for whom the invisible world exists so naturally
that nothing in him protested when Vintras, on the occasion of their
meeting, declared himself in constant and direct communication with a
spiritual sphere. Baillard returned from Normandy to Sion-Vaudémont a
fervent disciple of the New Elias (as Vintras styled himself), and,
on the scene of his old labours, began to edify--with how much less
success!--a schismatic Church. But he is no longer the prosperous,
the genial, Abbé Léopold Baillard. His cure is taken from him, his
doctrines are condemned, his person excommunicated. He is the fallen
Angel, he whom pride misled.
There is tenderness as well as irony, poetry as well as tragedy, deep
compassion mixed with a half-reluctant disapproval in the eloquence
of M. Barrès, as he relates the downfall of the schismatic--his
follies, his errors, his sufferings, his long martyrdom, his final
reconciliation with the Church. _Melius est ut pereat unus quam
unitas._ Yet if that one be Pascal, or Fénelon, or Father Tyrrell,
or even an Abbé Léopold Baillard (so mere a peasant in his harsh
materialism, so nearly a saint in his inspired spirituality), how shall
one not admire the ardour, the grandeur, the genius, the generosity
of a soul superior to the docile flock? The lost sheep (depend upon
it) was the fairest of the fold--and was, as we know, the dearest to
the immortal Shepherd. The sympathies, if not the convictions, of the
author are evidently with the vanquished prophet. For a religion, says
our author, is made of two elements, with difficulty conciliable, yet
equally vital: on the one hand, enthusiasm, inspiration; on the other,
discipline, authority.
‘Eternel dialogue de ces deux puissances! À laquelle obéir? Et
faut-il donc choisir entre elles? Ah! plutôt qu’elles puissent,
ces deux forces antagonistes, s’éprouver éternellement, ne jamais
se vaincre et s’amplifier par leur lutte même. Elles ne sauraient
se passer l’une de l’autre. Qu’est-ce qu’un enthousiasme qui
demeure une fantaisie individuelle? Qu’est-ce qu’un ordre qu’aucun
enthousiasme ne vient plus animer?’
_Est aliquid hominis quod nec ipse scit spiritus hominis qui in ipso
est_: there is more in man than the soul of man conceives. This line of
Saint Augustine (which serves as an epigraph to _La Colline Inspirée_)
might be inscribed above all Maurice Barrès’ later writings: they are
all laid on the altar of an Unknown God. Nothing in the eyes of this
barely orthodox critic is more sacred, more moving than a village
church, whose narrow chancel has echoed the prayers, the praise, of
countless spirits straining to approach the secret Reality which
sustains the world of Appearances. The stones have witnessed the tears
of generations many times renewed as they consigned their dead to
the keeping of God; before the same altar fathers and children have
plighted their troth; and the font served to christen the grandsires
of to-day. A village church is, to an imaginative mind, a thing which
revives the sacred memory of our country and our dead. And so--not in a
spirit of narrow orthodoxy--but in the largest and most human movement
of generosity--Barrès takes up his pen to plead for the churches of
France, falling into ruin since the separation of Church and State.
It must be remembered that, when these parted company, there was a
question of constituting certain parish councils, or _associations
cultuelles_, specially charged with the maintenance of the churches
of France; but the Vatican, ever suspicious of all that tends towards
a decentralisation of authority, would not allow of their existence.
In consequence, no responsibility towards the Government obliges the
communes to restore their parish church; if it fall into disrepair,
they may abandon it or amend it at their own sweet will, should it
threaten to tumble about their shoulders, they may disaffect it, or
even at a last extremity, pull it down altogether.
Now, such is the antagonism of free-thinker and Catholic in France,
especially in the less cultivated part of the community, that in
certain villages, where the Church-people would be willing to restore
their parish church at their own expense, a sectarian town council has
forbidden them to do so, and, by an abuse of authority, has declared
the church disaffected. In other hamlets, too poor for so great an
outlay, the church is in ruins for lack of means and initiative. In
others, their treasure, however slight, of old glass, enamel, tapestry,
or gold and silver embroideries, old lace, or mediæval carving, has
awakened the cupidity of those who know too well how to dispose of such
relics of the past.
It is true that certain churches and certain treasures are considered
worthy of the rank of historical monuments, and, as such, are entrusted
to the protection of the State. But the thesis of M. Barrès is that
_all_ churches, built before 1800 (I don’t know why he insists upon the
date), should be included in this immunity; that any vote of a sum to
be expended in repairs, decreed by a commune or department, should be
immediately doubled by the Government; and that any ratepayer should
have the right to restore his parish church at his own expense. It is
not as a Catholic that he pleads the cause of the altar, but in the
name of civilisation; and he requires the nation to repair its village
churches just as he would demand the preservation of the National
Library or the College of France.
‘C’est à la civilisation qu’il faut s’intéresser, si l’on n’a
pas le sens de Dieu et si l’on est rassasié du moi. Eh bien! la
civilisation, où est-elle défendue aujourd’hui?’
‘Dans les conseils d’administration? Je ne suis pas de ceux qui
le croient. Elle est défendue dans les laboratoires et dans les
églises.’
It is perhaps a little difficult to formulate the intellectual
position of Barrès. What he craves, appears to be, not an orthodoxy,
but a preserve of Mystery; a sort of private hunting ground for the
imagination; the right to lean out of the visible world and draw a deep
breath, _hors de la prison des choses claires_. Or, shall we say? in
the blank wall of our science and our ignorance, he wants to be free
to throw open a window looking on the Infinite? He defends, perhaps,
less a faith than a conception of life which is bound up with all our
ideas of honour, our notions of sacrifice. I think he is inspired
by a sense of ancestral piety rather than by what we usually term
religion. Indeed, I imagine that no reader would have more intimately
vibrated to _La Grande Pitié des Églises de France_, than a certain old
friend of mine, whom Barrès did not always understand, by name Ernest
Renan--Renan who wrote (already in 1849):--
‘N’y aurait il quelque moyen d’être catholique sans croire au
catholicisme?’