Chapter III

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!"