Maurice Barrès

“ But such individualism in a soul which was searching for the French genius, always incorrigibly social, could only be unstable and ephemeral, and it is because Barres's thought felt the wider appeal of the nation's soul that he is the most eagerly read French writer to-day, while the symbolist contemporaries of his youth have passed like their own fleeting sensations. Already in Le Culte du Moi, with its pictures of his native Lorraine countryside into which he withdraws with his friend to meditate, one feels the suggestion of the larger collective life to which he must soon be sensitive. ”

“ All these tendencies seem to mark the reappearance of a fusion of thought and action, of intelligence and feeling, which is the characteristic charm of the French genius. In the midst of what seems like reaction, this new spirit is searching for a national self-consciousness which shall clearly see, strongly feel, and sanely act. In the search for the naiionalisme integrale of Barres, the youth of to-day, one feels, are seeking the nourishing qualities of the traditional trait, the richness of a common culture which, has a right to make traditionalism seem seductive and beautiful. ”

“ A perpetual delirium or intoxication is the state of mind which is recommended by this "heart of fire," as the only one becoming in a French officer who has taken up arms to defend his country.
For the young men who consciously adopted the maxims of the Prince de Ligne as their guide at the opening of this war, M. Maurice Barrès has found the name of "Traditionalists." They are those who followed the tradition of the soldierly spirit of France in its three main lines, in its individualism, in its intelligence, in its enthusiasm. ”

“ But in these ideas, 'les plus hautes et les plus desolees,' the youth of Barres's day found no fortification of soul. The atmosphere of detached rationalism, the divorce of pure reason and pure sensibility, so uncongenial to the personal and artistic French spirit, could only tear up the youth from their French soil, without transplanting them into the rich German ground. Such philosophy could only make those who absorbed it candidates for nihilism. ”

“ Anatole France, while recognising the eloquent art of this young man, spoke of the "perverse idealist" which is Maurice Barrès. His philosophy was pronounced a perverted pyrrhonism, the quintessence of self-worship. A Vita Nuova of egoism had been born.
But the dandy did not falter. He has said that one never conquers the intellectual suffrages of those who precede us in life; he made his appeal to young France. And what was the balm in Gilead offered by this new doctor of metaphysics? None but a Frenchman at the end of the last century could have conceived the Barrèsian plan of soul-saving. ”

“ The affaire, Which seemed to the outside world simply a matter of the triumph of individual justice, was for France a colossal combat of ideas, and as a result the national storehouses of tradition were revealed as lodging-places for the basest of prejudices and blind injustices, rather than for the rich common culture of France. While the reconstruction of the national genius had been going on in minds like that of Barres, an international socialism had been growing up by its side. The exiled Communards had been filtering back; industrial development had made the working-classes restless ”

“ To the visitor to-day in France who asks what the younger generation is thinking and dreaming, it seems that that golden age has passed. The reaction has occurred, the nationalism of Barres, checked by the affaire, has at last asserted itself, and the youth of France find their spirit called home to defend the national spirit against the enemies within and without. ”

“ The sappers of the 26th said:
"He was a fine fellow, that little second lieutenant. He shan't go underground without a coffin, at any rate. Let's make one for him."
And they began sawing and hammering.
Then the men of the 27th put their heads together and said:
" There must be no difference between the two brothers. We might as well make a coffin for our lieutenant, too."
By nightfall, when they were ready to bury the brothers side by side, an old woman spoke up. She was a wretched old creature, so poor and broken that she stubbornly refused to leave the village. ”

“ So, if the French youth of the present day, inspired by the traditionalist Barres, are coming to know their own national genius anew, they are coming to a knowledge of it immensely enriched and fertilized by the liberation of those years of socialism and a broadly ranging humanism. ”

“ A traditionalism, rich and appealing like that of Barres, but colored by this new social and pragmatic feeling, seems the best of guaranties that the younger generation in France, no matter what the dread exigencies of national circumstance, will not go very permanently or very far along the path of obscurantism and reaction. ”

“ In a phrase which only a French mind, perhaps, can understand, he says, 'Be skeptical - and ardent!' That cause which is to excite his ardor is to be the life of Lorraine with its quiet beauty, its recovered peace, its procession of passing generations; and through Lorraine, the national collectivity of France. With that precise and beautiful social intuition of the French genius, this 'moi' of Barres, unsatisfied with itself, reaches out and finds itself not an individual in a fortuitous collection, but a link in a great chain, a focus of innumerable rays of culture, tradition, and race. ”

“ And in the debacle of traditional institutions, this new spirit of nationalism, which Barres had been so carefully constructing, went down. France entered upon a decade of secular democracy, a golden age of internationalist and socialist feeling. The middle-class political parties leaned toward socialist action, the syndicalist organization of the workers made rapid progress, the peace movement became popular, the Church was denationalized, the age of l'Humanite seemed to have come. The new nationalism had developed at a bound into internationalism. ”

“ In this wondrous city of Paris, where art is the occasion for continual intellectual warfare, and ideas cause debacles, one cannot read the journals or see the play, or even walk the streets, yellow with their flood of books, without seeming to touch everywhere the soul of France. Everything has its style, everything has its spirit characteristically French, and the nation, as a whole, is proudly conscious of it. ”

“ For this new cult of nationalism is a very different thing from what it would have been if it had succeeded when first preached by Barres, unpurified by the humanitarian socialism of the golden age. The new national consciousness is not a mere chauvinism, but sounds deeper notes of genuine social reform at home. Social work, of the sort that is testifying to a generally awakened social consciousness in America, is attracting great numbers of the youth of both sexes in France to-day. ”

“ A traditionalism from which all the blind, compressing forces of the social groups have been withdrawn, so that one feels only the nourishing influences of a rich common culture in which our individual souls are steeped, and which each generation carries on freely, consciously, gladly, because of its immortal power to express the traits of the race's genius, - this is a gospel to which one could give one's self with wistfulness and love! ”

“ But, best of all, one finds in France a true jeunesse, a younger generation, into whose hands the precious fabric of the national culture is given for conservation and use. In France, unlike our Anglo-Saxondom, youth, like woman and democracy, seems to be taken seriously; it is the thinking youth who measure for the nation the direction and force of the spiritual currents of the day, and stamp upon the age its characteristic impress. ”

“ Perhaps the most significant experience that comes to one who lives for a time in France is the vivid personal realization that above all the concrete manifestations of industry and religion, politics and letters, there is France, and that her thought and action, politics and poetry, national endeavor and daily life, are woven together into an intimate cultural fabric of a richness and tenacity of which we have little knowledge at home in our heterogeneous America. ”

“ To the frightened bourgeoisie, alarmed at the power they had been giving to the workers, the golden age suddenly revealed itself as the criminal idleness of fantastic reverie. To-day, after four years, one finds the reaction in full swing. Military service, which had seemed a bitter and barely tolerable evil, is actually increased by one-half, and is hailed as the sacrifice which the youth of France must be prepared to make for the nation. ”

“ C'était une vieille si pauvre qu'elle avait obstinément refusé d'abandonner le village. "J'aime mieux mourir ici," avait-elle dit. On l'avait laissée. Elle gîtait misérablement dans sa cabane sur la paille et n'avait pas d'autre nourriture que celle que lui donnaient les soldats. ”

“ The sociological philosophy has made great advances in the last decade in France, and is influencing an important younger school of writers, who call themselves unanimistes. Much of the more youthful writing of the day bears witness to the enthusiastic discovery of William James, and of our divine poet of democracy, Walt Whitman. ”

“ He recognizes that he 'represents a moment in the development of a race, an instant in a long culture, a gesture among a thousand gestures, of a force which preceded him and will survive him.' And with Lorraine as the text, a theme which at once calls to his own mind a rich treasury of tradition and stirs in the mind of the French reader the feelings of assertion and revenge, Barres proceeds, after the insufficiency of the 'cult of himself has been established in Le Jardin de Berenice, and Sur l'CEil des Barbares, to a reconstruction of French nationalism. ”

“ The Church, whose fall was viewed almost with indifference, now begins to seem lovely in her desolation; her political and social power shattered, the thoughtful youth begin to respond to her aesthetic appeal. Even royalism, under the leadership of some of the most able intellects of the day, begins to raise its head, and to preach a cult of the crown as the symbol of the social order and spiritual cohesion, without which a true nationalism is impossible. ”

“ Politically, a restlessness seems to be evident, a discontent with the feebleness and colorlessness of the republican state, and a curious drawing together of the extreme Left and the extreme Right, in an equal hatred, though from opposite horizons, of the smug capitalism of the day, - a rapprochement for the founding of the Great State, which shall bind the nation together in a sort of imperial democracy, ministering to the needs of all the people and raising them to its ideals of splendor, honor, and national defense. ”

“ So that the youth of the day, following him, are both more mystical than the realistic followers of Zola and the rationalistic followers of Anatole France, and at the same time more resolute and active, more eager for the combat with life, than were the humanitarians of the preceding decade. This taste for action finds expression in the new popularity of sports, and the expressed admiration which one finds for the individualism of the Anglo-Saxon. ”

“ And, more significant still to the American who watches his language go to pieces under the strain put upon it by the exigencies of the pulsating American life, there is a language here which conserves all these attitudes and nuances of feeling, and may still, unlike our modern English, express both simplicity and ardor with perfect freedom from banality. ”

“ Spiritually one finds a renaissance of religious faith, - mystical and social, however, rather than dogmatic; for a new prophet, Bergson, has arisen to justify the intuitional approach to the reality of the life-force, unmediated by the cold concepts of science. ”

“ In his later articles and speeches, this exposition develops into a genuine philosophy of nationalism, - a nationalism which shall mean the defense and conservation of French art and ideas and manners as well as her military reorganization and defense; a patriotism which shall define a Frenchman as 'one who has come to a consciousness of his own formation,' 'who has put himself at the single point of view of the French life,' and feels within himself all the thousand strands of the past and present which make him what he is. ”

“ And the older generation, having played its role of youth, is not averse to devoting itself to discovering what the new jeunes gens are thinking and dreaming. By means of enquetes, or a sort of social introspection, the literary journals keep the public informed as to the intellectual tendencies of youth, even, in these latter days, of the feminine youth as well, and thus seek to make on every side youth articulate. The French education seems to set for its goal, above all things, the achievement of clarity of thought and expression. ”

“ And the first result seems to be that in French youth introspection is robbed of the morbid terrors which so affright the Anglo-Saxon, destitute as he is of the faculty of expression and thus forced to watch his own thoughts. Because of our less developed social sense, our introspections are forcibly kept individual, while to the Frenchman it is always not what I find in my soul, but what we find in our soul that matters. No writing is so personal as the French ”

“ He preaches a return of art to the old principles of clarity, balance, and design, the art of 'la continuity francaise,' and a new Catholicism, recognizing the social meaning of the 'communion of saints,' - the ideal collective life where the hunger of the 'moi individuel' is satisfied by the 'moi social.' And finally, a cult of France, symbolized in 'la terre et les morts,' - the land and its dead, - with its worshipers bound together in interwoven links of amities, a consciousness of a common background of living truth. ”