inward animation; and, even when he saw the General as he really was, the experiment still seemed interesting and poignant. Barrès, by this time, was so weary of his own fastidious refinement that his devotion was perhaps enhanced by the discovery that his hero was just an average sensual man. No Plotinus, no Loyola in him! A certain pleasant vulgarity, a soldierly mediocrity of mind, appeared to the subtle neophyte an attraction; he recognised the quality-a cheap chromolithograph of Henri Quatre or Lafayette-and he liked his chief none the worse for it; smiling, perhaps, at his own enthusiasm, as he continued to repeat in perfect sincerity, 'J'aime Boulanger comme un stimulant!'

But, all the same, Boulanger was more to the member for Nancy than just a glass of Amer Picon quaffed at the tavern door. He soon saw the inadequacy of his adventurer 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 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, and out of disorder bring a new organic order. Opening his Sophocles, Barrès pondered the magnificent sentence of Antigone, οὔτοι συνέχθειν, ἀλλὰ συμφιλεῖν ἔφυν. And through a maze of errors-for in my opinion the political adventures of Barrès were chiefly errors, Boulangism, antiDreyfusism, etc.-this noble conception has continued to broaden and to ripen, so that to-day the national traditionalism of Barrès is perhaps the largest and finest conception in the political literature of contemporary France. Both as author and as politician he had been through many phases. He had known in its excess the vain egotistic impressionability of the young artist, the caprice and disorder of the Bohemian, the retreat of the mystic, the desiccating irony of the sceptic, the arid talent of the decadent, the ardour of the conspirator, the generous emotions of hero-worship, the love of country, the sense of responsibility. None of these phases had vanished without leaving its trace in an attentive and retentive mind, but they were all finally blent and effaced in the triumphant master-passion, patriotism, in the sense of continuity and the hope of order.

Barrès is not, in the artistic sense, a creator; he has invented no type like Madame Bovary, or Manette Salomon, or Numa Roumestan, or M. Bergeret; his characters are not living creatures whom we all may have met, but the subtle and pensive sketches of an impassioned observer. Sturel alone perhaps the nervous, timid and sensual Sturel, with his long black eyes, at once intense and dull, and, as it were, heavy with sadness and ardour; the pale, dark, alert Sturel, with his low voice often husky with feeling; Sturel the fastidious and the melancholy, with his grave and passionate nature, his romantic soul, his longing for a classic discipline-yes, the Sturel of 'Les Déracinés' is alive (at least in the same sense that the reflection in a mirror lives), for Sturel is Barrès: Il sentait avec une intensité prodigieuse . . . il ne s'occupera que de s'exprimer.' The seven uprooted young Lorrains of Les Déracinés' are portraits, not inventions; they are accurate reports of characters studied with a passionate intentness; and sometimes they are merely arguments to prove a case. And sometimes they are symbols. We cannot rid ourselves of the notion that Astiné Aravian, the Armenian beauty, murdered by journalists on the banks of the Seine at Neuilly, represents the philosophy of the schools, that useless enchantress, that noir délire de l'Asie,' done to death at Neuilly by the agitations of Barrès' campaign as a Boulangist deputy.

There exist two great families of literary works; one kind is complex and often symbolical, diffuse, romantic, representing sentiments too rare to be recognised, save by a chosen few. Of such are the works of Stendhal; and down to this date the works of Barrès belong to this category. But with his very next novel, 'L'Appel au Soldat,' he will effect his transition to that other group, which instinctively we call classic, which deals with the simple sentiments of general humanity, seen from a great height, plumbed to a great depth, yet largely, objectively. With 'L'Appel au Soldat' Barrès enters the sphere of Goethe.

If the book please us so greatly, it is less for its animated picture of the Boulangist fever, for its portraits of the General, so deeply pathetic in its human weakness, or for the death of Madame de Bonnemains, even though

few things in history are more heartrending, than for an interlude of some seven-score pages, 'La Vallée de la Moselle.' It is but the 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, a feeling, a flexibility, an evident sincerity which make them infinitely touching. A grave crudity, almost Spanish-something brusque, bizarre, fixed, absolute, elliptic, which we have hitherto remarked in Barrès-has vanished here; he keeps his peculiar quality, which is penetrating and individual, but his romantic sentiment is at last expressed with a serene largeness, with the ripe calm and in the pure language of a classic. A harmony, a delightful measure, flow through his later works; beautifully our Barrès will sail his black Venetian gondola along a current purely classic. Nothing in literature is so delightful as those works, brief and rare, which ally to the poignancy, the unusualness, of the romantic, the wide humanity, the wisdom and the ease of classic art. We think of Werther,' of Paul et Virginie,' of 'Jocelyn,' of our English 'Vicar of Wakefield;' and also of Pêcheur d'Islande,' and of 'Colette Baudoche,' twin marvels of our own times.

Marriage and the birth of a son had doubtless much to do with this harmonious 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 ensures the continuity of all that we inherit from our ancestors; a child, we may say, is the printed copy of our manuscript, safe henceforth, no longer so unique and 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: ' notes sur l'acquisition par un petit Lorrain des sentiments qui donnent un prix à la vie.' It is an exquisite book; it might bear the motto of the town of Toul, 'Pia, pura, fidelis.' It is the book of an observer who is a poet, of a poet who is a philosopher, of a philosopher who is a father. And yet the watchful ear recognises even here that subtle, that poignant note of suffering egotism

which is as inseparable from the sentiment of Barrès as from the genius of Chateaubriand. There are moments (as in the anecdote called 'Le Trou ') when this mournful undertone rises almost to the note of rancour-a rancour immediately caught up in a passion of gratitude and tenderness. The child Philippe will 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 que je demeurerai, jamais Philippe n'ira dans le trou!' (p. 56).

And the same passion of 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 heart, fill the transparent, fresh, 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 with the old forgotten glamour, new ears which shall hear fine sounds that this long while have escaped him-above all, an innocence, a freshness:

"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 jeun devant le vaste univers' (p. 188).

This paterfamilias had been the most passionate of pilgrims. Under the correctness and irony of his style there had trembled the most exasperated sensibility. Impassioned and methodical, enthusiastic and circumspect, chimerical and positive, two natures had warred in him; 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: Vol. 217.-Nọ, 432,

K

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!'

Of all the glorious memories of Greece there is nothing that so much attracts him 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 serenity 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.

'La déesse m'a donné, comme à tous ses pèlerins, le dégoût de 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.'

There are, in literature, certain authors, such as Corneille and Pascal, whom we frequent, not merely to admire their art, but for a lesson in conduct. We look