September 11, 1915. 
LAND AND WATER 
IN PRAISE OF MAURICE BARRES.* 
By F. Y. Eccles. 
THE faithful readers of Maurice Barr^s, abroad 
as well as in France, knew beforehand where 
to look for the worthiest expression of the 
French conscience at a supreme crisis; and 
for my part, since the war began, I have 
missed very few of his articles as they appeared from 
day to day in a Paris newspaper. Here, reprinted in a 
volume which I hope will be widely read In Great 
Britain, is a first series of them, covering three months 
of the campaign — the montlis which, for the surprise, 
the suspense, and the sliarp turn of fortune, must to the 
end stand out as the most dramatic in our memory. 
These pages (including now a careful concordance of 
events) have the value of a document and the attraction 
of whatever revives the intense alternative of hope and 
fear. But vivid and veracious records of the public 
anxiety are to hand from a hundred sources. What 
dignifies such informal paragraphs and lifts them above 
their obvious dependence on the news or the mere 
rumours of the hour, is, I think, the strong sense of 
immemorial issues which pervades them, and a constant 
appeal to tlie historic personality of France. Each of 
the allied peoples brings to the common purpose the 
forces drawn from a separate past which necessarily 
colours our particular conception of the stake. Think 
of it : the same Barbarian, once hirsute and now spec- 
tacled, for perhaps the twentieth time is trampling the 
fields of Gaul. For the French this is, in one aspect, 
but another phase (the last ?) of an assault and a re- 
sistance perpetually renewed; and in the last resort 
their confidence is justified by a reasonable reading of 
their history. " France has always been the land of 
awakenings and recommencements." Barr^s is ex- 
ceptionally qualified to remind the world and his 
countrymen of that, not by genius only but by the share 
he has had in the great rally of national sentiment whicii 
during the last few years prepared the French for their 
ordeal. To judge by the spiritual curve of his career 
in letters he was sure, of all men, to find the words that 
were wanted just now, when deeds alone seem to count, 
but the mind of nations is still hungry for the words that 
mirror and inspire their effort. 
His Literary Career. 
Perhaps — for his name is certainly better known 
among us than his writings — it is not superfluous to 
glance back over the road Maurice Barr^s has travelled 
since first he startled a delicate public with the petulance 
and irony of his Culte du Moi. Eight and twenty years 
ago, no one could have predicted (least of all himself) 
that the disdainful stripling who descended upon Paris 
from Lorraine with a fresh talent for agile phrases and 
a half-serious profession of egoism, was to discover 
gradually a wonderful " healing power " and by and 
by become the very voice of concord and discipline 
among his people, of abnegation and the will to endure. 
At least the vogue of those early writings tended to 
restore the supremacy of moral interest in fiction over 
the pathological obsession of the realists ; and under all 
the fatuity of a literary posture, who could miss the 
residual sincerity of a search — rare enough in a genera- 
tion lured by the prestige of amiable sceptics — after 
certitude and a motive to live for? But a course of self- 
dissection pursued under the public gaze really implied 
the cruel need of friends. His hero, Philippe, does not 
get far before he finds that his most intimate predilec- 
tions and dislikes have their roots deep in the past, that 
he belongs body and soul to a genuine human group, 
land that a long series of buried ancestors still govern 
the affections and the very reason of the living. Almost 
' li'Am* franjM* ct La Guerre.— I. L'Union Saceec. Paris : 
Einile-Faal trirea, lOlS. 
from the first Barr6s has associated loyalty to the native 
soil with the remembrance of the dead. Sometimes, 
especially in his sentimental journeys, it merges 
curiously in a rather feverish melancholy which recalls 
the old Romantic dalliance in graveyards. The land- 
scapes he prefers are all ennobled by the humanity 
beneath; but " I have found a discipline," he says 
somewhere, " in the cemeteries where my forerunners 
only rhapsodised." 
New Ways of Thinking. 
To disdain formulas and give the rein to a vagabond 
curiosity was only the first step towards self-knowledge 
and the discovery of his most durable affinities. New 
ways of feeling and thinking were what he sought in 
travel (the pretext of several enchanting volumes), inj 
poetry and music, and even in politics : but only because 
choice, however instinctive, involves experiment. The 
bankruptcy of systems whicli seduce the intellect with- 
out engaging any hereditary sentiment seems to be the 
moral of an early book of fiction which turns on re- 
volutionary theories. But when he wrote it Barres had 
already made his first excursion into public life, and 
taken part as a follower of poor Boulanger in what ho 
calls a " Gallic tumult." That episode, in a vigorous 
and exciting trilogy, Lc Roman de I'Encrf^ie Nationale, 
appears as an abortive attempt to assert the permanent 
French interests against the babblers and pettifoggers 
whose wrangling thwarted the counsels of national 
defence. At any rate, the story of the six young men 
from Nancy is a splendid vindication of " home-rooted- 
ness," or local pietj% as the foundation and preservative 
of sane patriotism." 
The point of maturity for his doctrine as well as his 
genius is fixed by the appearance of Les Amities 
Fran^aiscs. In this " introduction of a little Lorrainer " 
— his own son — "to the emotions which give life its 
value " the true function of Maurice Barres is apparent : 
it is, in a word, to guard the continuity of the French 
tradition, in morals and thought and art. And those 
who can judge best say that his mastery of iiis language 
is most absolute here. Even a foreigner can feel sure 
tliat if he had written nothing but that grave and thrill- 
ing Song of Confidence in Life with which the book ends 
he would have added substantially to the treasures of 
French prose ; and that the civilisation he exalts was 
never more magnificently defined. 
Tenacity of Alsace. 
But since that, he has given us the admirable narra- 
tive of his Greek journey, which has a chastening virtue 
of its own ; and two moving stories of the lost provinces | 
and in La Collinc inspiree — a masterpiece of psycho, 
logical reconstruction — he has chronicled the fortune 
of a very curious schism. The tenacity of Alsace lives 
in the figure of the soldier whose heart is so French under 
a German uniform, and Colette Baudoche in her pathetic 
loyalty resumes the uncontaminated grace of Metz. A 
respectful sympathy — no more, but no less — for the 
faith of his fathers marks, in the other work, his 
scrupulous treatment of a theme which might so easily 
have become a scandalous pretext. It is evident, of 
course, in the last substantial volume of Maurice Barres, 
which pleads with eloquence and discretion for the 
decaving rural churches of France. 
And now the war has laid upon this great writer and 
great patriot the dutv, which Is his especial privilege, 
of cementing with good words the " holy concord " of 
French minds often bitterly opposed in the long peace, 
of encouraging the sedentary, and of bearing witness 
before the world to the high resolve of the young genera- 
tion which his writings have done so much to fortify. 
n 
