Twentieth Century French Writers: Reviews and Reminiscences

Chapter I

Maurice Barrès is the oldest of all the personages of this little book, which deals emphatically with the young—with the writers of the Twentieth Century, and not with those already famous fifteen years ago. Still, every rule has its exceptions; and it is impossible to imagine the young literature of our days without this man of fifty. Time flies, and never did it seem to me to fly more swiftly than in this moment, when I realise that Barrès must be ranked among the middle-aged. Only the other day, he was that young Deputy, delightfully impertinent, impatient of the ways of his elders, who rose from his bench in the Chamber to propose ‘that the ashes of Jules Simon be transferred to the Panthéon’—Jules Simon being at that moment comfortably seated in the Upper House. May it be long before the ashes of Maurice Barrès are carried to the home of the immortals!

Yet Time has already begun his travesties: the Don Juan of letters, the enfant terrible of politics, is already a sort of Conscript Father, almost a Father of the Church. He, too, in the world of letters, dignifies the Upper House, for he is an Academician. Maurice Barrès is the Chateaubriand of our unfolding age, or, to translate my meaning into English, he is perhaps even more exactly its Disraeli—a Disraeli reversed: an incomparable artist, a brilliant politician, but, in this latter line, something of an amateur. Still we cannot imagine our Barrès stripped of his politics, nor even the literature of our time without the politics of Barrès. His Nationalism, his Regionalism fill and flood the literature of France as fully as Imperialism occupied the English horizons of yesterday. Doubtless we are moving out of the sphere of their influence. But they have nourished the imagination of our younger men.