No more than Maurras was Barres a believer. Religion, for him, inherited from The Land and the Dead, is an integral part of his opportunism; it touched his heart sentimentally, but offered his mind nothing absolute. He sets down in his book Les Amities françaises (that Thibaudet, formed by him, considered one of his best) — he sets down, I said, the principles of the education he gives to his son. What appears most important to him, is to inculcate in the child Philippe the feeling of attachment, of attachment “to the land and our dead.” That is what seems to him “fundamental.” “It is fitting,” he writes, “it is sweet that the same inner music should regulate the steps of those who set out on the path to our tombs, and those who have already gone half the way.” He tries to give to his son “the knowledge of our predestination” and would consider himself fortunate if it could be said later, quoting a line of Heredia:
In spite of himself, he made the hereditary gesture,
excluding all spontaneity, as he again says: “substituting for his instinctive tendency a determined pattern.”
The almost unconscious struggle against this instinct sometimes leads the work of Barres into a most disturbing complexity; but it is the pages on which this “instinctive tendency.” gives itself the freest rein that retain the greatest chance of survival and that can still touch us: the passages on Venice or Toledo, on the Orontes and, in the compact mass of the Déracinés, the refreshing tale of Astiné Aravian; each time, as a matter of fact that our Lorrainese abandons himself, lets himself go without fear of his inconsistencies, forgetting to be what he wants to be, consenting to show himself in his natural state: a man and no longer only a Lorrainese.
For — and the remark has often been made — the greatness, the value, the benefit of our French culture is that it is not, if I may say so, of local interest. The methods of thought, the truths it teaches us, are not particularly Lorrainese and consequently do not risk backfiring against us when adopted by a neighboring people. They are general, human, susceptible of touching the most diverse peoples; and since, in them, every human being can learn to know himself, can recognize and communicate with himself, they work not toward division and opposition, but toward conciliation and understanding.
I hasten to add this, as it appears to me of primordial importance: French literature, taken as a whole, does not tend in one direction alone … (I am thinking of the exquisite remark of Madame de Sévigné, who said of herself: “I am far from being of my own opinion,” thus indicating that she retained over herself and the natural bent of her sensibility, a critical judgment without complacency.) French thought at every period of its development, of its history, presents to our attention a dialogue, a pathetic and unending dialogue, a dialogue worthy as any to occupy (for on listening to it, one takes part in it) both our minds and our hearts — and I consider that a young mind concerned about our culture and eager to let itself be instructed by it, I consider that that mind would be deflected, if it heeded, or if it were allowed to hear, only one of the two voices of the dialogue — a dialogue not at all between a political right and left, but, much deeper and more vital, between secular tradition, the submission to recognized authority, and free thinking, the spirit of doubt, self-examination that works toward a slow and progressive emancipation of the individual. We already see it outlined in the struggle between Abélard and the Church, — the latter, needless to say, always triumphs, but on withdrawing and reforming its positions each time on this side of its first lines. The dialogue is taken up again with Pascal against Montaigne. There is no exchange of remarks between them, since Montaigne is dead when Pascal begins to speak; yet it is to him he addresses himself — and not only in the illustrious conversation with Monsieur de Sacy. It is to Montaigne’s Essays that the book of Pensées1 is opposed, and on which, it could be said, he bases everything. “The foolish idea he had of depicting himself,” he said of Montaigne, without foreseeing that the passages in the Pensées where Pascal too depicts himself and lets himself go, with his anguish and his doubt, touch us to-day more than the statement of his dogmatics. In the same way, what we admire in Bossuet is not the antiquated theologian, it is the perfect art of his admirable language, which makes him one of the magnificent writers of our literature: without that art he would scarcely be read to-day. It is due to that form, which he himself considered impious, that he survives.
Dialogue recommenced ceaselessly across the ages and more or less dissembled on the side of free-thinking, by wisdom, that “wisdom of the serpent,” as the Holy Scriptures say, for the tempting and liberating demon of the mind prefers to speak in a whisper; he insinuates, while the believer proclaims, — and Descartes takes as his motto larvatus prodeo, “I advance with a mask on,”—or better said, it is under a mask that I advance.
And sometimes one of the voices wins: in the eighteenth century, it was that of free-thinking, masked no longer. It won to the point of bringing about, as a necessary result, a distressing drying up of poetic enthusiasm. But the balance of the dialogue is never disturbed for long, in France. With Chateaubriand and Lamartine, the religious sentiment, a source of lyricism, wells up magnificently. It is the great Romantic flood. And, if Michelet and Hugo revolt against the Church and the churches, it is still with a profound religious feeling.
Rolling from one bank to the other, the vessel of French culture progresses and pursues its hazardous route, fluctuat nec mergitur—it sails on and will never be sunk. It would risk being so, it would be, on the day one of the two interlocutors of the dialogue should be definitely victorious over the other and reduce him to silence, on the day when the ship should upset or roll over on one side.
In our day, we watch a prodigious unfolding of Catholic writers: after Huysmans and Léon Bloy, Jammes, Péguy, Claudel, Mauriac, Gabriel Marcel, Bernanos, Maritain … but without speaking of a Proust or a Suarès, the solid and unwavering Paul Valéry would suffice to balance them. Never was the spirit of criticism exercised in a more masterly way on the most diverse problems, and never had it been able to prove itself more creative. Now I recall Oscar Wilde’s remark: “Imagination imitates; it is the spirit of criticism that creates,” a remark that Baudelaire could have made and that it would profit every artist to meditate upon. (It is not a question, needless to say, of criticizing others, but oneself.) For among the multitudinous phantasms that the imagination offers us in disorderly fashion, the critical mind must choose — every design implies a choice— and it is a school of design that I admire especially in France.
When, with a few rare friends about me, we founded the Nouvelle Revue Française, which, later, was to assume an unhoped for importance, people at first were determined to see in it the formation of a little “clique” and, as happens all too often: a “mutual admiration society.” Now it was exactly the contrary: “a Society of Criticism,” it could have been called — and of mutual criticism. That satisfaction with oneself toward which, when one is young and a man of letters, one is generally only too easily inclined, we feared to the degree that we had promised, from the very beginning, never to speak of each other in the magazine. But not a reader noticed that discretion; for silences are little remarked — and yet they are often very significant and important.