soul of Jehan Rictus-at once savage and pitiful, sweet, resigned, ironic and if it were worth while -anarchic. He writes in argot; it is the equivalent of the speech common in the Bowery. It adds a strange realism to his verse-his verses, like his beggars, go in the rags and tatters of modernity. Argot, however, is very transitory. The slang of to-day is dead to-morrow. I must confess that I do not think "Le Revenant" would lose much either in power or actuality were it dressed in the garment of proper French. And yet I do not know. Perhaps the plaint of these poor wretches, who seek futilely the Christ, gains a new immensitypoignancy when it is spoken in their own tongue. A real poet, this Jehan Rictus. And it is real life, he sings-life pitiably real and quotidian.

a new

Maurice Barrès and Egoism

"I

FIND no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones," said Walt Whitman; and this casual boast Maurice Barrès has erected into a theory of life. It is an inevitable consequence that he should take the dilettantesque view of life. Men and things are merely the toys with which his bored Ego amuses itself; in breaking a moral canon or a woman's heart he finds the child's pleasure in destroying a mechanical doll. One of M. Barrès' disciples he has disciples! - has written this significant sentence: "Since in this irreparable flight of things the point and moment of our consciousness remain our only good, we must exalt it and exasperate its intensity." Surely here there is nothing new. That smug dilettante, Horace, chirped his carpe diem and drank himself to sleep. The voice of Omar Kháyyám has come gallantly down the years with its praise of "this day's moment." The dilettantism of M. Barrès, however, is a variant of the old theory; he has made of it a principle of action-as Byron tried to live his poetry. He has sent his soul abroad on adventurous missions. He has played his part in the comedies of the hour. Wherever there were stir and

bustle of thought he has taken his stand—loitered there, amiable and alert, amusing his Ego. He has played with politics and trifled with conspiracy. No man of his years in France no one in our century, unless it be Disraeli- has enjoyed more of the melodramatic excitements of life and letters. In 1888 he was twenty-seven years old, a smart little bourgeois dandy; he had written "Taches d'Encre," perhaps, but little else. In one of the minor reviews he had published an article, "La Jeunesse Contemporaine et le Général Boulanger." Sometning like this: "To us, traversing a mystic and unsatisfying youth that youth in which the souls of this generation suffer and die-there opens at last a field of action. Blessed be the hour, etc. The consoler and saviour appears, etc. Palms, victory and Boulanger, etc."

It all seems very ridiculous now. It was ridiculous then. But on the strength of this article — and thanks to the fortunate coalition of hopeful priests and despairing workingmen this dandy of

letters found himself a member of the House. M. le député — there was nothing ridiculous in that; indeed success is never ridiculous; when it is the result of a single magazine article it is in the way of being sublime. (Beside this, Stéphane Mallarmé with his donkey-cart- the price of one dark symbol — pales into insignificance.) There was an element of opera-bouffe in M. Barrès' success that

pricked up European curiosity. At St. Petersburg, as at Naples, at Edinburgh, as at Berlin, the young acclaimed him; he was belabored and defended; he was a Cause! Think, then, my brothers, what a rare adventure was this for the Ego of our little bourgeois dandy. He had his disciples; Hermann Bahr, Paul Remer, absurd Germans, and the sombre Neapolitan, Vittoria Pica. Nordau, with his strange Jewish instinct for decay, crept humbly to his feet, crying, "I, too, have a beautiful Ego." Ironic, elegant, charmed, alert, the little dandy looked down from his pedestal - he was amusing his soul. And he wrote, wrote, wrote; strange essays that were psychological confessions; fissiparous novels that were essays; and he travelled -in Italy and Spain he made the stations of his soul. The book "Of Blood, of Pleasure and of Death," it was his journey to the island in Lough Derg. Life in all its manifestations- the tumult of politics, the dolor of women, the fritinancy of the drawing-room was his "divine amusement." Once he used Maeterlinck's figure of a hot-house -he was forcing his soul. Now and then he pulled it up by the roots to see how it was growing. "I do things," he said, "merely to study the effect they will have upon Me."

At one time it was the mode to trace M. Barrès' literary ancestry through Renan and Stendhal back to Voltaire. There is truth enough in the com