_Second: They bring their political passions into their activities as ‘clerks’._ The ‘clerks’ have not been content simply to adopt political passions, if by this one means that they have made a place for these passions side by side with the activities they are bound to carry on as ‘clerks’. They have introduced these passions into those activities. They permit, they desire them to be mingled with their work as artists, as men of learning, as philosophers, to colour the essence of their work and to mark all its productions. And indeed never were there so many political works among those which ought to be the mirror of the disinterested intelligence. You may refuse to be surprised by this in the case of poetry. We must not ask the poets to separate their works from their passions. The latter are the substance of the former, and the only question to ask is whether they write poems to express their passions or whether they hunt for passions in order to write poems. In either case one does not see why they should exclude national passion or the spirit of party from their vibrant material. Our political poets, who are not numerous however, have only followed the example of Virgil, Claudian, Lucan, Dante, d’Aubigné, Ronsard, and Hugo. Yet we cannot deny that political passion, as it is expressed by Claudel or d’Annunzio, a conscious and organized passion _lacking all simplicity_, coldly scornful of its adversary, a passion which in the second of these poets displays itself as so precisely political, so cunningly adapted to the profound cupidity of his compatriots and the exact point of weakness in the foreigner--we cannot deny, I say, that this political passion is something different from the eloquent generalities of the ‘Tragiques of the Année Terrible.’ A work like _La Nave_, with its national plan as exact and practical as that of a Bismarck, wherein the lyric gift is used to extol this practical character, seems to me something new in the history of poetry, even of political poetry. The result of this new departure on the minds of laymen may be judged by the present state of mind of the Italian people.[48] But in our day the most remarkable example of the poets’ applying their art to the service of political passions is that literary form which may be called ‘lyrical philosophy’, the most brilliant symbol of which is the work of Barrès. It begins by taking as its centres of vibration certain truly philosophical states of mind (such as pantheism, a loftily sceptical intellectualism) and then entirely devotes itself to serving racial passion and national feeling. Here the action of the lyric spirit is doubled by the prestige of the spirit of abstract thought (Barrès admirably caught the appearance of that spirit--he stole the tool, a philosopher has said of him), and in France as elsewhere the ‘clerks’ have thereby stimulated political passions among the laymen, at least in that very important section of them who read and believe they think.