It is perhaps a little difficult to formulate the intellectual position of Barrès. What he craves, appears to be, not an orthodoxy, but a preserve of Mystery; a sort of private hunting ground for the imagination; the right to lean out of the visible world and draw a deep breath, _hors de la prison des choses claires_. Or, shall we say? in the blank wall of our science and our ignorance, he wants to be free to throw open a window looking on the Infinite? He defends, perhaps, less a faith than a conception of life which is bound up with all our ideas of honour, our notions of sacrifice. I think he is inspired by a sense of ancestral piety rather than by what we usually term religion. Indeed, I imagine that no reader would have more intimately vibrated to _La Grande Pitié des Églises de France_, than a certain old friend of mine, whom Barrès did not always understand, by name Ernest Renan--Renan who wrote (already in 1849):-- ‘N’y aurait il quelque moyen d’être catholique sans croire au catholicisme?’ And who are the followers whom Barrès calls to the rescue against an excess of sectarian zeal--against the village science of the Radical druggist, of Monsieur Homais? Nothing is more interesting, more symptomatic, to those who remember the France of yesterday, when, as a rule, the Intellectuals and the artists were on one side of the hedge, and the priests and the pious on the other. Persecution has certainly done wonders for the Church in France! Those whom Maurice Barrès convokes to defend the belfry and the altar are the younger generation in letters! ‘Je ne doute pas de leurs réponses.... Ces mêmes jeunes troupes désintéressées qui auraient à d’autres moments, combattu, rejeté un catholicisme oppressif ... se rassemblent d’instinct pour faire face à la Barbarie. Je voudrais tracer ici le tableau de la littérature nouvelle que je salue et d’où s’élève, plus ou moins haut, la grande flamme spirituelle que le Café du Commerce ne voit pas....’ ROMAIN ROLLAND