All this, and much more, Barrès sang in his fluid, swift, and supple prose, without a vestige of the dogmatic. He did not write either to prove or to convince, only to describe his interior life. He did not believe, neither did he despair. There is a spiritual malice in his egoism that removes it far from the windy cosmos of Walt Whitman or the vitriolic vanity of D'Annunzio. In his fugue-like flights down the corridor of his metaphysics, he never neglects to drop some poetic rose, some precious pearl of sentiment. His little book, true spiritual memoirs, aroused both wrath and laughter. The wits set to work. He was called a dandy of psychology, nicknamed _Mlle. Renan_, pronounced a psychical harlequin, a masquerader of the emotions; he was told that, like Chateaubriand, he wore his heart in a sling. Anatole France, while recognising the eloquent art of this young man, spoke of the "perverse idealist" which is Maurice Barrès. His philosophy was pronounced a perverted pyrrhonism, the quintessence of self-worship. A _Vita Nuova_ of egoism had been born. But the dandy did not falter. He has said that one never conquers the intellectual suffrages of those who precede us in life; he made his appeal to young France. And what was the balm in Gilead offered by this new doctor of metaphysics? None but a Frenchman at the end of the last century could have conceived the Barrèsian plan of soul-saving. In Baudelaire, Barbey d'Aurevilly, and Villiers de l'Isle Adam, the union of Roman Catholic mysticism and blasphemy has proved to many a stumbling-stone. These poets were believers, yet Manicheans; they worshipped at two shrines; evil was their greater good. Barrès plucked several leaves from their breviaries. He proposed to school his soul by a rigid adherence to the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola. With the mechanism of this Catholic moralist he would train his Ego, cure it of its spiritual dryness--that malady so feared by St. Theresa--and arouse it from its apathy. He would deliver us from a Renan-ridden school. This scholastic fervour urged Barrès to reinstate man in the centre of the universe, a position from which he had been routed by science. It was a pious, mediæval idea. He did not, however, assert the bankruptcy of science, but the bankruptcy of pessimism. His book is metaphysical autobiography, a Gallic transposition of Goethe's Wahrheit und Dichtung. We may now see that his concentrated egoism had definite aims and was not the conceit of a callow Romantic.