Barrès imbibed from the Parnassian poetic group his artistic remoteness. His ivory tower is a borrowed phrase made by Sainte-Beuve about De Vigny. But his mercurial soul could not be imprisoned long by frigid theories of impeccable art--of art for art's sake. _My soul!_ that alone is worth studying, cried Maurice. John Henry Newman said the same in a different and more modest dialectic. The voice of the French youth is shriller, it is sometimes in falsetto; yet there is no denying its fundamental sincerity of pitch. And he has the trick of light verbal fence beloved of his race. He is the comedian among moralists. His is neither the frozen eclecticism of Victor Cousin, nor the rigid determinism of Taine. Yet he is a partial descendant of the Renan he flouts, and of Taine--above all, of Stendhal and Voltaire. In his early days if one had christened him _Mlle. Stendhal_, there would have been less to retract. Plus a delicious style, he is a masked, slightly feminine variation of the great mystifier who wrote La Chartreuse de Parme, leaving out the Chartreuse. At times the preoccupation of Barrès with the moral law approaches the borderland of the abnormal. Like Jules Laforgue, his intelligence and his sensibility are closely wedded. He is a sentimental ironist with a taste for self-mockery, a Heine-like humour. He had a sense of humour, even when he wore the _panache_ of General Boulanger, and opposed the Dreyfus proceedings. It may rescue from the critical executioner who follows in the footsteps of all thinkers, many of his pages.