A dilettante, an amateur--yes! But so was Goethe in his Olympus, so Stendhal in his Cosmopolis. He elected at first to view the spectacle of life, to study it from afar, and by the _tempo_ of his own sensibility. Not the tonic egoism of Thoreau this; it has served its turn nevertheless in France. Afferent, centripetal, and other forbidding terms, have been bestowed upon his system; while for the majority this word egoism has a meaning that implies our most selfish instincts. If, however, interposes Bourget, you consider the word as a formula, then the angle of view is altered; if Barrès had said in one jet, "Nothing is more precious for a man than to guard intact his convictions, his passions, his ideal, his individuality," those who misjudged this courageous apostle of egoism, this fervent prober of the human soul, might have modified their opinions--and would probably have passed him by. It was the enigmatic message, the strained symbolism, of which Barrès delivered himself, that puzzled both critics and public. Robert Schumann once propounded a question concerning the Chopin Scherzo: "How is gravity to clothe itself if jest goes about in dark veils?" Now Barrès, who is far from being a spiritual _blagueur_, suggests this puzzle of Schumann. His employment, without a _nuance_ of mockery, of the devotional machinery so marvellously devised by that captain of souls, Ignatius Loyola, was rather disquieting, notwithstanding its very practical application to the daily needs of the spirit. Ernest Hello, transported by such a spectacle, may not have been far astray when he wrote of the nineteenth century as "having desire without light, curiosity without wisdom, seeking God by strange ways, ways traced by the hands of men; offering rash incense upon the high places to an unknown God, who is the God of darkness." Ernest Renan was evidently aimed at, but the bolt easily wings that metaphysical bird of gay plumage, Maurice Barrès. II