What is the nature of this type? Let us answer this question in the author’s own words. The hero of the novels is ‘somewhat literary, proud, fastidious and désarmé’ (Examen, p. 11); ‘a young bourgeois grown pale, and starving for all pleasures’ (p. 26); ‘discouraged by contact with men’ (p. 34); he is one of those ‘who find themselves in a sad state in the midst of the order of the world ... who feel themselves weak in facing life’ (p. 45). Can one imagine a more complete description of the degenerate incapable of adaptation, badly equipped for the struggle for existence, and for this reason hating and fearing the world and men, but shaken at the same time by morbid desires?
This poor shattered creature, who was necessarily rendered an ego-maniac by the weakness of will in his imperfect brain, and the perpetual turmoil of his unhealthy organs, raises his infirmities to the dignity of a system which he proudly proclaims. ‘Let us keep to our only reality, to our “I”’ (p. 18). ‘There is only one thing which we know and which really exists.... This sole tangible reality, it is the “I,” and the universe is only a fresco which it makes beautiful or ugly. Let us keep to our “I.” Let us protect it against strangers, against Barbarians’ (p. 45).
What does he mean by Barbarians? These are the ‘beings who possess a dream of life opposed to that which he (the hero of one of his books) forms of it. If they happen to be, moreover, highly cultured, they are strangers and adversaries for him.’ A young man ‘obliged by circumstances to meet persons who are not of his patrie psychique’ experiences ‘a shock.’ ‘Ah! what matters to me the quality of a soul which contradicts some sensibility? I hate these strangers who impede, or turn aside the development of such a delicate hesitating and self-searching “I,” these Barbarians through whom more than one impressionable young man will both fail in his career and not find his joy of living’ (p. 23). ‘Soldiers, magistrates, moralists, teachers,’ these are the Barbarians who place obstacles in the way of the development of the “I”’ (p. 43). In one word, the ‘I’ who cannot take his bearings in the social order regards all the representatives and defenders of that order as his enemies. What he would like would be ‘to give himself up without resistance to the force of his instincts’ (p. 25), to distinguish ‘where lie his sincere curiosity, the direction of his instinct, and his truth’ (p. 47). This idea of setting instinct, passion and the unconscious life free from the superintendence of reason, judgment and consciousness recurs hundreds of times in the author’s novels. ‘Taste takes the place of morality’ (L’Ennemi des Lois, p. 3). ‘As a man, and a free man, may I accomplish my destiny, respect and favour my interior impulsion, without taking counsel of anything outside me’ (p. 22). ‘Society enclosed by a line of demarcation! You offer slavery to whoever does not conform to the definitions of the beautiful and the good adopted by the majority. In the name of humanity, as formerly in the name of God and the City, what crimes are devised against the individual!’ (p. 200). ‘The inclinations of man ought not to be forced, but the social system must be adapted to them’ (p. 97). (It would be very much more simple to adapt the inclinations of a single man to the social system which is a law to millions of men, but this does not seem to suggest itself to our philosopher!)
It is absolutely logical that M. Barrès, after having shown us in his three first novels or idéologies the development of his ‘cultivator of the moi,’ should make the latter become an anarchist and an ennemi des lois. But he feels himself that the objection will be justly raised, that society cannot exist without a law and an order of some sort, and he seeks to forestall this objection by asserting that everyone knows how to behave himself, that instinct is good and infallible: ‘Do you not feel,’ he says (p. 177), ‘that our instinct has profited by the long apprenticeship of our race amid codes and religions?’ He admits then that ‘codes and religions’ have their use and necessity, but only at a primitive period of human history. When the instincts were still wild, bad and unreasonable, they required the discipline of the law. But now they are so perfect that this guide and master is no longer necessary to them. But there are still criminals. What is to be done with them? ‘By stifling them with kisses and providing for their wants they would be prevented from doing any harm.’ I should like to see M. Barrès obliged to use his method of defence against a night attack of garrotters!
To allow one’s self to be carried away by instincts is, in other words, to make unconscious life the master of consciousness, to subordinate the highest nervous centres to the inferior centres. But all progress rests on this, that the highest centres assume more and more authority over the entire organism, that judgment and will control and direct ever more strictly the instincts and passions, that consciousness encroaches ever further on the domain of the unconscious, and continually annexes new portions of the latter. Of course, instinct expresses a directly felt need, the satisfaction of which procures a direct pleasure. But this need is often that of a single organ, and its satisfaction, however agreeable to the organ which demands it, may be pernicious, and even fatal, to the total organism. Then there are anti-social instincts, the gratification of which is not directly injurious to the organism itself, it is true, but makes life in common with the race difficult or impossible, worsening consequently its vital conditions, and preparing its ruin indirectly. Judgment alone is fitted to oppose these instincts by the representation of the needs of the collective organism and of the race, and the will has the task of ensuring the victory over suicidal instinct to the rational representation. Judgment may be deceived, for it is the result of the work of a highly differentiated and delicate instrument, which, like all fine and complicated machinery, gets out of order more easily than a simpler and rougher tool. Instinct, the inherited and organized experience of the race, is as a rule more sure and reliable. This must certainly be admitted. But what harm is done if judgment does make a mistake for once in the opposition which it offers to instinct? The organism is, as a rule, only deprived of a momentary feeling of pleasure; it suffers therefore at most a negative loss; the will, on the other hand, will have made an effort, and acquired strength by the exercise, and this is for the organism a positive gain, which nearly always at least balances those negative losses.
And then all these considerations take for granted the perfect health of the organism, for in such a one only does the unconscious work as normally as consciousness. But we have seen above that the unconscious itself is subject to disease; it may be stupid, obtuse and mad, like consciousness; it then ceases completely to be dependable; then the instincts are as worthless guides as are the blind or drunken; then the organism, if it gives itself up to them, must stagger to ruin and death. The only thing which can sometimes save it in this case is the constant, anxious, tense vigilance of the judgment, and as the latter is never capable, by its own resources, of resisting a strong flood of revolted and riotous instincts, it must demand reinforcements from the judgment of the race, i.e., from some law, from some recognised morality.
Such is the foolish aberration of the ‘cultivators of the “I.”’ They fall into the same errors as the shallow psychologists of the eighteenth century, who only recognised reason; they only see one portion of man’s mental life, i.e., his unconscious life; they wish to receive their law only from instinct, but wholly neglect to notice that instinct may become degenerate, diseased, exhausted, and thereby be rendered as useless for legislative purposes as a raving lunatic or an idiot.
Besides, M. Barrès contradicts his own theories at every step. While he pretends to believe that instincts are always good, he depicts many of his heroines, with the most tender expressions of admiration, as veritable moral monsters. The ‘little princess’ in L’Ennemi des Lois is a feminine Des Esseintes: she boasts of having been, as a child, ‘the scourge of the house’ (p. 146). She looks upon her parents as her ‘enemies’ (p. 149). She loves children ‘less than dogs’ (p. 284). Naturally, she gives herself at once to every man that strikes her eye, for, otherwise, where would be the use of being a ‘cultivator of the “Ego,”’ and an adept at the law of instinct? Such are the good beings of M. Barrès, who no longer need laws, because they have ‘profited by the long apprenticeship of our race.’
Yet a few more traits to complete the mental portrait of this Decadent. He makes his ‘little princess’ relate: ‘When I was twelve years old, I loved, as soon as I was alone in the country, to take off my shoes and stockings and plunge my bare feet into warm mud. I passed hours in this way, and that gave me a thrill of pleasure through all my body.’ M. Barrès resembles his heroine; he ‘experiences a thrill of pleasure through all his body’ when he ‘plunges himself into warm mud.’
‘There is not a detail in the biography of Berenice which is not shocking’—thus begins the third chapter of the Jardin de Bérénice. ‘I, however, retain of it none but very delicate sensations.’ This Berenice was a dancer at the Eden Theatre in Paris, whom her mother and elder sister had sold as a little child to some old criminals, and whom a lover took away later from the prostitution which had already stained her infancy. This lover dies and leaves her a considerable fortune. The hero of the novel, who had known her as a gutter-child, meets her at Arles, where he presents himself as the Boulangist candidate for the Chamber, and he resumes his ancient relations with her. What charms him most in their intercourse, and increases his pleasure in the highest degree, is the idea of the intense love she felt for her dead lover, and the abandonment with which she had reposed in his arms. ‘My Berenice, who still bears on her pale lips and against her dazzling teeth the kisses of M. de Transe [the lover in question].... The young man who is no more has left her as much passion as can be contained in a woman’s heart’ (p. 138). The feeling which M. Barrès seeks to crown with the help of inflated, grandiloquent expressions is simply the well-known excitement that hoary sinners feel at the sight of the erotic exploits of others. All those who are conversant with Parisian life know what is meant in Paris by a voyeur, or pryer. M. Barrès reveals himself here as a metaphysical voyeur. And yet he would wish to make us believe that his little street-walker, whose dirty adventures he describes with the warmth of love and the enthusiasm of a dilettante, is in reality a symbol; it is only as a Symbolist that he claims to have formed her. ‘A young woman is seen about a young man. Is it not rather the history of a soul with its two elements, female and male?’ Or is it by the side of the ‘I’ which guards itself, wishes to know and establish itself, also the imagination in a young and sensitive person, for the taste pleasure and for vagabondage?[300] One may well ask him, where is the ‘symbolism’ in the biographical details of Petite Secousse, the name that he gives to his ‘symbol.’