Maurice Barrès: "How the Catholic Critic Conceives of the Role of Artist"

 Introduction

Maurice Barrès (1862-1923) was a novelist, traveloguist, and politician.  After the initial portion of his life—in which he wrote a novel trilogy entitled The Cult of I and ran for office as a" national socialist" (long before the Nazis adopted the name)—he became a strongly anti-German nationalist.  His nationalism involved both strong ties to one's local land (his homeland of Lorraine was a polestar for his politics and writing) and Catholicism as part of the national French character (hence his push to have Joan of Arc declared patron of France and to be given a national patriotic feast).  

Barrès' last prehumous novel was A Garden on the Orontes (1922).  The novel told the story of a Crusader who renounces the chance to recapture Jerusalem in order to spend his life with a Saracen princess with whom he had fallen in love.  Somewhat surprisingly, the novel stirred up a virulent reaction from some Catholics, who claimed the novel was detrimental to public religious morals.  Chief among these critics was José Vincent, editor and literary critic for the Catholic newspaper La Croix.  In response to criticism from Vincent and others, Barrès penned the following essay, published in the newspaper L'Echo de Paris on August 16, 1922.  (The same newspaper had previously run Barrès' daily articles, often derided as pro-government propaganda, during World War I.)

 

How the Catholic Critic Conceives of the Role of Artist

Maurice Barrès

Here is a great literary problem, which has never been resolved, as far as I know, by an accord of interested parties, and which is everywhere posed, with force, by artists and by critics.

Since it preoccupies me, I submit it to those who can debate it and settle it. It is a difficult problem, but hiding it is of no benefit. It exists, and it creates a malaise that, on my part, I feel vividly.

What is art in the eyes of Catholic doctrinaires, and what liberties do they accord it?

Assuredly, the question has been posed many times. In a multitude of pages, I suppose that it has been answered. But how clearly? I am interested because of my personal case, and it is in regards to a book that I just published that I see us in the presence of demands whose principle I approve and whose applications I badly decipher.

In a serious, meditated, peaceable article, the literary critic of the journal La Croix, M. José Vincent, reproves the Garden on the Orontes. The blames are expressed with measure, and even with a base of entirely natural sympathy among people who love and defend so many things in common. But, in the end, a kind of malfeasance was denounced in this little book, and this is what astonishes me, for I thought I preserved it from all baseness. I asked the critic for his reason, not so that I can claim to universal applause, but because here a high question of intelligence is at play. He gave them to me in private, and with a very strong feeling. I believe he will excuse me for mentioning this. It is, I repeat, a beautiful problem of general interest!

I shorten M. José Vincent’s response, because it is all mixed up with the friendliest courtesies. In substance, if I understand it aright, the editor of La Croix told me: “My article, ah, well! It’s the rational manifestation of a state of spirit that is very new in Catholic criticism, which now imposes the obligation to not completely yield to the magic of a superior art. Twenty or twenty-five years ago, the lettered Christian, the Christian critic, imagined themselves in good faith by not pushing the logic of their credo to the end, so that morality, religion, and art figured as so many distinct domains, separated by tightly-closed walls. They let their spirit be enchanted by the pagan splendors of the pure Parnassus, by the crudity of the realists of Médan,¹ by the beautiful juggling of the dilettantes. Personally, while all immersed in never introducing into my conduct free principles one could disengage from them, I was delighted to read the preface, gloomily memorable at heart, of Mademoiselle de Maupin.² Having taken sides, I ignored Leconte de Lisle’s anticlericalism, and I was totally taken in by the cold and great artist. Zola’s talent, enormous in every regard, had concealed his baseness from me… At present, we want to be consistent, logical, resolute, intransigent Catholics.”

Thus M. José Vincent says, or close to it, and I myself do not listen to him with bad humor and in a spirit of contradiction. Far from it. We are in accord on the principle. There is no literature without soul; there is no partition between literature and the higher life of thought; a powerful writer, without even knowing it, collaborates in some doctrine, contributes to the establishment of a conception of life, does the work of a propagandist: consequently, each has the right to demand an account from him of the employment he has made of his talent and his influence.

For my part, the conception that I make of life is the traditional French and Catholic idea. A life à la française, solidly installed on the lands that our fathers cleared and loved, and ready to revise and sharpen all that the four winds of the spirit bring us.

I accept, I solicit being judged for this traditional French point of view. Often (I could say daily) my manners of feeling and thinking have earned me torrents of injuries from the anti-France press. I am strongly satisfied by this, I have a right to it, it is my duty. But the reprobation (even attenuated) of a Catholic critic, and speaking like this, is it just? This is the problem.

Have I ill-kept the teaching that I believe I received, as a little lad, in the college of priests where I first spent four years, before going to lycée? In the one and the other establishment, they prayed and commanded me to admire the plaints of Dido and those of Calypso, the malices of the nymph Eucharis, the tenderness and crimes of the heroines of Racine, and their loves based in hate. If I had not done it, I would have been deprived of Thursday recess. And now, what else do I do when I place Oriante and Isabelle in the train of those charming and lying shades?

We hope that, from the midst of our circles, there would arise artists to give us the—as perfect as possible—type of moral grandeur, as the Greeks, in the course of the centuries, came to constitute the most beautiful image of the masculine body and the feminine body. After physical perfection, may perfection of the soul be rendered sensible to us! May there come a great Christian who can make his faith pass into his art! We call upon him, with you, but, while waiting, let us work according to the idea that is in us and which, all the same, does not lack spirituality. Permit us, without ignoring us, to represent what lives, beats, goes crazy, and calculates, and, across all the layers stacked with passion, nihilism, and passion again, which form our deep being, let us let burning and icy cries ring out, whose laicism does not differ so strongly from sacred songs.

To study and stir the passions, is this an evil in itself, and an action without efficacy? Descartes, if I have well understood his Treatise on the Passions, believed, hard as iron, that the passions are forces with which one can produce great good deeds. Are we going to ignore them, fear them with hate, and refuse to be educated about them? For me, the great artist tends to better what Nature suggests to us, which is the worst mixed with the excellent, and belles lettres accomplished, in great part, the work of civilization, being defined in the terms that Baudelaire admirably proposed: “Civilization,” he said, “is not in gas, nor in vapor, nor in turntables. It is in the diminution of the traces of original sin.”³

I am in accord with the Catholic critic: morality is Christian morality. Is that to say that the artist ought to know and paint only edifying situations? Do there not exist inflamed, wounded, and sorrowful souls? Do you want to throw away the immense world of emotions, of passions of the soul, and of affections of the heart? Do you deny that the creative frisson is born from a state of superabundance, that which reason, furthermore, must be busy with controlling? I well understand that you want to reintegrate morality into art, into literature, into the novel, and to diminish, repulse, mark down the writers who speak against it while throwing it away. Ah, well! Let us pass on to the positive, let us leave the negative part of the problem to the side: what works are justified, in your eyes? How will you replace what we, the artists, your friends, your neighbors, your free brothers, produce, and what, according to M. José Vincent, will you be after throwing them away?

Humanity has need of diversions and ennoblings. You know it well, you who make appeal to so much music in which there are accents worse (I want to say “more beautiful”) than mine. When you have diminished us in the spirit of those who listen to you, are you assured that better attracts will hold them? I hear Mozart and Glück in the churches; I admire the canvas of Delacroix; why proscribe a draft of a poem in which the ardent desire for the infinite is completed by a need for order and appeasement? Ah! I am very firm in this argument, even when I speak to you of a little book, light, rapid, all heartbreaking through high desires, related, through a far-off but certain cousinage, to the works that form your adornment. So, to end, I return to this, I redouble it and tell you: it is in a Catholic college that priests, first, placed the Télémaque of Fénelon,⁴ the tragedies of Racine, and the choice pages of Chateaubriand in my hands. What do you want me to become? Had they, my first educators, been more severe, I would still have been troubled by reading Massillon’s Petit Carême.⁵ There is so much malice in beautiful things, or in readers!

Must one, then, condemn art? Ah! A blasphemy, whose acceptance would enshadow, decrown, envile life. It is not Rome nor the Church of France whom one hears casting forth this baleful anathema, which sometimes seems like the thought of a Rousseau or of a Tolstoy.⁶ But, what then? What should we understand, and what is the way that the Catholic critic shows us? Where are, in his judgment, the great exemplary models?

 

1Home of Émile Zola (1840-1902), the great naturalist novelist; he frequently entertained other naturalist writers there.

2An 1835 novel by Théophile Gautier (1811-1872), about a real-life French opera singer, Julie d’Aubigny (1670-1707). Gautier’s preface to the work is well-known for its rejection of moral or utilitarian visions of literature and for its preaching of art for art’s sake.

3See Charles Baudelaire, Mon Cœur Mis a Nu §LIX, in Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètesi, ed. Y.-G. Le Dantec (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1954), 1224. The same section goes on to say, “Nomadic peoples, shepherds, hunters, farmers, and even cannibals, all can be superior, through energy, through personal dignity, to our Western races. / These, perhaps, will be destroyed. / Theocracy and communism.” We might also note a line from Castagnary that Baudelaire quotes in §XXXVII of the same work: “Art is a civilizing agent” (ibid., 1218).

4François Fénelon (1651-1715) was a Sulpician priest, Archbishop of Cambrai, theologian, and author. In theology, he is best-known for his embroilment in the Quietist controversy; in general culture, he is best-known for his didactic novel The Adventures of Telemachus, Son of Ulysses (1699).

5Jean-Baptiste Massillon (1663-1742) was Bishop of Clermont, and a member of Pierre de Bérulle’s Oratory of Jesus. He had a reputation as a great preacher, and his most popular work was a series of sermons grouped under the title of Little Lent (Petit Carême).  Massillon sat in Chair #4 in the Académie française, the same chair Barrès later occupied.

6In his later years, Tolstoy came to reject all art that was not explicitly and didactically Christian, in his conception: thus he even rejected all of the great literature he had previously written.  See particularly his 1897 book What Is Art?

Translation ©2024 Brandon P. Otto.  Licensed via CC BY-NC.  Feel free to redistribute non-commercially, as long as credit is given to the translator.