before we left England I went with him to an orchestral concert -the Philharmonic I think it was-to hear a well known pianist whose name I had forgotten until my old friend reminded me of it this evening. The concerto which he played was by Meritritzky; you, probably, have never heard any of his music; even then it was rapidly disappearing from concert programmes. But we were young, and we came away enormously excited about the concerto; my friend said that it was the finest thing he'd ever heard, and he announced his intention of studying it. He would make his début with it, he said. And, as I've already told you, I never heard of him again until he recognized me here tonight. I am quite certain I shouldn't have known him unless he'd spoken to me. . . . I must tell you that he was, even as a young man, a plodding, painstaking sort of chap, totally devoid of originality.

"But, really, his limitations have become an eccentricity. Will you believe it, he has lived in this hotel for twenty-five years? In the summer he goes out to Como and stays in a hotel there. And he's never been anywhere else, all these years. As soon as I mentioned music (I gave up playing in public some years ago, and am now a director of a Gramophone Company), I noticed a queer look in his face. He asked me to come up to his room, as he had something he wished to talk about in private. Well, we went up to his room. It is a good-sized room, but most of it is occupied by a concert-grand-a magnificent instrument. He sat down at once, and without a word of warning began to play that old concerto by Meritritzky! At first I took it for a joke, and after a few minutes of the stuff I interrupted him by remarking that it was wonderful how well he remembered it after so many years. To my amazement he jumped up and rushed at me with an offended look on his face.

"Remember it! Remember it! Why I've been working at it ever since I saw you. I'm going to make my début with it in London next winter. Yes, I've mastered it at last. And I'm going to revive it. No one plays it now; and all the better for me. I'll make my reputation with one concert. And then I'll take it to America. All the agents 'll be after me!'

"Of course I saw at once that it was a case of an obsession.

I did my best to humor him. The poor chap produced a letter from a London concert-agent, stating his terms for arranging the orchestral concert at which the Meritritzky concerto was to be revived. The concert was going to cost three hundred pounds. Looking at the date I found that the letter was written nearly ten years ago. Lord knows what they'd book him for it now, though he said he expects to get most of it back for the sale of the tickets! Apparently the poor chap has been dreaming about his concert for years, waiting until he's satisfied himself that he's got the great work absolutely right. And now he wants me to go and see the London agent and renew the negotiations. When he suggested that I tried to dissuade him by saying that I was afraid the public had lost interest in Meritritzky. I asked him if it mightn't be wiser to play something more modern-if he intended to create a sensation? I couldn't have said anything more unfortunate! He broke out in a furious diatribe against contemporary composers. He seemed to regard everyone later than Tchaikovsky as a personal enemy. The fact is he's got Meritritzky on the brain. And goodness knows what'll be the end of it, if he ever realizes the futility of his ideas. I hadn't even the courage to tell him that I'm catching the midnight train to Paris. I got away by promising to have another talk about it in the morning."

He looked at the clock on the wall; thanked me for allowing him to relieve his feelings, and shook my hand. "I'm afraid it's a hopeless case." he remarked. And went out.

Early next morning I left for Florence.

SIEGFRIED SASSOON.

MAURICE BARRÈS: AUTHOR

AND PATRIOT

BY F. D. CHEYDLEUR

THROUGH the death of Maurice Barrès France lost not only one of her most notable writers but also a patriot whose influence on the destiny of his country in regaining her prestige lost through the Franco-Prussian War and recovered through the late World War cannot be overestimated. A Lorrainer by birth and early education, he often discussed problems peculiar to the provinces, Alsace and Lorraine, the bone of contention between France and Germany for so many centuries, and for this reason his writings have probably had a less wide appeal abroad than those of his distinguished contemporaries, Anatole France, Paul Bourget, and Pierre Loti. But the accounts of his life and work in European and American publications recognized in this man one of the dominant figures who have shaped the main current of thought and action in France during the last generation.

To understand Barrès and his important rôle in French letters and politics during the last quarter century, one must recall the state of mind and the kind of literature prevalent in his country during the two or three decades following the crushing defeat of the French at the hands of the Prussians in 1870. As a result of this humiliating débâcle France was reduced in the European concert of nations from a first-rate Power, which position she had held for ages, to one of the second or third rank. Writings of all kinds reflecting the various social conditions of this period are generally characterized by a fatalistic determinism, pessimism, and skepticism. This trend of thought is best exemplified by Renan and Taine, who were the torch-bearers of the literary youth of their day, and also by the productions of the realistic and naturalistic novelists and dramatists at this time. Although not belonging to this latter group, even Barrès and Bourget in their early works, and Loti and Anatole France in nearly all they

have written, are tinged with this depressing spirit of doubt concerning the future of their country, with a gloomy feeling that the star of France had reached its zenith and was now setting. Ultimately it fell to the lot of Barrès through the transformation of his mind and the pouring out of his convictions concerning the need of a revival of the good French traditions and the necessity of national solidarity to start the tide of thoughts flowing in the opposite direction. It will be to his everlasting glory and praise that he possessed in an eminent degree the instinct, the foresight, the understanding, the courage, and the public leadership to hold up during the most momentous crisis in history the noblest traits of the French people to themselves and to the world, and to point out the way that led to the reëstablishment of his native land in the front rank of nations.

Maurice Barrès was born at Charmes-sur-Moselle, in Lorraine, in 1862; and studied at the lycée of Nancy, and then at the Faculty of Law in the same town. His parents wished to make a magistrate of him, but, though he was a good student, he was more interested in Gautier, Baudelaire, and Flaubert than in Roman law, and early tried his hand at writing. However, he kept at his appointed task for two years. Finally, the calling of letters proving too alluring for him, he abandoned the plan of becoming a lawyer, went to Paris at the age of twenty, having been encouraged by Leconte de Lisle and Anatole France. Then after a setback in his first literary efforts, he bent all his energies on founding two short-lived reviews called the Taches d'Encre and Les Chroniques, and on contributing articles to various other periodicals such as the Revue Contemporaine and the Voltaire. Thus far all of this journalistic experience served only as an apprenticeship for Barrès, but in 1888 he published his Sous l'oeil des Barbares, which had the good fortune of drawing a favorable criticism from the pen of Paul Bourget in the Journal des Débats; the young author had at last won his spurs. Soon after this was followed by Un Homme libre and Le Jardin de Bérénice, which formed his first trilogy bearing the title, Le Culte du Moi. This set of novels is a tantalizing study of the means of preserving one's individuality in a world of Philistines and is marked by curious psychological analyses, touches of dandyism, flashes of wit, and a belief in

the subconscious influences in life that is reminiscent of Bergson's philosophy. According to Charles Maurras, these books marked a new point of departure in French literature by showing a return to a better and more traditional taste than that displayed by the naturalistic and impressionistic school in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. However, there is an undercurrent of skepticism in the Culte du Moi trilogy and in nearly all of Barrès's work up to the end of the last century: this is the same spirit that contaminated so much of the literature in France from 1870 to 1900, and from which it was almost impossible to escape. In his justification of the cult of the Ego, Barrès claimed that inasmuch as the ethical code of France, her religion, and her sense of national unity, had crumbled to pieces, the only thing worth paying attention to, until some certainty was again reached, was the reality of the Self. In contradistinction from others who had concerned themselves with the analysis of the Self, he emphasized the cult of the Self. He answered the attacks of those who decried his Egoism by pointing out that patriotism is nothing but a magnified Egoism and causes the same injustice between nations as personal Egoism does between individuals. The best that we can hope for, he thought, was that personal selfishness and national selfishness could be brought together in a common action. Hence, one's first duty was to attend to one's Ego and to harmonize the Self with the rest of humanity.

Many French, English, and American critics have taken evident pleasure in stressing the antinomy-more apparent than real -between the Barrès of the first period and that of the second, between his individualism and his nationalism; but he himself in replying to his detractors, who accused him of being either insincere or else inconsistent, revealed the core of his natural evolution. He claimed and proved clearly enough that by enlarging the scope of his sensations and analyzing the same, by delving into the depths of his Ego to discover its true essence, and by his persistent efforts to preserve his innermost Self from being absorbed by the omnivorous octopus, the great mass of common people, he had finally reached the bed-rock of all his essential characteristics, namely the French race itself, of which he was merely a member. In showing first his development in the Culte