corner. He is superficial in under the perfect the perfect discipline thought as he is generally of Racine and Molière, we are familiar and easy-going in style. left our rich baggage and our His was the style coulant, which glorious banners. Here, again, Baudelaire condemned in the I submit to the national tradiworks of George Sand, and to us tion, but how should I be unat least he does not seem worth grateful to the enchantments a place among the twelve "seri- of my youth?" Or, as M. ous ones of the world. We Charles Maurras puts it, he is say this in no dispraise of "original but traditional, traProfessor Saintsbury. It is his ditional but original." Such highest merit that he invites every great writer must be. discussion. There is in his For none but a savage can book something for all tastes, shake off the gladly-worn fetand it is our only regret that ters of his art, and none who we cannot argue out our case, speaks aloud to future generaacross the hearth-rug, with as tions, or to his own, can be genial and many-sided a critic heard if he do not speak with of life and letters as ever put a voice, or at least an accent, pen to paper. But, alas! he that is his own. Nothing that is not a best-seller" in Bloem- M. Barrès has written could fontein ! 66 In the noise and clatter of the General Election, the sad and sudden death of M. Maurice Barrès passes in England almost unnoticed. It is a matter of regret for all the civilised world. M. Barrès possessed in an eminent degree all the qualities which ensure the artistry of French prose. After the publication of Huit jours chez M. Renan,' his gift of irony could not be held in doubt. His prose, noble and strenuous, comes within the great tradition. "In literature," as he has said himself, "without going back upon our fathers, the romantiques, I ask nothing more than to descend into les forêts barbares, and to join the classic road, provided that, in enrolling ourselves belong to another. The sensibility with which he has envisaged foreign cities-Toledo, Venice, Athens, Sparta-is personal and distinctive. The skill which he has of exciting in others the impressions which he feels himself is unmatched in the literature of to-day. Above all, the political point of view, from which he surveys the world, is fixed on the country. He Moreover, Barrès went early into politics. He was the youngest lieutenant of General Boulanger, and he remained a nationalist all his life long. If he did not allow the pursuit of politics to interrupt the practice of literature, he thought it was his duty to serve his country where best he could serve her in the Chamber. An eloquent and zealous deputy, he took his share of the debates for many a long year. could forget his native Lorraine as little as he could forget the France to which it belonged, to which it has been restored. He believed that France without the two ravished provinces was truncated, maimed. politics," he has written, "I held tenaciously to one thing only the recovery of Metz and Strasbourg. All the rest I subordinated to this principal end. To judge any event, to appreciate any project of the legislature, I ask myself: Will it make us stronger?'. . . I cannot arrive at wishing to be Switzerland or Belgium, which seems to be the practical ideal of our advanced parties, and I continue to regard the quality of Frenchman as a glorious title and an heroic duty.' "In she deserved. Even the churches of France, ill-treated as they have been and are, through the championship of Barrès are better cared for than once they were. He loved the blood and soil of France. He felt that he was part of her glorious past. "A Napoleon himself," he asked, is he then? An innumerable group of events and men. And my grandfather, an obscure soldier in the Grand Army, I know well that he is a constituent part of Napoleon, Emperor and King." "what It is not strange, then, that the panache in which France delights was dear to Maurice Barrès. He cannot withhold his admiration from those young heroes of St Cyr who swore that they would go into battle in full dress, with white gloves and cassoway plumes in their caps-"too French," he calls it, "over full of the innocence and the admirable goodwill of these young men, over full also of disastrous consequences." But France, through it all, remains ever faithful to her own soul. "In every generation "-again it is Barrès who speaks-" she calls to life again Roland, Godefrey de Bouillon, Bayard, Turenne, Marceau, though she knows not their names, and still she intoxicates herself with the sentiments of which she changes nothing but the formulæ." If France has done this, as indeed she did in the Great War, it is due largely to the lofty teach ing of such patriots as Maurice literature. He was a great Barrès, and an amiable Radical in the 'Ere Nouvelle' charged him, after his death, with being one of those responsible for the deaths of one million seven hundred thousand Frenchmen, which proves that the same contemptible breed flourishes on the other as on this side of the Channel. But let it not be thought that because Barrès, like all good citizens, played a gallant part in the politics of his country, he ever made any concessions in the practice of writer always, scrupulous and exact. His famous trilogy, the Romance of the National Energy,' is a political novel in the same sense that Disraeli's trilogy is a political novel. Each of the two men discovered the genre, and made it his own. So it may be said that Barrès is an equal loss to politics and to letters, and France, in paying him the highest honour at his funeral that she can pay to a distinguished son, acquitted herself as best she might of the debt she owed him. Printed in Great Britain by WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE. No. MCCC. FEBRUARY 1924. VOL. CCXV. THE SCHOONER AND THE SOVIET. THUD -SWISH. The little pole-masted schooner staggered and quivered as she took it over the weather-rail, and the high-booted Turkoman helmsman met the seas bracing himself against the kick of the brass-sheathed tiller. All the forenoon the wind had backed and veered to the swinging of the stumpy booms and the rattle of their sheetblocks on the rusty iron hawses. Now it had settled down definitely to blow from the southeastward, raising a choppy and uncomfortable sea. To the southwards, as the leaden clouds lifted here and there, one could descry purple peaks, tipped with gleaming snow, of the seaboard of Gilan and Mazanderan. Elsewhere, to the north, the west, and the east, the grey skies lowered over an empty waste of chill desolate waters, flecked with sea-horses. The subaltern, sitting wedged I. under the binnacle, seemed to feel that the gloomy scene needed an antidote, and set himself out to provide one by humming "Zaftra, Zaftra, Nichevo, Zaftra, Zaftra, Za-aftra, Z-a-a-aftra, Slava Bogu Nichevo." Without a second's hesitation, a raven - tressed Astrakhancapped damsel, who had till then been sitting on the coachhouse cabin roof of the schooner, inhaling a swift succession of slender cigarettes, snatched a loose iron belaying-pin from the mainmast rack beside her, and hove it with quite unfeminine force and accuracy at the subaltern. That officer ducked, and the missile, glancing off the binnacle lid, struck the helmsman a shrewd blow on his snub Mongoloid nose. He uttered a hoarse roar of rage, bellowed in his Turkish patois for one of his mates, shifted his grip on the heaving F tiller-head, whipped a singleedged ivory-hilted pichaq from its green shagreen sheath, and prepared to avenge his outraged proboscis as soon as his relief should arrive. A shout of joy went up from the fore-hatch, where six blueeyed Pathan soldiers of the subaltern's following had been sitting playing their uncivilised poker, which they they termed 66 flush." The guffaw became a gurgle as the poker-party threw itself in a mass of khaki arms and legs on the helmsman's relief, who struggled vainly up through the hatchway. The tall Cossack girl had by now selected a second belayingpin for the benefit of the subaltern, who dodged behind the cover of the foresail, and added to the lady's annoyance by singing "Ya Tatar, Ya Tatar, Ya Nie Russki Chielovek." She, addressing him in icily polite French phrases as "mon capitaine," invited him to come out from behind the sail. When she was really annoyed with him his rank would go up, even to that of voiskoivo Starshina," the Cossack equivalent for a major. As a matter of fact he really was a captain, but concealed the fact, because he said it made him feel so old. The monotony of the after noon had been dispelled. It is a matter for speculation now as to whether the helmsman would have let go the tiller and sacrificed thereby his professional pride, and probably some of the schooner's canvas, in his desire for vengeance. However, the lid of the companion-way in the coach-house roof lifted, to disclose the dignified countenance and burly shoulders of the grizzled Risaldar from Jhelum, who spent much of his time getting the subaltern out of trouble. He sized up the situation swiftly. In his courteous Jhelum way he invited the Cossack damsel's attention to the fact that Private Bloggs had made ready the samovar, which was now a-boiling in the cuddy. Xenia Dimitrievna's anger melted, as it always did at the sight of the Risaldar's benign fatherly countenance. She, addressing him as Babushka, allowed him to assist her down the ladder. The helmsman's wrath was half evaporated already, and melted away altogether, to the benefit of the schooner's course, when the Risaldar patted that worthy on the back and whispered some choice Persian gem into his ear about the arrow of mischance and the hand of loveliness. The Turkoman failed to comprehend, but grinned pleasantly to show that there was now no ill-feeling whatever, and resheathed his weapon. The old officer then worked his way slowly to the fore-hatch, released the second Turkoman sailor from the mass of Pathan soldiery on top of him, and sedately, impartially, and with |