The Imagination of Maurice Barres 9781487578237

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THE IMAGINATION OF MAURICE BARRtS

PHILIP OUSTON

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

PRESS

University of Toronto Romance Series 26

© University of Toronto Press 1974 Reprinted in 2018

Toronto and Buffalo Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-5274-6 ISBN 978-1-4875-7904-3 (paper) LC

79• I 90347

TO MY CANADIAN FRIENDS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is a pleasure to be able to express my thanks to Professor John Cocking, of the University of London King's College, for the guidance and encouragement he has given me at every stage of the planning and preparation of this book, which is a revised version of my doctoral thesis. It has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities Research Council of Canada, using funds provided by the Canada Council, and the Publications Fund of the University of Toronto Press. I am also much indebted to the Court of the University of St Andrews and to the Cassel Educational Trust for assisting my research financially. Chapter Ten, 'An Image of France,' was published in Forum for Modern Language Studiesvr 4 (October 1970), and is reprinted here by permission of the editors of that journal. I am most grateful for all the help and advice I have been privileged to receive from the editors of the University of Toronto Press, and I should like to record the very special debt of gratitude I owe to Professor Frederic Grover, of the University of British Columbia, who encouraged me to submit my manuscript to them for publication. I also wish to thank Monsieur Philippe Barres for the generously attentive and helpful interest he has taken in this study of his father's work, and for his kind permission to publish the three photographs with which it has been illustrated. St Andrews, March 1974

PAO

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments / vii Foreword / xi Chronological Table/ xv PART I:

INTRODUCTION

1 Exemplars / 3 The Limits of the Imagination / 7 3 The Development of Barres's Traditionalism / 15

2

PART 11: IMAGINATION IN BARREs's PHILOSOPHY

4 The Religious Imagination / 81 5 Scientific Imagination / 93 6 The Reconciliation of Science and Religion / 99 PART 111:

IMAGINATION IN BARREs's RHETORIC

Introductory Note on Propaganda and Education / 121 7 Function and Forms of the Persuasive Image / 123 8 The Cult of Heroes / 136 9 The Rhetoric of Commemoration / 160 1 o An Image of France / 1 76 1 1 Imagination in Barres's Theory of Education / 204 PART IV:

I2

Notes / 276

CONCLUSION

Barres's Unity /

241

Bibliography/ 287

Index/ 296

FOREWORD

Many critics have called attention to the predominance in Barres's work of such forms of imaginative consciousness and expression as image, metaphor, symbol, myth. 1 But the sustained effort he made, throughout three bitterly contentious decades of French political history, from the Dreyfus affair to the Treaty of Versailles, to establish and to defend nationalist and traditionalist positions within the 'area of interest' these 'overlapping' forms may be said to delimit,2 has not, I claim, been adequately recognized and explored.3 The purpose of this book is to make good this claim. The word 'imagination' in its title and text has the general and familiar meaning, authorized by the Concise Oxford Dictionary, of 'mental faculty forming images of external objects not present to the senses.' The semantic difficulties of this field of study, springing from the double reference of such words as imagination, image, and imagery to both psychology and literary criticism, are well known.4 Psychologists and students of style may avoid many of them by restricting the meaning of 'image' respectively to either 'an experience which reproduces or copies in part, and with some degree of sensory realism, a previous perceptual experience in the absence of the original sensory stimulation,' 11 or 'all those numerous stylistic figures ... in which an Seep. 276. R. Wellek and A. Warren, Theory of Literature 3rd ed. ( London Peregrine Books 1963) 186 3 Seep. 277 . 4 R. Wellek and A. Warren, Theory of Literature, 186 5 P. McKellar, Imagination and Thinking: A Psychological Analysis 1

2

xii

Foreword

element of comparison or identification of two terms appears or is inspired.' 6 No such restriction is desirable in the present study, however, since it is neither exclusively psychological nor stylistic in the technical sense, but historical, an attempt to ascertain the place and the weight in Barres's thought and art of a 'faculty forming' what he, less exdusively than either psychologists or stylisticians, called images, both when referring to experiences of the mind's eye and when referring to figurative expressions.7 Context and comment will show, as Professors Wellek and Warren recommend they should,8 whether Barres is using the word image for such psychological experiences as perception, recollection, or association, or whether he is using it to denote word-pictures or their synaesthetic correspondance or transposition; or, again, whether the psychological and the figurative senses of the word are blurred, as in the following mature example of his selfconsciously imaginative philosophy of traditionalism, and where the reference of images may be either the experience or the vehicle of an act of secondary perception,9 or both: i.e. either or both (a) the author's mental image of a traditional way of life, (b) pictures, descriptions, or models representing it in forms that can be handed on from one generation to the next: Voila trente ans que l'idee de tradition m'emerveille et m'emeut, et que je subis, comme on adore les