Paris is no more difficult a social medium to navigate in than New York; the French capital has been the battlefield of all French genius; but neither in New York nor in Paris can a young man face the conflict so loaded down with the burden of general ideas and with so scant a moral outfit as possessed by these same young men. The Lorraine band--is it a possible case? No doubt. Nevertheless, if its members had remained at Nancy they might have been shipwrecked for the same reason. Why does not M. Barrès show his cards? The Kingdom on the table! cries Hilda Wangel to her Masterbuilder. Love of the natal soil does not make a complete man; some of the greatest patriots have been the greatest scoundrels. M. Bourget sums up the situation more lucidly than M. Barrès, who is in such a hurry to mould citizens that he omits an essential quality from his programme--God (or character, moral force, if you prefer other terms). Now, when a rationalistic philosopher considers God as an intellectual abstraction, he is not illogical. Scepticism is his stock in trade. But can Maurice Barrès elude the issue? Can he handle the tools of such pious workmen as Loyola, De Sales, and Thomas à Kempis, for the building of his soul, and calmly overlook the inspiration of those masons of men? It is one of the defects of dilettanteism that it furnishes a _point d'appui_ for the liberated spirit to see-saw between free-will and determinism, between the Lord of Hosts and the Lucifer of Negation. Paul Bourget feels this spiritual dissonance. Has he not said that the day may come when Barrès may repeat the phrase of Michelet: _Je ne me peux passer de Dieu!_ Has Maurice Barrès already plodded the same penitential route without indulging in an elliptical flight to a new artificial paradise?
If his moral evolution, so insistently claimed by his disciples, has been of a zigzag nature, if _lacunæ_ abound in his system and paradoxical _vues d'ensemble_ often distract, yet logical evolution there has been--from the maddest, romantic individualism to a well-defined solidarity--and without attenuation of the dignity and utility of the Individual in the scheme of collectivism. The Individual is the Salt of the State. The Individual leavens the mass politic. Numbers will never supplant the value, psychic or economic, of the Individual. Emerson and Matthew Arnold said all this before Barrès. Incomparable artist as is Maurice Barrès, we still must demand of him: "In Vishnu-land what Avatar!"