De Beers and Kaffir shares rather than go direct to the market in Johannesburg, with which London is in constant communication. The rubber planters of Ceylon and the Middle East, when they want a ready market for the shares in their estates, send the rupee companies to London to be converted into sterling, and arrange for a market to be made from that centre.

It would, however, be as easy to magnify the London Stock Exchange as it would be to wax pessimistic over the parlous state into which its business dwindles when, in the words of the Stock Exchange member, there is nothing doing. He comes, that member, into a proud heritage which seems to him the apex of his ambition until he has spent a few years on the floor of the House, when his voice will most probably swell the chorus of his fellows in wishing that there were no such place. Occasionally there are alarms of fire in Throgmorton Street; and hundreds of men crowd to the spot whence the rumour rises. In nine cases out of ten the reply to the eager enquiry, 'Is the House on fire?' is the gloomy answer, 'No such luck.' But this, it may be, is only a part of the gentle cynicism for which the Stock Exchange is noted, and which finds its expression in a caustic wit that is illustrated every day in the newspapers. From the very nature of the business, it is manifest that the member of the Stock Exchange must come into contact with many hundreds of financial propositions which tend to shake his faith in the innate rectitude of human integrity. He is in the midst of a business where it is considered essential that one man should get a little bit the better of the other man; and the most popular stories in the Stock Exchange are those which illuminate this touching trait in the profession. One morning a broker strode into the House before the market had opened, and asked a dealer to make him a price in a large quantity of North Western stock. The dealer was reluctant to transact business so early, and asked the reason for such apparent haste on the part of the broker. It is nothing, my dear fellow,' replied the other. Eventually, however, he made a price and the broker sold the stock. Booking the bargain, the dealer enquired if the broker had any special information. 'Oh, no,' was the airy reply, 'merely a deceased account.' Immediately afterwards

·

arrived the news of a bad smash on the line, and the price of the stock fell five points. The broker kept away from the market, but came in at the end of the day, and happened to be noticed by the dealer to whom he had sold the stock early in the morning. The dealer looked at him for a second without speaking and then, turning on his heel, remarked over his shoulder: That was a knowing old corpse of yours this morning, wasn't he?'

6

Yet, for all the pessimism which the pursuit of stockbroking must necessarily create, the members of the House, on the whole, are an optimistic and hopeful body of men. If it were not so, they would lose their business, for human nature is an irrepressible 'bull.' People will buy for speculation readily enough, but to sell with the same object is a much rarer thing. Eradicate hope, and the Stock Exchange would drift into the realm of the unwanted. It would be a mere excrescence upon the land doomed to rapid extinction. But, so long as human nature remains bullish,' that is to say, hopeful, so long will the Stock Exchange remain and flourish; for even a Socialist has been known to buy shares for the rise. In all seriousness, the Stock Exchange performs a function in the life of the community which quickens enterprise and encourages adventure, while at the same time it offers the readiest range of facilities for the investment of capital from the smallest amount to the largest. That it may ever uphold its fine standard of business honour, that it may ever seek to raise still higher its ideals of usefulness and protection to the public, that it may ever continue in this manner to progress and flourish these must be the cordial aspirations not only of the member of the House, but of everyone who has at heart the cause of high commercial morality, which not even its bitterest enemies deny to be the goal aimed at by the London Stock Exchange.

WALTER LANDELLS.

Art. 6. MAURICE BARRÈS.

Sous l'œil des Barbares (1888), Un homme libre (1889), Le Jardin de Bérénice (1891), L'Ennemi des Lois (1892), Les Déracinés (1897), L'Appel au Soldat (1900), Les Amitiés françaises (1903), Le Voyage de Sparte (1905), Au Service de l'Allemagne (1905), Colette Baudoche (1909), L'Angoisse de Pascal (1910), Il Greco (1912), and other works by M. Barrès.

AMONG the living writers of French books Barrès appears as a Romantic in the ranks of the Classics, or rather as a free-lance fighting the battles of Idealism. He is not an idealist in that deeper sense which admits, beyond our varying truths, one truth absolute, in which they all are fused, as all our colours merge in white; he is no prophet of notions and verities; he is rather a sceptic, with the sceptic's care for purely human interests; he tacitly rejects every form of supernaturalism. And if he consider the soul, it is as a musical concord resulting from the harmony of all our parts; and doubtless he believes that, with death, the music of our consciousness will pass away for ever, unless, indeed, in some child of our race, there revive some strain of the melody we were. Yes, Barrès is a sceptic! But he loathes the dogmatic materialism of positive philosophy; and in his subtle and subjective mind the suspense of the sceptic appears as a transition towards some spiritual outlook. We might apply to him what he says himself in another connexion, in his 'Discours pour nos Églises': 'Je sais à quelle monstre de souplesse j'ai affaire.' A natural chivalry of disposition, and the sceptic's inclination to make custom and tradition rather than any reasoned principle the standard of morality, alike persuade him to espouse, in these troubled times, the quarrel of the persecuted Church. Barrès is a formidable Catholic champion, 'jusqu'à la foi, exclusivement.' We may compare his position with that occupied in the primitive Church by those pious improfessi, those God-fearing metuentes, who, though neither Jews nor Christians, ran the risks and fought the battles of Paul and Peter, and yet remained unbaptised, uncircumcised, entitled to no celestial rewards.

It is interesting to follow the course of such a man's

development. Like all really living things, it surprises: like a river, whose place of arrival is so remote and different from its source; like a fine tree, which throws out its branches towards all the points of the compass before it decides to shoot straight up aloft. This variety in unity is the very sign of life. Maurice Barrès is neither the strongest, nor the deepest, nor the most abundant of contemporary French writers, but he is extraordinarily alive.

He is a man of mingled race, with a strain of Teuton in him warring with the Celt and the Latin, a German sensibility hampered and contracted by a Latin love of order. He calls himself a child of the Rhine valley; and on his father's side, like Pascal, he is a son of the Celtic volcano of Auvergne. If we gave a free rein to our imagination, and let ourselves argue from type and talent to a strain of race, we might suppose that, like Montaigne, Barrès had in his stock some Jewish or Marrana grandmother, who gave him his taste for speculation, with something curious, double, and ironical in his outlook; but here, we believe, the genealogists protest. We must content ourselves with the mixture of Lorraine with Auvergne. In a recent discourse, pronounced on the frontier, during the war-threatened summer of 1911, Barrès admitted all that he owes to the romantic fancy of the Rhine, to the burgs on the pineclad hills of Alsace, to the tales and the legends of the Border:

'Je sais que d'instinct, de naissance, je suis porté à ne mettre aucun esprit au-dessus de Goethe. J'aime Schiller d'avoir chanté nos héroïnes nationales, la romanesque Marie Stuart, fille des Guises, et la sainte Jeanne d'Arc. . . . Enfin, je suis si peu l'ennemi du génie allemand que je voudrais croire ce que disait, l'autre jour, Émile Faguet: que c'eût été pour Nietzsche un réconfort de savoir que, vers 1887, dans un temps où il était si profondément ignoré de ses compatriotes, il eût trouvé à Paris un jeune homme qui, sans avoir lu aucun de ses livres, se rencontrait avec lui dans le mépris des 'Barbares" et dans le "Culte du Moi.”'

Maurice Barrès was born in 1862 at Charmes in Lorraine, where the hills of the Vosges slope down to the banks of the Moselle in, the most gracious declivity. His first impressions of conscious and public life were of a nature to aggravate the natural melancholy of a delicate and

impassioned nature. He remembers a paroxysm of tumult, a torrid summer sun, trains crammed with soldiers, thousands of them drunk, some with wine and some with a frenzy of excitement, singing at the top of their voices. And all the little town of Charmes, men, women, and especially the little boys like himself, surging against the barriers and railings of the station, hanging over them, reaching out bottles of wine, brandy, coffee, and crying, 'À Berlin!' as loudly as the soldiers. And then, a few weeks later, the retreat: that day of stupefaction in the pouring rain while horsemen and infantry, pell-mell, in wild confusion, passed in a very rage of shamed withdrawal; soldiers insulting their officers, a General in tears; the linen-clad Turcos livid and shivering in the dreary damp. And then five Uhlans, their revolvers in their hands, who rode across the bridge into the town and took possession.

When the child was ten years old he was sent to a college in the country kept by the Fathers, at Malgrange, in the neighbourhood of Nancy; and perhaps the influence of the four years spent there may be traced in his admiration for Loyola and the Exercices spirituels.' But Barrès was not happy at Malgrange. J'ai passé mon enfance au collège, au milieu d'abominables imbéciles!' A proud, timid, melancholy little boy, he was too sensitive and too intellectual to admire his masters or like his comrades, such as they were; he inherited the experience of Shelley. Platitude, anarchy, dullness-a dead, dry, unprofitable, stale tediousness; such was the impression left on his mind. At fourteen he entered the Lycée of Nancy, and, after all, did the Fathers credit, for he showed himself a brilliant pupil in Latin, in philosophy and rhetoric. But it is an open secret that Maurice Barrès condemns the educational system of the Lycée. It is difficult to bring up a genius to his own satisfaction. At the Lycée of Nancy the schoolmasters of Barrès never dreamed of mingling with their Parisian culture the genius of the Rhine or the Moselle; into the child's glass they poured, undiluted, the distant, the alien, waters of the Seine. Yet doubtless he did absorb, unwittingly, something of the peculiar charm of Nancy; that elegance and clearness of arrangement, that grace in grandeur, that delicate nobleness of line, and the harmony in