views; they merely stigmatised it as
_bourgeois_ sentimentality.

Clerambault furnished them with fresh arguments by a new article,
where his aversion to war seemed incidentally to condemn revolution as
well. Poets are proverbially bad politicians.

It was a reply to "_The Appeal to the Dead_," that Barres, like an owl
perched on a cypress in a graveyard, had wailed forth.

_TO THE LIVING_

_Death rules the world. You that are living, rise and shake off the
yoke! It is not enough that the nations are destroyed. They are bidden
to glorify Death, to march towards it with songs; they are expected to
admire their own sacrifice ... to call it the "most glorious, the most
enviable fate" ... but how untrue this is! Life is the great, the holy
thing, and love of life is the first of virtues. The men of today have
it no longer; this war has shown that, and even worse. It has proved
that during the last fifteen years, many have hoped for these horrible
upheavals--you cannot deny it! No man loves life who has no better use
for it than to throw it into the jaws of Death. Life is a burden to
many--to you rich of the middle-class, reactionary conservatives,
whose moral dyspepsia takes away your appetite, everything tastes flat
and bitter. Everything bores you. It is a heavy burden also to you
proletarians, poor, unhappy, discouraged by your hard lot. In the dull
obscurity of your lives, hopeless of any change for the better,--Oh,
Ye of little faith!--your only chance of escape seems to be through
an act of violence which lifts you out of the mire for one moment at
least, even if it be the last. Anarchists and revolutionists who have
preserved something of the primitive animal energy rely on these
qualities to liberate themselves in this way; they are the strong. But
the mass of the people are too weary to take the initiative, and that
is why they eagerly welcome the sharp blade of war which pierces
through to the core of the nations. They give themselves up to it,
darkly, voluptuously. It is the only moment of their dim lives when
they can feel the breath of the infinite within them,--and this moment
is their annihilation_....

_Is this a way to make the best of life?... Which we can only
maintain, it would seem, by renouncing it; and for the sake of what
carnivorous gods?... Country, Revolution ... who grind millions of men
in their bloody jaws_.

_What glory can be found in death and destruction? It is Life that we
nee