part that seems to come from almost anywhere rather than from the mind
and intention of the writer. And the more genius, we must believe, the
more of this appearance of what is known (or unknown) as inspiration.
Yet, in the case of Keats, a man of genius all compact, one has only
to read his letters to see (and glad we must be to see it) that, for
all his youthfulness and comparatively slight acquaintance with books,
he was pretty well aware of himself, having withal a kind of philosophy
of life and many shrewd ideas concerning the poetic art. His gift was
no external, detachable thing, an influence of which he could give
no account, and over which he had no control, like, shall we say,
the inscrutable, uncanny, unrelated mathematical faculty of a Zerah
Colburn, a thing by itself, significant of no general capacity on the
part of its possessor. The man _himself_ was a genius.
And being such, he was safest when he followed his own leadings. When
he humbled himself to write what he hoped men would pay for, as, under
pressure of his brother’s and sister’s need, he persuaded himself
he might do (“the very corn which is now so beautiful, as if it had
only took to ripening yesterday, is for the market; so, why should
I be delicate?”), he was mostly wasting his time. “I have great
hope of success,” he writes, “because I make use of my judgment more
deliberately than I have yet done.” It was a vain dependence. “Live
and learn,” says the proverb. And, prose men or poets, the brightest
must mind the lesson. But Keats, alas! could not live. He was “born for
death,” and was already marked. His work, the best of it, was already
finished. Racked and broken, devoured by the very madness of passion
and wasting away with incurable disease, his tale henceforth is pure
tragedy. If his passion was a weakness,--and no doubt it was,--to
colder-blooded men a state of mind incredible, and to Pharisees and
fools a thing to mock at,--so let us call it, and there be done. It was
past cure, so much is certain. Here and there in his letters there are
still gleams of brightness, sad touches of pleasantry. To his sister,
about whose health he is continually in a fever, lest she should be
going as his mother and his brother Tom have gone (and he himself far
on the road), he is always a little improved, always making the most
of the doctor’s words of encouragement; but between times, to some
other correspondent, he shows for a moment the plague that is consuming
his life. It is heart-breaking to hear him. “If I had any chance of
recovery, this passion would kill me.” He cannot name the one of whom
he is night and day thinking. “I am afraid to write to her--to receive
a letter from her--to see her handwriting would break my heart.” Even
to see her name written would be more than he could bear. “Oh, Brown, I
have coals of fire in my breast. It surprises me that the human heart
is capable of containing and bearing so much misery.”
And strange it is how cruel a price a man can be made to pay for what,
at the worst, is only a piece of natural foolishness.
“Well and wisely said the Greek,
Be thou faithful, but not fond;
To the altar’s foot thy fellow seek,
The Furies wait beyond.”
Never man found this truer than Keats.
There is but one letter more,--dated a month later, and addressed to
the same friend. This time the dying man knows that he is taking
leave, though he still quotes a doctor’s soothing diagnosis. He is
bringing his philosophy to bear, he says; if he recovers, he will do
thus and so; but if not, all his faults will be forgiven. And then:
“Write to George [his brother] as soon as you receive this, and tell
him how I am, as far as you can guess; and also a note to my sister,
who walks about my imagination like a ghost, she is so like Tom. I can
scarcely bid you good-bye, even in a letter. I always made an awkward
bow. God bless you!”
How wasteful is Nature! Once or twice in an age, one man out of
millions, she brings forth a poet; and then, while his powers are still
budding, she sends on them a sudden blight, and anon cuts him down.
Wasteful, we say. But who can tell? Perhaps she also, like the rest of
us, is doing what she can, and, like the rest of us, is disappointed
when she fails.
ANATOLE FRANCE
ANATOLE FRANCE
M. Anatole France is a writer who is continually saying something. His
thought is always breaking into bloom. He is not one of those who, on
the ground of weightiness of matter, or other supposed excellence,
have taken out a license to be dull. All his pages have light in them.
His readers not only know in which direction they are going,--a great
comfort, not always vouchsafed to such travelers,--but are made to
enjoy the journey, having a thousand sights to look at by the way. It
is an author’s business, he considers, to make his truth beautiful; and
nothing is beautiful but what is easy. An artist who knows his trade
will “not so much exact attention as surprise it.”
It sounds like a good creed; and the style of his writing answers
to it. Its qualities are the classical French qualities,--neatness,
precision, ease, moderation, lightness of touch, lucidity. In sum,
it is such a style as comes of good breeding. He is clever without
being smart, and pointed without emphasis. As for that dreadful
something which goes by the name of rhetoric, you may search his
twenty-odd volumes through without finding trace of it. His method is
old-fashioned, his masters are the old masters. Brilliancy, surprise,
felicities, originalities,--yes, indeed, he has all these and more,
but he knows how to wear them. They are all natural to him. “Elegant,
facile, rapid,” he says; “there you have the perfect politeness of a
writer.” Obscurity, difficulty, is to his way of thinking but a kind of
bad manners.
He was born to enjoy beautiful things, one would say; elected before
the cradle to a life of scholastic quietness and leisure: a dilettante
and a saunterer, loving old streets, old shops, old books, the old
literatures, fond of out-of-the-way and useless learning, the very type
and pattern of an aimless reader and dreamer. And so, to take his word
for it, he appears to have begun. Those were his best days. Then he was
most himself. So, in certain moods, at least, it seems to him now. Of
that time he is thinking when he says, “I lived happy years without
writing. I led a contemplative and solitary life, the memory of which
is still infinitely sweet to me. Then, as I studied nothing, I learned
much. In fact, it is in strolling that one makes beautiful intellectual
and moral discoveries.”
The old book-stalls on the Paris quays,--one wonders how many scores
of times he has an affectionate word to say for them in his various
books. Even in one of the earlier essays of “La Vie Littéraire” he
apologizes for what is already becoming a frequent reference. “Let
me tell you,” he breaks out, “that I can never pass over these quays
without experiencing a trouble full of joy and sadness, because I was
born here, because I spent my childhood here, and because the familiar
faces that I saw here formerly are now forever vanished. I say this in
spite of myself, from a habit of saying simply what I think, about that
of which I think. One is never quite sincere without being a little
wearisome. But I have a hope that, if I speak of myself, those who
listen to me will think only of themselves; so that I shall please
them while pleasing myself. I was brought up on this quay in the midst
of books, by humble and simple people, of whose memory I am the only
guardian. When I am gone they will be as if they had never been. My
soul is all full of their relics.”
He runs a risk of being wearisome, he says. But that is merely a
grace-note of French politeness, to be taken as it is meant, and
answered after its kind. Indeed, he knows better. It was he who
said of Renan that his most charming book was his little volume of
youthful reminiscence, because he had put most of himself into it.
And of M. Anatole France it is equally true that although he has an
abundance of ideas, and loves not only his own past but the past of the
world,--especially of all mystics, heretics, skeptics, enthusiasts, and
saints,--yet he never comes quite so close to his reader as when his
talk grows most intimate. It is what we who read are always after, the
man behind the pen. If he will really tell us about himself, about
his inner, true self, which we blindly feel must be somehow very like
another self, more interesting still, with which we seldom succeed in
coming face to face, although, according to the accepted theory of
things, it is, or ought to be, our nearest neighbor,--if he will really
tell us something, little matter what, that is actually true about
himself, we will sit up till morning to listen to him. It seems an easy
way to be interesting, does it not? And so indeed it is, for the right
man; for the really fine things are always easy,--if one can do them at
all.
There intrudes the doubt; for if success in personal reminiscence is
easy, failure is ten times easier. Of course a man must have taste,
an innate or well-bred sense of the fitness of things; and so a brook
must have banks, to save it from degeneration and loss. But what if
the stream itself be muddy, if it have no movement, no sparkle, no
variety, if it do not by turns ripple over sunny shallows, loiter in
comfortable eddies, and deepen and darken in dream-inviting pools? Or
what if the banks be straight-cut and formal, till what should have
been a brook is little better than a ditch? What if taste has become
propriety, and propriety has hardened into primness, and the writing
or the talk is without the breath of life? Yes, success is easy, and
it is also impossible. As the art of man never made a mountain brook,
so instruction never by itself made a writer. The rain must fall from
heaven, and readability (and _hearability_ likewise, since writing and
talking are but two forms of the one thing) must come from the same
source, or, as Emerson said, by nature.
If a man is to disclose himself, he must first have known something
about himself, a pitch of intelligence by no means to be taken for
granted; he must be one of the relatively few who are affectionately
cognizant of their own feelings, who delight in their own view of
things, who have felt, loved, suffered, and enjoyed, to whom life and
the world have been inwardly real and interesting, for whom their own
past especially is like a fair landscape, here in full sunshine, there
flecked with shadows, but all a picture of loveliness and a thing to
dream over.
In reminiscence, as in painting, the subject must be somewhat removed,
loss of detail yielding a gain in beauty, since, in the one case, as
in the other, what we seek is not an inventory, but a picture. This,
or something like this, is what Renan had in mind when in beginning
his “Souvenirs” he remarked that what a man says of himself is always
poetry. For his own part, he declares, he has no thought of furnishing
matter for _post-mortem_ biographical sketches. He is going to tell the
truth (mostly), but not the kind of truth of which biography is made.
Biography and personal reminiscence are two things, and can never be
written in the same tone. Many things, he tells us, have been put into
his book on purpose to provoke a smile. If custom had permitted, he
would more than once have written on the margin of the page: _cum grano
salis_.
One thinks of Charles Lamb, though in general the two men had
wonderfully little in common. How dearly he loved to talk of
himself, hiding the while behind some modestly transparent veil of
mystification! And how dearly we love to play the innocent game with
him, seeing perfectly what is going on, but, as children do, making
pretense of being deceived. Better than almost any one else he had the
winsome gift of half-serious, tenderly humorous self-disclosure. As
Renan said, it is all poetry, and always with something to smile at.
All this because of one of M. Anatole France’s many stray bits of
gossipy reminiscence concerning the old quays of Paris and his boyish
adventures among them! Such trifles are characteristic; they connote
other qualities, and of themselves show us one side of the man and the
writer. He loves his own life, especially his real life, the happy
years that lie behind him. The power to see them is to him a matter
of wonderment, a kind of miracle, a true fairy’s gift. If he could
see the future with the same distinctness, the fact would be hardly
more astonishing, and probably it would be much less beneficent. So he
tells himself in one of those rare and precious moods when the soul
seems preternaturally awake, and the commonest every-day objects wear
a look of newness and mystery till we are taken with a kind of inward
shivering as if we had been seeing ghosts.
For the more connected story of his youthful memories one must turn, of
course, to the two volumes expressly devoted to them, “Le Livre de Mon
Ami” and “Pierre Nozière.” That he should have written _two_ such books
is significant of the hold that his childhood still has upon him. But
the two are none too many. How delicious they are!--full of tenderness
and humor, every sentence true to the pitch, and the writing perfect.
And how many pictures they leave with us! The woman in white and her
lover with the black whiskers. The ragged street urchin, Alphonse,
whom the well-fed, well-dressed house boy envied and pitied by turns,
till one day he (the good boy) pilfered a bunch of grapes from the
sideboard, lowered them out of the window by a string, and called upon
little Alphonse to take them; which the suspicious Alphonse proceeded
to do with a sudden twitch at the cord (such rudeness!), after which,
turning up his face to the window, he thrust out his tongue, put his
thumb to his nose, and ran off with the dainty. “My little friends had
not accustomed me to such fashions,” the good boy confides to us. And
then, to heighten his sense of disappointment (how commonly grown-up
human benevolence is similarly disrewarded!), he bethought himself that
he must tell his mother of his pious theft. She would chide him, he
feared. And like a good mother she did, but with laughter in her eyes.
“‘We ought to give away our own good things, not those of another,’ she
said; ‘and we must know how to give.’
“‘That is the secret of happiness,’ added my father, ‘and few know it.’
“He knew it, my father.”
The books are full of such pictures, seen first by the child, and now
seen again, losing nothing of their color, through the eyes of the man
of forty; full, too, of a boy’s dreams and ambitions. Now he will be a
famous saint (like every boy, he is bound to be famous somehow), and
instantly he sets about it with fastings, an improvised hair shirt, and
even an attempt, ingloriously brought to nought by the strong arms of
the housemaid, to play the rôle of Simeon Stylites in the kitchen. What
with this muscular, unsympathetic maid,--who also tore his hair shirt
from him,--and his father, equally unsympathetic, who pronounced him
“stupid,” the boy had a bad day of it, and by night-fall, as he says,
“recognized that it is very difficult to be a saint while living with
one’s family. I understood why St. Anthony and St. Jerome went into the
desert to dwell among lions and satyrs; and I resolved to retire the
next day to a hermitage.” And so he did, choosing a labyrinth in the
neighboring Jardin des Plantes.
A few years later, wiser now and more worldly-minded, he is determined
to set up catalogues like his old friend Father Le Beau; and soon (joy
on the top of joy, and audacity almost past confession) he determines
that he will some day print them, and _read the proofs_! Beyond that
he can conceive of no higher felicity (though he has since learned,
through the confidences of a blasé literary acquaintance, that “one
wearies of everything in this world, even of correcting proofs!”).
Needless to say, he did not become a cataloguer, more than he had
become a saint; but good Father Le Beau, for all that, determined his
boyish admirer’s vocation, inspiring him with “a love for the things of
the mind and with a weakness for writing;” inspiring him, also, with
a passion for the past and with “ingenious curiosities,” and, by the
example of intellectual labor regularly performed without fatigue and
without worry, filling him from childhood with a desire to work and
instruct himself. “It is thanks to him,” he concludes, “that I have
become in my own way a great reader, a zealous annotator of ancient
texts, and a scribbler of memoirs that will never see the light.”
Good Father Le Beau! How plainly we can see him at his pleasant task,
and the small boy beside him taking his lesson! And if any be ready to
smile at the childish story, as if it were nothing _but_ a childish
story,--well, there is difference in readers. To some, let us hope, the
simple adventures of a boy’s mind, dreaming on things to come, will
seem quite as entertaining, and even quite as instructive and morally
profitable, as some more highly seasoned adventures of a man who covets
his neighbor’s wife, or a woman who covets her neighbor’s husband.
Of books recounting the pleasures and miseries of illicit passion
modern literature surely suffers no lack; and truth to tell, M.
Anatole France himself (the more’s the pity) has contributed to an
already full stock two or three examples not easily to be outdone in
piquancy of situation or freedom of speech. Concerning these no account
is to be taken here. Enough to say that they are unspeakable,--in
English,--though, not to do them injustice, it should be added that
neither “Le Lys Rouge,” nor even “Histoire Comique,” for all its
misleading, pleasant-sounding title, makes the path to the everlasting
bonfire look in the remotest degree alluring. The old truth, old
as man, that “to be carnally minded is death,” is nowhere more
convincingly set forth than in the modern French novel, whether it be
Balzac’s, Flaubert’s, Maupassant’s, Bourget’s, or Anatole France’s.
It is unfortunate, we must think, for our author’s reputation and
vogue outside of his own country, that not only the two of his books
just now named, but at least three others, though in a less degree,
are unfitted for full translation into English, or even to be left in
their original tongue upon the open shelves of public libraries or on
the family table. But what then? They were not written _virginibus
puerisque_, their author would say, and even their freest parts treat
of nothing worse than every newspaper is obliged somehow to chronicle,
however it may veil its language, and nothing worse, perhaps, than is
readily allowed in the English classics, especially in the books of the
Bible and the writings of Shakespeare. Wonderful is the effect of time
and distance! We gaze upon nude statues of the old Greeks and Romans
without a shiver, but the representation of an American President bare
only to the waist--as one may see, in all kinds of weather, poor
unhappy-looking George Washington sitting in front of the national
capitol--affects us with a painful sense of discomfort, not to say of
positive indecency.
M. Anatole France, as has been said, seems by birth and early
predilection to have been devoted to a career of studious leisure. He
would always be contented, one would have thought, to be a looker-on
at the game of life, sitting by the wayside, book in hand, and
watching the world go past; taking it all as a show; never so much as
considering the possibility of entering for any of the prizes that
more ambitious men run for, nor concerned very much as to who should
win or who lose; hardly so much as an observer; a spectator rather,
as he said himself; “in love,” as he said again, “with the eternal
illusion that wraps us round,” but only as an illusion; cultivating
his own garden,--like M. Bergeret, who delighted to cut the leaves of
books, esteeming it wise to make for one’s self pleasures appropriate
to one’s profession; at the most a collector of old books, and a teller
of old tales; a lover of Virgil, a disciple of Epicurus, a friend of
quietness, and a worshiper of the Graces.
Such we imagine M. Anatole France to have been when he wrote his
earlier volumes, including the one which the majority of readers would
probably name as the most beautiful of them all, “Le Crime de Sylvestre
Bonnard.” The dear old savant tells his own story, talking now to his
cat, now to his friendly despot of a housekeeper, now to good Madame de
Gabry, now, best of all, to himself. The whole story is, as it were,
overheard by the reader, and surely there never was, nor ever will be,
a prettier revelation of an old man’s soul.
Like Renan, and like M. Anatole France, Sylvestre Bonnard, Member of
the Institute, has a natural sense of humor, and if he does not put
into his narrative things on purpose to make us smile, it is only
because he is in no way thinking of us. He smiles often enough himself,
his own oddities and blunders as an absent-minded scholar--since,
like Cowper’s Mr. Bull, he “has too much genius to have a good
memory”--providing him with abundant occasion; and we smile with him.
We love him for his goodness, and we listen delighted to all his
philosophy. If he is not a saint, he is something better,--or if not
better, more interesting and lovable,--a man so humanly sweet, so
simple-hearted, so pure-minded, so bright in his talk, so admirable in
his kindness, so adorable a confesser of his own foibles, that there is
no resisting him. Dear old celibate!--who had loved a pair of blue eyes
in his youth, and had been true to their memory ever since! Verily, he
had his reward. Never man awaited the sunset with a better grace.
The man who drew this character was surely at peace with the world
and with himself. Life had so far been to him mostly a fair-weather
stroll in a pleasant country. And the same may be said, with some
grains of qualification, of the man who wrote the weekly articles
that went to the making of the four volumes of “La Vie Littéraire.”
These are not things to last, it may be, like “Le Crime de Sylvestre
Bonnard,” which, if one may be so simple as to prophesy, can hardly
fail to become a classic; but for the present they must afford to many
readers, if not a keener, yet a more various, delight. They are books
of extraordinary interest, in whatever light one may view them. As we
turn them over, remarking here and there the pages that at different
times have especially pleased us, we find ourselves saying again and
again, Oh, that we had such books in English, and on English subjects!
If there were in Great Britain or in the United States a writer who
could, week by week, furnish one of our newspapers with pieces of
literary criticism or bookish causerie of this enchanting quality;
so light, so graceful, so original, so suggestive, so full of happy
surprises, so bright with humor and philosophy, so perfect in form
and temper, and so satisfying in substance! Yes, if there were! How
quickly we would all subscribe for that newspaper! The articles might
deal, as M. Anatole France’s often do, with books that we have never
read and have no thought of reading; it would not greatly matter. If
the subject in hand were nothing but a text-book or an encyclopædia,
a letter from an inquisitive correspondent, or a play of marionettes,
the talk about it would be literature. And real literature, served to
us fresh every Sunday morning! The very thought is an exhilaration. We
are not to be understood as implying that excellent literary criticism
is not more or less often written in English, and on both sides of the
water. The question is not of moderately sound, reasonably instructive,
workmanlike articles, proper enough to be read and forgotten, but of
essays full of charm, full of genius, full of poetry,--essays in which,
to adapt a saying of Thoreau, we do _not_ miss the hue of the mind,
essays that of themselves are in the truest sense little masterpieces
of the literary art.
He had never thought of doing such things. His old publisher, Calmann
Lévy, “rather friend than publisher,” who had welcomed him in his
obscurity, and smiled at his first humble successes, had for years been
chiding his indolence and dunning him for another book. But he was
in love with his idle ways and distrustful of his capacity. He was
then living those “happy years without writing,” of which we have seen
him cherishing so fond a remembrance. But now came the manager of “Le
Temps,” a man accustomed to have his way, and behold, the dreamer’s
pen is again covering paper. “I believe you have a talisman,” the new
critic says to the editor, in dedicating to him the first of the four
resulting volumes. “You do whatever you will. You have made of me a
periodical and regular writer. You have triumphed over my indolence.
You have utilized my reveries and coined my wits into gold. I hold you
for an incomparable economist.”