better, or more easily, than when regular work--not too pressing--keeps
his hand in play. So Sir Walter Scott, hag-ridden by debt, if he
finished a novel in the morning began another in the afternoon,
because, as he explained, it was less difficult to keep the machine
running than to start it again after a rest.
In this same dedicatory epistle to M. Hébrard are to be found some of
the brightest and most characteristic things that M. Anatole France
has ever written about his own nature and habits, as well as about his
ideas of critics and criticism. For talking about himself, as we have
before said, and as the reader must have discovered even from our few
quotations, he has the prettiest kind of talent. “You are very easy to
live with,” he tells M. Hébrard. “You never find fault with me. But I
do not flatter myself. You saw at once that nothing great was to be
expected, and that it was best not to torment me. For that reason you
left me to say what I pleased. One day you remarked of me to a common
friend,--
“‘He is a mocking Benedictine.’
“We understand ourselves very imperfectly, but I think your definition
is a good one. I seem to myself to be a philosophical monk. At heart
I belong to an _abbaye de Thélème_, where the rule is comfortable and
obedience easy, where one has no great degree of faith, perhaps, but is
sure to be very pious.”
There is nobody like a skeptic, he continues (he is echoing
Montaigne), for always observing the moralities and being a good
citizen. “A skeptic never rebels against existing laws, because he has
no expectation that any power will be able to make good ones. He knows
that much must be pardoned to the Republic;” that rulers at the best
count for little; that, as Montaigne said, most things in this world
do themselves, the Fates finding the way. Still he advises his manager
never to confide his political columns to any Thelemite. The gentle
spirit of melancholy that he would spread over everything would be a
discouragement to honest readers. Ministers are not to be sustained by
philosophy. “As for myself,” he adds, “I maintain a suitable modesty
and restrict myself to criticism.”
And then, in two sentences, one of which has attained almost to the
rank of a familiar quotation, he defines criticism and the critic.
“As I understand it, and as you allow me to practice it, criticism,
like philosophy and history, is a sort of romance, and all romance,
rightly taken, is an autobiography. The good critic is he who narrates
the adventures of his own mind in its intercourse with masterpieces.”
To be quite frank, he declares, the critic should begin his discourse
by saying: “Gentlemen, I am going to speak about myself apropos of
Shakespeare, apropos of Racine, or of Pascal, or of Goethe. It is a
fine occasion.”
And here, of course, the battle is joined between the two schools of
critics: the subjective, or impressionistic, so called, on one side,
and the objective, or scientific, so called, on the other.
Into this controversy (which, like many another, may yet turn out to
be concerned with words rather than with things) we feel no call to
enter. Like our author himself, we desire to maintain the modesty that
is fitting to us. We content ourselves, therefore, with some random
comments upon “La Vie Littéraire,” which to our taste is one of the
most delightfully readable books of recent times. Having read it and
reread it, we are (somewhat ignorantly, to be sure, having nothing
like an exhaustive acquaintance with universal current literature)
very much of Mr. Edmund Gosse’s opinion when he says of M. Anatole
France that he is perhaps “the most interesting intelligence at this
moment working in the field of letters.” The word “perhaps,” it will be
noticed, is outside the double commas. A genuinely modest man likes to
make a show of his modesty even in his use of quotations.
Whether criticism in general, as critics in general write it, ought to
be of one school or another, subject to personal impression or subject
to rule, one thing is beyond dispute: the singular charm, one feels
almost like saying the incomparable charm, of “La Vie Littéraire” lies
in its intimate, individual quality. It is not a set of formulas, nor
even a thesaurus of literary opinions and estimates. It is the voice of
a man, speaking as a man. As you listen, you see his mind at work; you
know what he thinks about, and how he thinks about it; what he enjoys
best and oftenest, what trains his reveries naturally fall into; how
the world looks to him, past, present, and future. He does not set
himself to reveal himself; when men do that, they mostly fail; his
mind _plays_ before you. Above all things, he is an ironist. There is
nothing, least of all anything in himself or concerning himself, that
he cannot smile at, though there may be tears in his eyes at the same
moment. He admires, and can perfectly express his admiration; and when
he despises, he is no more at a loss. The more he knows, the more he
is ignorant,--and the more he wonders. He is full of modern knowledge,
and he loves of all things a fairy tale. Shakespeare delights him, and
he cannot say well enough nor times enough how greatly he enjoys the
marionettes.
It can hardly have been an accident (and yet, for aught we know, it
may have been, since accident often seems to be no more foolish than
the rest of us) that his first “Times” essay was concerned with a
representation of “Hamlet,” and the second with the latest story of M.
Jules Lemaître. Both the Danish prince and the martyr Sérénus were men
oppressed and finally overcome by a sense of the mystery of things,
having ideas, almost in excess, and being so skillful in debate that
they could never come to a conclusion. Like horses and politicians,
they needed blinders, and for lack of them could not keep a straight
course.
Both make a lively appeal to our critic’s sympathy. In his own way
he is sufficiently like them. And so what ought, on one theory, to
have been a dissertation upon Shakespeare’s conception of Hamlet’s
character, runs of its own will into an address to the Dane himself. He
is so real to the Frenchman that the two go home together, as it were,
after the play, and the Frenchman, having sat silent so long, finds his
heart full and his tongue suddenly unloosed.
First he must apologize to Hamlet for the audience, some part of which,
as he may have noticed, seemed a trifle inattentive and light. Hamlet
must not lay this to heart. “It was an audience of Frenchmen and
Frenchwomen,” he should remember. “You were not in evening dress, you
had no amorous intrigue in the world of high finance, and you wore no
flower in your buttonhole. For that reason the ladies coughed a little
in their boxes while eating candied fruits. Your adventures could not
interest them. They were not worldly adventures; they were only human
adventures. Besides, you force people to think, and that is an offense
which will never be pardoned to you here.”
Still there were a few among the spectators who were profoundly moved,
a few by whom the melancholy Dane is preferred before all other beings
ever created by the breath of genius. The critic himself, by a happy
chance, sat near one such, M. Auguste Dorchain. “He understands you, my
prince, as he understands Racine, because he is himself a poet.”
And then, after a little, he concludes by confiding to Hamlet what a
mystery and contradiction the world continues to find him, though he is
the universal man, the man of all times and all countries, though he is
exactly like the rest of us, “a man living in the midst of universal
evil.” It is just because he is like the rest of us, indeed, that
we find his character a thing so impossible to grasp. It is because
we do not understand ourselves that we cannot understand him. His
very inconsistencies and contradictions are the sign of his profound
humanity. “You are prompt and slow, audacious and timid, benevolent and
cruel; you believe and you doubt; you are wise, and above everything
else you are insane. In a word, you live. Who of us does not resemble
you in something? Who of us thinks without contradiction, and acts
without inconsistency? Who of us is not insane? Who of us but says to
you with a mixture of pity, of sympathy, of admiration, and of horror,
‘Goodnight, sweet prince; and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!’”
This may not be great Shakespearean criticism; certainly it bears no
very striking resemblance to the ordinary German article that walks
abroad under that name; but at least it is good reading, and so far as
may be possible in a few sentences, it may be thought to go somewhat
near to the heart of the matter.
As for the Sérénus of M. Jules Lemaître, he, too, is a thinker and
dreamer set to live in difficult conditions. He, too, is caught in
contradictory currents, and finds it impossible to make the shore. For
him, as for Hamlet, death is the only way out. His creator, of whom M.
Anatole France loves to talk, is himself a born skeptic, always asking,
under one ingenious form and another, the question of the old Roman
functionary, “What is truth?” and never getting an answer. Like his
friend and critic, “he loves believers and believes not.” It may have
been he of whom it is remarked, somewhere, that he has “a mind full
of ironic curiosity.” We have been turning the volumes over in search
of the phrase. We did not find it, but we found ourselves repeating
the word with which we began: “M. Anatole France is a writer who is
continually saying something.” It seems to us truer than ever; and it
seems a considerable merit.
In the course of our search we fell anew upon the essay dealing
with that amazing book, the “Journal” of the Goncourt brothers. It
is no very enlivening subject, one would say, but the essay is of
the brightest, sparkling from end to end with those “good things”
concerning which the scientific critic may say what he will, so long
as the impressionistic critic will be kind enough to furnish them for
our delectation. As plain untheoretical readers, we are thankful to be
interested.
Of all books, as we know already, M. Anatole France believes in
personal memoirs. In his opinion writers are seldom so likely to be
well inspired as when they speak of themselves. La Fontaine’s pigeon
had good reason to say:--
“Mon voyage dépeint
Vous sera d’un plaisir extrême.
Je dirai: ‘J’étais là; telle chose m’avint:’
Vous y croirez être vous-même.”
Even a cold writer like Marmontel gets a hold upon us “as soon as he
begins to tell about a little Limousin who read the Georgics in a
garden where the bees were murmuring,”--because he was the boy, and
the bees were those whose honey he ate, the same which he saw his aunt
warming in the hollow of her hand, and refreshing with a drop of wine,
when the cold had benumbed them. As for St. Augustine’s “Confessions,”
so called, our essayist has no very exalted opinion of them. The great
doctor, he thinks, hardly confesses enough. Worse yet, he hates his
sins; and, in the way of literature, “nothing spoils a confession like
repentance.”
But Rousseau, “poor great Jean-Jacques,” “whose soul held so many
miseries and grandeurs,”--he surely made no half-hearted confession.
“He acknowledged his own faults and those of other people with
marvelous facility. It cost him nothing to tell the truth. However vile
and ignoble it might be, he knew that he could render it touching and
beautiful. He had secrets for that, the secrets of genius, which, like
fire, purifies everything.”
But we must be done with quotation, though the matter that offers
itself is fairly without end. Especially one would be glad to cite
some of the essayist’s reminiscences of the men he has known: some of
them famous, like Flaubert, “a pessimist full of enthusiasm,” who “had
the good part of the things of this world, in that he could admire;”
Jules Sandeau, whom the critic, when a child, used to meet on the
quays of Paris, which are “the adopted country of all men of thought
and taste;” and dear old Barbey d’Aurévilly, so queerly dressed, so
profane a believer, “so frightfully Satanic and so adorably childish;”
and others,--and these among the best,--two or three priests, in
particular,--never heard of except in our author’s pages.
One would like, also, to speak of his favorite heterodox theory
touching the fallible nature of posterity as a judge of works of
art; of the fun that he pokes so effectively at the new school of
symbolists and decadents (small wonder they do not love him); of his
ideas upon language, upon history, upon the grossness of Zola,--with
which he as an artist has no patience,--upon the exalted rank of the
critical essay, upon the educational value of the humanities. These
and many other things have their place in the four volumes, and every
one is touched with grace and something of originality. Everywhere the
personal note makes itself heard. It is a voice, not the scratching of
a pen, that we listen to, the voice of a man who never forgets that
he was once a child. He has lived in Eden. We all begin, he tells
himself, where Adam began. “In those blessed hours,” he says, “I have
seen thistles springing up amid heaps of stones in little sunny streets
where birds were singing; and I tell you the truth, it was Paradise.”
The two or three years during which he was contributing weekly articles
to “Le Temps” were not quite of this heavenly quality, we may safely
presume; in the inevitable course of things the gates of Eden must
for some time have been already closed against him; but if one is to
judge by his books of the period, meaning to include among them “La
Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque,” “Les Opinions de M. Jérôme Coignard,”
and “Le Jardin d’Épicure,”--three of the best and most characteristic,
though the two first named are not for readers afflicted with what
a French critic calls _pudeur livresque_,--they were still years of
quietness and a reasonably full content. He was writing and studying
more than formerly, to be sure, and of course, by his own showing, was
learning so much the less; but, taking everything into account, he and
the world, for all its badness, were pulling pretty well together.
Since then, somehow, we cannot profess to know exactly how or why, a
change appears to have come over him; a change not altogether for the
worse, nor altogether for the better. Life, in his eyes, is no longer
so bright as it was. He is more serious, more satirical, less disposed
to mind his rhyme and let the river run under the bridge; a little out
of conceit with his old rôle of saunterer and looker-on. He seems to
have heard a drum-beat, and if there is to be a fight, he will, after a
rather independent fashion of his own, bear a hand in it. Perhaps this
is the manlier part. At all events, there is no quarreling with it, and
the evil days on which Anatole France has fallen (“_le perfide Anatole
France_,” as we are told that his political enemies--a strange word for
use in connection with the author of “Sylvestre Bonnard” and “Le Jardin
d’Épicure”--are accustomed to call him) have borne their full share of
fruit.
His second manner, to call it so, is like his first in this regard,
that its most successful creation is an old scholar. M. Bergeret is
Sylvestre Bonnard with a difference, as the present Anatole France, is
the old Anatole France with a difference. It strikes us as almost a
pleasantry of Fate that these two leading characters should stand thus
as representatives of their creator’s two selves, or, if one prefers to
express it so, of their creator’s one self in his two periods of calm
and storm.
Sylvestre Bonnard’s life ran an even course. Its incidents were no
more than the windings and falls of a quiet brook,--just enough to
keep it wholesomely alive and give it a desirable diversity and
picturesqueness. The world was good to him; and he thanked it. If
he did not marry the girl with the pair of blue eyes,--the eyes _de
pervenche_,--he was happier in his bachelorhood than the majority
of men are in their married condition, and doubly happy toward the
last, when time and chance (with more or less of human assistance)
brought him his heart’s desire in the opportunity to care for his lost
Clementine’s grandchild. His professional successes were according to
his taste: he was a member of the Institute, an authority upon ancient
texts, and in his old age the happy author of a book upon a new hobby.
Such was the life of a savant as M. Anatole France conceived it before
the world was too much with him, before “Nationalists” and “Royalists”
had begun to look askance upon him, and call him traitor.
M. Bergeret, like M. Bonnard, is a man of kindly nature, a scholar,
and a lover of peace, but life to him, as to Shelley, has been
“dealt in another measure;” a disloyal wife, uncongenial daughters,
squalor in his house, disappointment in his calling, lack of favor
with his colleagues and superiors, and, to fill his cup, the Dreyfus
controversy, which makes him a target for stoning.
And in the midst of it all, notwithstanding it all, what a dear old
soul, and what an interesting talker!--so amiably philosophical, so
keen in his thrusts, so sly in his humor, so fond of good company, his
own and his dog’s included, and, in spite of his weaknesses, so equal
to the occasion! If he is irreligious, according to his neighbors’
standards, it is at least “with decency and good taste.”
The four volumes in which he figures (“Histoire Contemporaine,” they
are jointly called), like all the works of their author, are crammed
with clever sayings. There is no great story, of course, though some of
the incidents are many shades too lively to be set in modest English
type; but the characterization and the dialogue are of the best,--in
the good Yankee sense of the word, “complete.”
For its full appreciation the book--it is really one, in spite of its
four titles--demands a more familiar acquaintance with the ins and
outs of current French politics than the average American reader is
likely to bring to it. There are so many wheels within wheels, and the
intrigues are made, of set purpose on the author’s part, to turn upon
desires and considerations so almost incredibly sordid and petty! It is
a comedy; we are bound to laugh; but it is also a horror, and is meant
to be. Satire was never more biting. The game of provincial politics,
bishop-making and all, is played with merciless particularity before
the reader’s eyes; and if he fails to follow some of the moves with
perfect intelligence, he sees only too well the smallness and baseness
and cruelty of the whole; a game in which a matron’s honor is no more
than a pawn upon the chessboard, to be given and taken without so
much as an extra pulse-beat, even an extra pulse-beat of her own. If
it be true, or within a thousand miles of true,--well, to repeat the
saying of one of old, a critic accounted wise in his day, “man hath no
preëminence above a beast!”
Poor M. Bergeret! He ought to have been so happy! Like his human
creator, he was born for life in a cloister, some Abbaye de Thélème,
where he should have had nothing to do but to read his books, say his
prayers, mind a few cabbages, perhaps, and be quiet; and instead of
that, here he is passing his days in such a turmoil that he experiences
a kind of joy on finding himself in the street, the one place where he
gets a taste of “that sweetest of good things, philosophical liberty.”
And with all the rest of his tribulations there falls upon him that
dreadful nightmare of the Dreyfus case. Neither he nor his neighbors
can let it alone. It is like the bitterness of aloes in all their
conversation.
One resource he still has; one neighbor, better still, one housemate,
with whom he can discuss anything, even the “Affaire,” with no risk
of being stoned or misunderstood. His dog Riquet, though he “does not
understand irony” (a congenital deficiency, it must have been, with
such opportunities), is to our _Maître de Conférences à la Faculté des
Lettres_ a true friend in need. For that matter, indeed, M. Bergeret
is probably not the only man who has found it one of the best points
in a dog’s favor that you can say to him anything you please. If your
human neighbor stands in perishing need of wholesome truth, or if you
stand in sore need of expressing it to him, and if there happens to be
some not unnatural unwillingness on his part, or some momentary lack
of courage on yours, why, you have only to deliver your message to him
vicariously, as it were, to the sensible relief of your own mind, if
not to the edification of his.
“Riquet,” said M. Bergeret, after a vain endeavor to make one of his
brother provincials submit himself to reason, “Riquet, your velvety
ears hear not him who speaks best, but him who speaks loudest.” And
Riquet, well used to his master’s conversational eccentricities, took
the compliment in good part; in much better part, at all events, than
any human interlocutor would have been likely to take it. For really,
unless one actually lost one’s temper, one could not say just that to a
neighbor and equal, especially if it happened to be true.
For a heretic living among the orthodox there is nothing like keeping a
dog. So we were ready to say and leave it; but we bethink ourselves in
season that there is a more excellent way. Keep a dog, if you will, but
keep also the pen of a novelist. Then all your beliefs and half beliefs
and unbeliefs, all your benevolently contemptuous opinions of men and
of men’s institutions, all your treasures of irony and satire, dear as
these ever are to the man who possesses them, instead of being wasted
upon a pair of velvety ears, may be trumpeted to the world at large
through the lips of a third party, a “character,” so called, some M.
Bergeret, if you can invent him, or an Abbé Coignard.
It is one of the best reasons for reading fiction, by the way, provided
it is written by a man of insight and force, that he is so much more
likely to tell us what he thinks when he is not compelled to speak in
his own person.
A happy lot is the novelist’s. Such a more than angelic liberty as he
enjoys, so comfortably irresponsible and blameless as he is, whatever
happens! One thinks again of Jérôme Coignard, concerning whom too
little is finding its way into this paper. That grand old Christian and
reprobate, as we know, could live pretty much as he listed, and hold
pretty much such “opinions” as pleased him, at ease all the while in
the assurance that somewhere in a deep inner closet, fast under lock
and key, he preserved a faith in the Christian mysteries so perfect
and unsoiled--never having been subjected to any earthly contact--that
the good St. Peter, when the inevitable time should come, would be sure
to pass its possessor into the good place without a question.
Yet it will never do for us to intimate that M. Anatole France has
sought to save either comfort or reputation by talking through a mask.
His theological, political, and socialistic heresies, if you call them
such, this being matter of opinion, have been too openly expounded,
and have brought him, as has already been told, too many enemies and
reproaches. The most that we started to say under this head was that
the storms into which the currents of the world have drifted him are
reflected in his “Histoire Contemporaine,” especially in the difference
between his M. Bergeret and his M. Bonnard.
Of the two, M. Bergeret has the greater philosophic interest for us, as
well as the greater number of rememberable things to say to us. If the
reader wishes to see him in two highly contrasted situations, let him
turn to the wonderful chapter describing his sensations and behavior
immediately after detecting his wife’s infidelity, and the beautiful
one in which he and his more practical sister visit together the old
Paris mansion in which they had passed some portion of their childhood.
They were house-hunting at the time, and the Master, falling into one
of his far-away, philosophical moods, remarked, apropos of something or
nothing: “Time is a pure idea, and space is no more real than time.”
“That may be so,” answered his matter-of-fact, executive-minded sister,
“but it costs more in Paris.”