ANATOLE FRANCE--VERSATILE STYLIST IN FICTION AND ESSAYS
The prize of 1921 has been awarded:
Anatole France (Thibault, Jacques Anatole), Paris, born 1844; died
1924: “in recognition of his splendid activity as an author,--an
activity marked by noble style, large-hearted humanity, charm and
French _esprit_.”[136]
When Anatole France, who had been the Nobel prize winner of 1921, died
in the autumn of 1924, there was scarcely a journal of standing in any
country that did not summarize his influence upon letters and life in
France and other nations. Distinctly Parisian in traits and expression,
this writer was broadly international in his analysis of humanity, in
his genial mockery of life, in his dreamy idealism which coexisted
with a ruthless realism. He had lived the full span of life--and
_lived_ it to the end of his eighty years. He had written in moods of
biting satire and emotional intensity; he had found themes in history,
current topics, and the future. As he neared the close of his life,
the emphasis was more upon the genial, kindly aspects of humanity;
his later literary expressions were memories of his boyhood and youth,
the completion of that cycle of intuitive memories that began with _My
Friend’s Book_ (1885) and _Pierre Nozière_, and ended with _Little
Pierre_ and _The Bloom of Life_ (1922).
[Illustration:
_Copyright, 1925, by J. B. Lippincott Company._
_Photograph by Choumoff, Paris_
ANATOLE FRANCE]
Between these volumes of imaginative and reminiscent delights, which
form a better biography of his mind and spirit than has otherwise been
written, Anatole France produced such diverse literary types, such
books of ironic and cynical flavor as _The Red Lily_, _Thaïs_, _The
Revolt of the Angels_, _The Amethyst Ring_, _At the Sign of the Reine
Pédauque_, _Crainquebille_, _The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife_, _The
Elm Tree on the Mall_, _Penguin Island_, _The Gods Are Athirst_, _The
Life of Jeanne d’Arc_, _The Human Comedy_, and volumes of critical
essays and poems. To the books of more reminiscent flavor, with wistful
idealism, he was indebted, especially, for the honor of the Nobel
prize. These had already won the tributes--and critical estimates--of
readers of European countries, of Canada, United States and South
America. Few writers have had such diverse judgments passed upon them;
in many cases, the temperamental traits of the critic influence his
reactions to this author; in other instances, most effusive tributes,
like those by James Lewis May and Paul Gsell, of recent years (1924),
have brought natural reactions in more unvarnished truth, tinged
with wit and naturalism, like the biography by Jean-Jacques Brousson:
_Anatole France Himself_ which has been called facetiously _Anatole
France in Bed-Slippers_ (the French title reads _Anatole France en
pantouffles_, 1925). Mr. May has written as a friend and warm admirer;
Paul Gsell, as a disciple; M. Brousson, as private secretary and
fearless narrator.
It might be said that Anatole France was _born_ into the inheritance of
books in 1844, for his father, François Noël Thibault, was a bookseller
of repute throughout Paris and its environs. Son of a shoemaker in
Anjou, this elder Thibault had taught himself to read and write while
he had been in military service as a young man. At his bookshops in
the Quai Malaquais and Quai Voltaire gathered scholars and authors,
iconoclasts in politics and letters and religion; the shopkeeper was
a Royalist and a fervent Catholic. In the character of Dr. Nozière,
in _Pierre Nozière_, his son “has taken away the bookshop,” as he
confesses, but he has revealed many traits of his father’s character.
In the Epilogue to _The Bloom of Life_ are other memories that may be
“capricious,” as he admits, but are none the less true “records” of his
childhood. Here his father’s lack of business instincts is suggested
as elsewhere--he would often prefer to _read_ his books rather than to
_sell_ them. The influence of these boyhood days in this bookshop,
with contact directly with thinkers and writers, with wits and critics,
must have been vital and permeating in the later development of Anatole
France as psychologist and stylist.
In his last hours, we are told, this famous writer who had been “a
genial mocker at life,” an epicurean and scoffer, a scholar of wide
culture, called upon the name of his mother. She had been the first,
and one of the most significant factors in his life-development. There
are passages of less deferential tone about her in _Anatole France
Himself: a Boswellian Record_, by Jean-Jacques Brousson (Philadelphia,
1925). She was of good Flemish family, with unfailing _esprit_ and
optimism, practical and able to “attend to the gears of household
management that got loose sometimes,” with an absent-minded father.
She was, however, a rare story-teller and devoted to her boy with
the unusual gifts which she alone, in his boyhood, could foresee and
encourage. How happy he was at home is revealed in many chapters of
his books--not alone those of acknowledged reminiscence but others
like _The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard_ and an occasional essay _On Life
and Letters_. By contrast with the joys of home--the delicate table
linen and decanters, the “tranquil faces,” the easy talk--he disliked
the classrooms and the restrictions of school life, declaring, “Ah,
Home is a famous school.” A sense of humor and a keen interest in
humanity made the life at the Collège Stanislas endurable but he loved
solitude; he resented the gibes of instructors and students, and he
stole away to the quays along the Seine at the hour of noon recess to
eat his luncheon--or to forget to eat it--and returned too late for the
afternoon session and his chance to recite.
It was his mother’s faith and intuition that refused to be severe with
him, even when the professor’s report of his school work was “progress
nil--conduct bad,” even when his father accepted the verdict of M.
Dubois, the professor, that the boy would never accomplish anything in
arts or sciences. Then his mother whispered words that he never forgot:
“Be a writer, my son; you have brains and you will make the envious
hold their tongues.” If his mother was the first vital influence in
making her son a world-famous writer, the second was the city of Paris
that he loved, studied and photographed on his memory from boyhood
to old age. The parks and avenues, the Louvre and the Trocadéro, the
sidewalk cafés and the bookshops beyond beautiful Notre-Dame, the
vivacious men and women, the workers on the streets and the children
in the playgrounds, the stately palaces and the tiny rooms above a
publishing shop--all these aspects of Paris form a panoramic picture in
his books.
In 1868, when Anatole France was an unknown, dreamy, book-browsing
young man of twenty-four, there appeared an _Etude_ of Alfred de
Vigny which was _his_ tribute to the poet who was “the exemplar of a
beautiful life, which gave beautiful work to the world.” The author was
known as one of a group of young men who gathered in the rue de Condé
to discuss poetry and other forms of writing. Two years later he was
serving in the army, trying to forget the shells that dropped in front
of him by reading Vergil or playing his flute.[137] In the years that
followed he wrote political satires, prefaces, read manuscripts for the
publisher Lemerre, collaborated in Larousse’s dictionary and did other
“odds and ends” of an editorial kind.
After the Franco-Prussian War, Lemerre published the small book of
verse to which Anatole France had devoted his leisure and zest,
_Poèmes après_. In spite of some stanzas of lyrical beauty they
attracted little attention. Better known is _The Bride of Corinth_ that
appeared three years later and revealed the author’s keen analysis of
paganism and early Christianity. It is translated with other plays
and poems by Wilfrid Jackson and Emilia Jackson, 1920. For a time
he was assistant to Leconte de Lisle in the Senate Library.[138]
As a witty conversationalist and brilliant companion, he was a
favorite in the salons of Catulle Mendes and Mme. Nina de Callias,
the would-be poet. At the home of M. de Bonnières, where gathered
actors, writers, and musicians, Anatole France was always welcomed. In
1881 appeared the book which registered the beginning of his popular
acclaim, _The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard_; one may say that it is
_the book_ by which, during the last forty years, the author has been
familiar to international readers, old and young. It is a simple
tale, sentimental, without much plot but with two marked qualities of
lasting appeal--sincerity and charm. Ten years later he laughed at its
continued popularity, especially the claim that it was “a masterpiece,”
saying “it was a masterpiece of platitudinousness,” adding that he
wrote it for a prize and won it.[139]
Predictions of future fame were expressed in reviews of this book and,
four years later, the public responded to _My Friend’s Book_, the first
of the cycle of youthful memories, vignettes of life which reveal the
author’s poetic reveries and friendly humanity. They differ from _The
Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard_ as the author gives here photographic
pictures of his boyhood, adolescence, and young manhood while in
Sylvestre Bonnard, the aged, lovable book-collector and Academician,
he gives an imaginative picture of what the author _may be_. He is
lonely and dominated by his cat, Hamilcar, and his housekeeper,
cherishing the romantic memories of Clementine, and is urged by these
sentiments to his sacrifice for her daughter. A few of his boyhood
memories, however, are incorporated into the early chapters of this
book--the craving for a doll, the silhouette of the uncle, Captain
Victor, and other pages of wistfulness and humor. Lafcadio Hearn, in
his Introduction to the translation of this classic _roman_, says
words that may be applied to the cycle of memories (for they all have
hall-marks of the author’s superb paradoxical genius). “If by Realism
we mean Truth, which alone gives value to any study of human nature,
we have in Anatole France a very dainty realist;--if by Romanticism we
understand that unconscious tendency of the artist to elevate truth
itself beyond the range of the familiar, and into the emotional realm
of aspiration, then Anatole France is at times a romantic.... It is
because of his far rarer power to deal with what is older than any art,
and withal more young, and incomparably more precious: the beauty of
what is beautiful in human emotion, that this story will live.”[140]
After 1886 the weekly “Causerie,” which Anatole France contributed _On
Life and Letters_ to the Paris _Temps_, increased his literary fame and
established his rank as critic. Here appeared such diverse, stimulating
judgments upon writers of the day, as Maupassant and Dumas, Balzac and
Marie Bashkirtseff, François Coppée (compared with Sully-Prudhomme and
Frédéric Plessis), Renan and George Sand; among topics of more general
interest were “Prince Bismarck,” “The Young Girl of the Past and the
Young Girl of the Present,” and “Virtue in France.” Four volumes of
these essays, _On Life and Letters_, have been translated into English.
It was nine years after _The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard_ that another
book appeared to rivet attention upon this industrious, progressive
author. He once declared that he wrote the earlier book “to please
the public” but that he wrote the later, _Thaïs_, to please himself.
In development of skill in fiction it is superior; it has been well
described as “an epic of eternal struggle between the spirit and the
senses.”[141] The author had passed through some emotional crises since
he wrote his earlier books of reminiscence, notably _My Friend’s Book_,
with its reflections of his happy home life and the whimsical domestic
discussions between the wife of his youth and himself about their
daughter, Susanne. He had traveled and become imbued with sensuous
beauty of southern lands; he had been annoyed, to the verge of anger,
by reactionists, represented in _Thaïs_ by Palaemon, “who would banish
joy and beauty from the world.” He made Nicias, often a skeptic in
his surface sentiments, his spokesman. The poet and the realist are
commingled in this tale of disillusionment, even as they are found
in the later, more vehement books of the novelist-satirist, _The Red
Lily_, _At the Sign of the Reine Pédauque_ (considered by many critics
his masterwork), _The Amethyst Ring_, _The Gods Are Athirst_, _The
Wicker-Work Woman_, _Penguin Island_, _The Revolt of the Angels_, and
shorter stories like _Crainquebille_, _The White Stone_, _The Seven
Wives of Bluebeard_, and _Tales from a Mother of Pearl Casket._
Fresh memories of the Dreyfus Case were awakened by his poignant satire
in _Penguin Island_ with its elements of burlesque. The author’s
historical research, which bore ripe fruits in _The Life of Jeanne
d’Arc_, is revealed in _The Gods Are Athirst_, with sardonic wit and
dramatic passages between Evariste, his mother, and his mistress.
Julie, his beautiful sister, appeals to the reader’s sympathy. The
ex-farmer of taxes, whose livelihood is now made by cutting out
cardboard dancing dolls, is a haunting character. He voices, perhaps,
the author’s attitude to life at this period--that is was full of
disillusionment and defeats but was not worth the cost of one’s anxiety
to the point of despair. In some of these satiric tales of life,
notably _The Revolt of the Angels_ when they come to Paris and behold
certain social conditions, there are passages so naturalistic that they
offend tastes of less “sophisticated” readers. Some of the books by
Anatole France were tabooed in libraries before the award of the Nobel
prize; the year after that was given, all of his works, without due
discrimination, were “placed on the Index” by the Roman Curia because
of excess of utterances that were communistic and anti-clerical in
tone. When he went to Stockholm to receive this prize in person he
was reported to have said, regarding the Treaty of Versailles, “the
most horrible of wars was followed by a treaty which was not a treaty
of peace but a prolongation of the war. The downfall of Europe is
inevitable unless at long last the spirit of reason is imported into
its councils.”[142]
In contrast to these fearless words that brought him the condemnation
of French journals, he made more urbane response to the literary honor
conferred upon him, adding to his personal gratitude, tribute to the
Swedish Academy: “Its decisions possess an international value,
and I rejoice in it, for it is a confirmation of what is, for me,
the principal lesson of the war, the beneficent influence exerted
by intellectual intercourse with other countries.” There had been
rumors, well attested, that the young men of France had repudiated
Anatole France as a leader, seeking other exponents of philosophy and
echoing the adverse comments upon him by Maurice Barrès and Henri
Massis, editor of _La Revue Universelle_. They contended that he
failed to give them a constructive philosophy in the hour of need.
He never claimed to be a philosopher; he was an observer of life, a
commentator, a poet-dreamer, a lover of justice, an ironist, a stylist
rather than a thinker. He was not widely read in other languages and
philosophies as were Georg Brandes or Sainte-Beuve. He bore some
relationship to Brotteaux of his story, _The Gods Are Athirst_, who was
condemned to death because of his lack of reverence for great political
revolutionists. Anatole France saw the world as a subject for keen
wit that is often sardonic but seldom bitter. He found life sadly in
contrast with some of his visions as a youth but he did not despair of
a future of more equality of conditions, more tolerance in creeds. Paul
Gsell, one of his hero-worshipers, in his records of conferences at the
Villa Saïd, the Paris home of “the Master,” has recalled significant
thoughts uttered by him upon “The Credo of a Skeptic,” “Politics in
the Academy,” and other themes.[143]
In his _Boswellian Record_ by Jean-Jacques Brousson (Lippincott,
1925) there are frank confessions of his “show conversations” and his
“contradictory ideas” which caused shyness and lack of clarity of
mind. He recalls “the almond icing” which he put on his first version
of _The Life of Jeanne d’Arc_, to be “picturesque” and to please “the
sanctimonious.” These “snap-shots” of Anatole France “en pantouffles,”
in moods of relaxation, are even less interesting than some of the
quotations of serious sort from the words of this master of style. Two
significant sentences will be often quoted; “You become a good writer
just as you become a good joiner; by planing down your sentences.”...
“People take me for a juggler, a sophist, a droll fellow. In reality I
have passed my life twisting dynamite into curl-papers.”[144]
Without question the return of Anatole France to the spirit and mode
of his earlier books, to the idealism, combined with photographic
vividness in _The Bloom of Life_, influenced the decision of the
Swedish Academy in his favor, in 1921. He was, in his old age,
living again the scenes of his youth--discussing with his schoolmate,
Fontanet, “People Who Do Not Give Enough”; playing truant from the
ferule of Monsieur Crottu whose rule “was a tissue of injustices”;
recalling “Days of Enchantment” when he went to his first play;
photographing “Monsieur Dubois, the Quiz,” and plucky Phillipine
Gobelin; and yielding again to the spell of Vergil and the Sixth
Eclogue, with its wonder and beauty. The stinging irony disappeared
from these later pages--irony which motivated such books (or portions
of them) as _Histoire contemporaine_ and _The Revolt of the Angels_ or
“A Mummer’s Tale” in _Histoire comique_.
Dual personality which resides in all persons was most marked in this
writer of charm and force, this exponent of his race, and of his age
among _all_ races. “Compassionate idealism” is the phrase chosen by
James Lewis May to explain the polemical essays and radical criticisms
of governments and religions, that are expressed or implied in many
of his writings. James Huneker calls him “a true humanist”; he thinks
he loved humanity and learning; he loved words, also, but he was “a
modern thinker, who has shed the despotism of the positivist dogma
and boasts the soul of a chameleon.”[145] He stresses his irony which
is “Pagan” and his pity which is “Christian.” Sisley Huddlestone, in
_Those Europeans_, devotes a chapter to Anatole France as “Ironist
and Dreamer.” The phrases are well chosen; the interpretation of
his salient traits is condensed but convincing: “In his irony one
constantly catches glimpses of beauty. By showing us life as it is,
though without bitterness, he indicates life as it should be. He
teaches tolerance and placidity in an age in which even the reformers
add to the confusion by their reckless energy.”[146]
FOOTNOTES:
[136] Inscription with the Nobel Prize Award in Literature, 1921.
[137] _Anatole France: the Man and His Work_ by James Lewis May, London
and New York, 1923, p. 72.
[138] _Studies from Ten Literatures_ by Ernest Boyd, New York, 1925.
[139] _Anatole France Himself_ by Jean-Jacques Brousson, Philadelphia,
1925.
[140] London, Bodley Head, Crown Edition, 1924, pp. v and ix. By
permission of Dodd, Mead & Co.
[141] _Anatole France: the Man and His Work_ by James Lewis May,
London, 1924, p. 120. By permission of Dodd, Mead & Co.
[142] _Ibid._, p. 108. By permission of Dodd, Mead & Co.
[143] _The Opinions of Anatole France_, recorded by Paul Gsell; in
American edition, _The Conversations_, etc., New York, 1924.
[144] _Anatole France Himself: a Boswellian Record_, by Jean-Jacques
Brousson, pp. 95, 347, Philadelphia, 1925. By permission of J. B.
Lippincott Co.
[145] _Egoists_ by James Huneker, New York, 1909, p. 143. By permission
of Charles Scribner’s Sons.
[146] _Those Europeans_ by Sisley Huddlestone, New York, 1924. By
permission of G. P. Putnam’s Sons.