Born to the literary life, one of the elect whose career is at once
a beacon of hope and despair for the less gifted or less fortunate,
Anatole François Thibault first saw the heart of Paris in the year
1844. The son of a bookseller, Noël France Thibault, his childhood was
spent in and around his father's book-shop, No. 9 du quai Voltaire,
and his juvenile memories are clustered about books. There are many
faithful pictures of old libraries and book-worms in his novels. He has
a moiety of that Oriental blood which is said to have tinctured the
blood of Montaigne, Charles Lamb, and Cardinal Newman. The delightful
Livre de Mon Ami gives his readers many glimpses of his early days.
Told with incomparable naïveté and verve, we feel in its pages the
charm of the writer's personality. A portrait of the youthful Anatole
reveals his excessive sensibility. His head was large, the brow was
too broad for the feminine chin, though the long nose and firm mouth
contradict the possible weakness in the lower part of the face. It
was in the eyes, however, that the future of the child might have
been discerned--they were lustrous, beautiful in shape, with the
fulness that argued eloquence and imagination. He was, he tells us,
a strange boy, whose chief ambition was to be a saint, a second St.
Simon Stylites, and, later, the author of a history of France in fifty
volumes. Fascinating are the chapters devoted to Pierre and Suzanne in
this memoir. His tenderness of touch and power of evoking the fairies
of childhood are to be seen in Abeille. The further development of the
boy may be followed in Pierre Nozière. In college life, he was not a
shining figure, like many another budding genius. He loved Virgil and
Sophocles, and his professors of the Stanislas College averred that
he was too much given to day-dreaming and preoccupied with matters
not set forth in the curriculum, to benefit by their instruction.
But he had wise parents--he has paid them admirable tributes of his
love--who gave him his own way. After some further study in L'Ecole
des Chartes, he launched himself into literature through the medium
of a little essay, La Légende de Sainte Radégonde, reine de France.
This was in 1859. Followed nine years later a study of Alfred de
Vigny, and in 1873 Les Poëmes dorées attracted the attention of the
Parnassian group then under the austere leadership of Leconte de Lisle.
Les Noces Corinthiennes established for him a solid reputation with
such men as Catulle Mendès, Xavier de Ricard, and De Lisle. For this
last-named poet young France exhibited a certain disrespect--the elder
was irritable, jealous of his dignity, and exacted absolute obedience
from his neophytes; unluckily a species of animosity arose between the
pair. When, in 1874, he accepted a post in the Library of the Senate,
Leconte de Lisle made his displeasure so heavily felt that France
soon resigned. But he had his revenge in an article which appeared
in _Le Temps_, and one that put the pompous academician into a fury.
Catulle Mendès sang the praises of the early France poems: "Les Noces
Corinthiennes alone would have sufficed to place him in the first rank,
and to preserve his name from the shipwreck of oblivion," declared M.
Mendès.
In 1881, with The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard he won the attention of
the reading world, a crown from the Academy, and the honour of being
translated into a half-dozen languages. From that time he became an
important figure in literary Paris, while his reputation was further
fortified by his criticisms of books--vagrom criticism, yet charged
with charm and learning. He followed Jules Claretie on _Le Temps_,
and there he wrote for five years (1886-1891) the _critiques_, which
appeared later in four volumes, entitled La Vie Littéraire. Georg
Brandes had said that, in the strict sense of the word, M. France is
not a great critic. But Anatole France has said this before him. He
despises pretentious official criticism, the criticism that distributes
good and bad marks to authors in a pedagogic fashion. He may not be so
"objective" as his one-time adversary, Ferdinand Brunetière, but he is
certainly more convincing.
The quarrel, a famous one in its day, seems rather faded in our days
of critical indifference. After his clever formula, that there is no
such thing as objective criticism, that all criticism but records the
adventures of one's soul among the masterpieces, France was attacked
by Brunetière--of whom the ever-acute Mr. James once remarked that
his "intelligence has not kept pace with his learning." Those critical
watchwords, "subjective" and "objective," are things of yester-year,
and one hopes, forever. But in this instance there was much ink spilt,
witty on the part of France, deadly earnest from the pen of Brunetière.
The former annihilated his adversary by the mode metaphysical. He
demonstrated that in the matter of judgment we are prisoners of our
ideas, and he also formed a school that has hardly done him justice,
for every impressionistic value is not necessarily valid. It is easy
to send one's soul boating among masterpieces and call the result
"criticism"; the danger lies in the contingency that one may not boast
the power of artistic navigation possessed by Anatole France, a master
steersman in the deeps and shallows of literature.
His own critical contributions are notable. Studies of Chateaubriand,
Flaubert, Renan, Balzac, Zola, Pascal, Villiers de l'Isle Adam,
Barbey d'Aurevilly, Rabelais, Hamlet, Baudelaire, George Sand, Paul
Verlaine--a masterpiece of intuition and sympathy this last--and many
others, vivify and adorn all they touch. A critic such as Sainte-Beuve,
or Taine, or Brandes, France is not; but he exercises an unfailing
spell in everything he signs. His "august vagabondage"--the phrase is
Mr. Whibley's--through the land of letters has proved a boon to all
students.
In 1897 he was received at the Académie Française, as the successor
of Ferdinand de Lesseps. His addresses at the tombs of Zola and Renan
are matters of history. As a public speaker, France has not the fiery
eloquence of Jean Jaurès or Laurent Tailhade, but he displays a cool
magnetism all his own. And he is absolutely fearless.
It is not through lack of technique that the structure of the France
novels is so simple, his tales plotless, in the ordinary meaning of
the word. Elaborate formal architecture he does not affect. The novel
in the hands of Balzac, Flaubert, Goncourt, and Zola would seem to
have reached its apogee as a canvas upon which to paint a picture of
manners. In the sociological novel, the old theatrical climaxes are
absent, the old recipes for cooking character find no place. Even the
love motive is not paramount. The genesis of this form may be found in
Balzac, in whom all the modern fiction is rooted. Certain premonitions
of the _genre_ are also encountered in L'Education Sentimentale of
Flaubert, with its wide gray horizons, its vague murmurs of the
immemorial mobs of vast cities, its presentation of undistinguished men
and women. Truly democratic fiction, by a master who hated democracy
with creative results.
Anatole France, Maurice Barrès, Edouard Estaunie, Rosny (the brothers
Bex), René Bazin, Bertrand, and the astonishing Paul Adam are in
the van of this new movement of fiction with ideas, endeavouring to
exorcise the "demon of staleness." French fiction in the last decade
of the past century saw the death of the naturalistic school. Paris
had become a thrice-told tale, signifying the wearisome "triangle"
and the chronicling of flat beer. Something new had to be evolved.
Lo! the sociological novel, which discarded the familiar machinery of
fiction, rather than miss the new spirit. It is unnecessary to add that
in America the fiction of ideas has not been, thus far, of prosperous
growth; indeed, it is viewed with suspicion.
Loosely stated, the fiction of Anatole France may be divided into
three kinds: fantastic, philosophic, and realistic. This arbitrary
grouping need not be taken literally; in any one of his tales we may
encounter all three qualities. For example, there is much that is
fantastic, philosophic, real, in that moving and wholly human narrative
of Sylvestre Bonnard. France's familiarity with cabalistic and exotic
literatures, his deep love and comprehension of the Latin and Greek
classics, his knowledge of mediæval legends and learning, coupled with
his command of supple speech, enable him to project upon a ground-plan
of simple narrative extraordinary variations.
The full flowering of France's knowledge and imagination in things
patristic and archæologic is to be seen in Thaïs, a masterpiece of
colour and construction. Thaïs is that courtesan of Alexandrin,
renowned for her beauty, wit, and wickedness, who was converted by the
holy Paphnutius, saint and hermit of the Thebaïd. How the devil finally
dislodges from the heart of Paphnutius its accumulation of virtue, is
told in an incomparable manner. If Flaubert was pleased by the first
offering of his pupil, Guy de Maupassant, (Boule de Suif), what would
he not have said after reading Thaïs? The ending of the wretched monk,
following his spiritual victories as a holy man perched on a pillar--a
memory of the author's youthful dream--is lamentable. He loves Thaïs,
who dies; and thenceforth he is condemned to wander, a vampire in this
world, a devil in the next. A monument of erudition, thick with pages
of jewelled prose, Thaïs is a book to be savoured slowly and never
forgotten. It is the direct parent of Pierre Loüys's Aphrodite, and
later evocations of the antique world.
Of great emotional intensity is Histoire Comique (1903). It is a study
of the histrionic temperament, and full of the major miseries and
petty triumphs of stage life. It also contains a startling incident,
the suicide of a lovelorn actor. The conclusion is violent and morbid.
The nature of the average actress has never been etched with such
acrid precision. There are various tableaux of behind and before the
footlights; a rehearsal, an actor's funeral, and the life of the
greenroom. Set forth in his most disinterested style, M. France shows
us that he can handle with ease so-called "objective" fiction. His
Doctor Trublet is a new France incarnation, wonderful and kindly old
consoler that he is. He is attached as house physician to the Odéon,
and to him the comedians come for advice. He ministers to them body and
soul. His discourse is Socratic. He has wit and wisdom. And he displays
the motives of the heroine so that we seem to gaze through an open
window. As vital as Sylvestre Bonnard, as Bergeret, Trublet is truly an
avatar of Anatole France. Histoire Comique! The title is a rare jest
aimed at mundane and bohemian vanity.
Passing Jocaste et le Chat maigre, and Le Puits de Sainte-Claire, we
come to L'Etui de Nacre, a volume of tales published in 1892. This
book may be selected as typical of a certain side of its author, a
side in which his fantasy and historic sense meet on equal terms. The
most celebrated is Le Procurateur de Judée, who is none other than
Pontius Pilate, old, disillusioned of public ambition, and grumbling,
as do many retired public officers, at the ingratitude of governments
and princes. To his friend he confesses finally, after his memory
has been vainly prompted, that he has no recollection of Jesus, a
certain anarchistic prophet of Judea, condemned by him to death. His
final phrases give us, as in the flare of lightning, the withering,
double-edged irony of the author. He has quite forgotten the tremendous
events that occurred in Jerusalem; forgotten, too, is Jesus. Not all
the stories that follow, not the pious records of Sainte Euphrosine, of
Sainte Oliverie et Liberetta, of Amyeus and Celestin, of Scolastica,
can rob the reader of this first cruel impression. In Balthasar the
narratives are of a superior quality. Nothing could be better, for
example, than the recital of the Ethiopian king who sought the love
of Balkis, Queen of Sheba, was accepted, after proofs of his bravery,
and then quietly forgotten. He studies the secrets of the spheres,
and when Balkis, repenting of her behaviour, seeks Balthasar anew, it
is too late. He has discovered the star of Bethlehem which leads him
straightway to the crib in company with Gaspar and Melchior, there to
worship the King of Kings. Powerful, too, in its fantastic evocation is
La Fille de Lilith, which relates the adventure of a modern Parisian
with a deathless daughter of Adam's first wife, Lilith, so named in the
Talmud. Laeta Acilia tells us one of France's best anecdotes about a
Roman matron residing at Marseilles during the reign of Tiberius. She
encounters Mary Magdalen, who almost converts the woman by a promise
of children, long desired. The conclusion is touching. It discloses
admirably the psychology of the two women. L'Oeuf Rouge is a tale
of Cæsarian madness, and the bizarre Le Réséda du Curé is so simply
related that we are disarmed by the style.
A graceful collection is that called Clio, illustrated in the highly
decorative manner of Mucha. Possibly the first is the best, a story
of Homer. Some confess a preference for a Gaulish recital of the
times when Cæsar went to Britain. Napoleon, too, is in the list.
An interesting discussion of Napoleon and the Napoleonic legend is
in a full-fledged novel, The Red Lily. "Napoleon," says one of its
characters, "was violent and frivolous; therefore profoundly human....
He desired with singular force, all that most men esteem and desire. He
had the illusions which he gave to the people. He believed in glory.
He retained always the infantile gravity which finds pleasure in
playing with swords and drums, and the sort of innocence which makes
good military men. It is this vulgar grandeur which makes heroes, and
Napoleon is the perfect hero. His brain never surpassed his hand--that
hand, small and beautiful, which crumpled the world.... Napoleon lacked
interior life.... He lived from the outside." In the art of attenuating
great reputations Anatole France has had few superiors.
This novel displeased his many admirers, who pretend to see in it the
influence of Paul Bourget. Yet it is a memorable book. Paul Verlaine is
depicted in it with freshness, that poet Paul, and his childish soul so
ironically, yet so lovingly distilled by his critic. There are glimpses
of Florence, of Paris; the study of an English girl-poet will arouse
pleasant memories of a lady well known to Italian, Parisian, and London
art life. And there is the sculptor, Jacques Dechartres, who may be a
mask, among many others of M. France. But Chouiette-Verlaine is the
lode-stone of the novel.
Where the ingenuity and mental flexibility, not to say historical
mimicry, of France are seen at their supreme, is in La Rôtisserie de la
Reine Pédauque. Jacques Tournebroche, or Turnspit, is an assistant in
the cook-shop of his father, in old Paris. He is of a studious mind,
and becomes the pupil of the Abbé Jérôme Coignard, "who despises men
with tenderness," a figure that might have stepped out of Rabelais,
though baked and tempered in the refining fires of M. France's
imagination. Such a man! Such an ecclesiastic! He adores his maker and
admires His manifold creations, especially wine, women, and song. He
has more than his share of human weakness, and yet you wonder why he
has not been canonised for his adorable traits. He is a glutton and a
wine-bibber, a susceptible heart, a pious and deeply versed man. Nor
must the rascally friar be forgotten, surely a memory of Rabelais's
Friar Jhon. There are scenes in this chronicle that would have made
envious the elder Dumas; scenes of swashbuckling, feasting, and
bloodshed. There is an astrologer who has about him the atmosphere of
the black art with its imps and salamanders, and an ancient Jew who
is the Hebraic law personified. So lifelike is Jérôme Coignard that
a book of his opinions was bound to follow. His whilom pupil Jacques
is supposed to be its editor. Le Jardin d'Epicure and Sur la Pierre
Blanche (1905) are an excuse for the opinions of M. France on many
topics--religion, politics, science, and social life.
Not-withstanding their loose construction, they are never inchoate.
That the ideas put forth may astound by their perversity, their
novelty, their nihilism, their note of cosmic pessimism, is not to
be denied. Our earth, "a miserable small star," is a drop of mud
swimming in space, its inhabitants mere specks, whose doings are not
of importance in the larger curves of the universe's destiny. Every
illustration, geological, astronomical, and mathematical, is brought to
bear upon this thesis--the littleness of man and the uselessness of his
existence. But France loves this harassed animal, man, and never fails
to show his love. Interspersed with moralising are recitals of rare
beauty, Gallion and Par la Porte de Corne ou par la Porte d'Ivoire.
Here the classic scholar, that is the base of France's temperament,
fairly shines.
In the four volumes of Histoire Contemporaine we meet a new Anatole
France, one who has deserted his old attitude of Parnassian
impassibility for a suave anarchism, one who enters the arena of
contemporaneous life bent on slaughter, though his weapon is the
keen blade, never the rude battle-axe of polemics. It is his first
venture in the fiction of sociology; properly speaking, it is the
psychology of the masses, not exactly as Paul Adam handles it in his
striking and tempestuous Les Lions (a book Balzacian in its fury of
execution), but with the graver temper of the philosopher. He paints
for us a provincial university town with its intrigues, religious,
political, and social. The first of the series is L'Orme du Mail;
follow Le Mannequin d'Osier, L'Anneau d'Améthyste, and Monsieur
Bergeret à Paris (1901). The loop that ensnares this quartet of novels
is the simple motive of ecclesiastical ambition. Not since Ferdinand
Fabre's L'Abbé Tigrane has French literature had such portraits of
the priesthood; Zola's ecclesiastics are ill-natured caricatures. The
Cardinal Archbishop, Abbé Lataigne, and the lifelike Abbé Guitrel,
with the silent, though none the less desperate, fight for the vacant
bishopric of Turcoing--these are the three men who with Bergeret carry
the story on their shoulders. About them circle the entire diocese
and the tepid life of a university town. Yet anything further from
melodramatic machinations cannot be imagined. Even the clerics of
Balzac seem exaggerated in comparison. The protagonist is a professor,
a master of conference of the University Faculty, a worthy man and
earnest, though by no means of an exalted talent. He has the misfortune
of being married to a worldly woman who does not attempt to understand
him, much less to love him. She deceives him. The discovery of this
deceit is an episode the most curious in fiction. It would be diverting
if it were not painful. It reveals in Bergeret the preponderance of
the man of thought over the man of action. His pupil and false friend
is a classical scholar, therefore the affair might have been worse!
And he is given the scholar's excuse as a plea for forgiveness! But
hesitating as appears Bergeret, he utilises his wife's treachery as a
springboard from which to fly his miserable household. Henceforth, with
his devoted sister and daughter, he philosophises at ease and becomes
a Dreyfusard. His dog Riquet is the recipient of his deepest thoughts.
His monologues in the presence of this animal are the best in the book.
There are many characters in this serene and bitter tragi-comedy. A
contempt, almost monastic, peeps out in the treatment of his women.
They are often detestable. They behave as if an empire was at stake,
though it is only a conspiracy whereby Abbé Guitrel is made Bishop
of Turcoing. France always displays more pity for the frankly sinful
woman than for the frivolous woman of fashion. There is also a subplot,
the effort of a young Hebrew snob, Bonmont by name (Guttenberg,
originally), to get into the exclusive hunting set of the Duc de Brécé.
This hunt-button wins for the diplomatic Abbé Guitrel his coveted see.
M. France is unequalled in his portrayal of the modern French-Hebrew
millionaire, the Wallsteins and Bonmonts. He draws them without
_parti-pris_. His prefect, the easy-going, cynical Worms-Clavelin,
with his secret contempt of Jews and Gentiles alike, and his wife who
collects ecclesiastical bric-à-brac, are executed by a great painter
of character. He exposes with merciless impartiality a mob of men
and women in high life. But his aristocrats are no better than his
ecclesiastics or bankers. There is a comic Orléanist conspiracy. There
are happenings that set your hair on end, and a cynicism at times which
forces one to regret that the author left his study to mingle with the
world. Nor is the strain relieved when poor Bergeret goes to Paris;
there he is enmeshed by the Dreyfus party. There he comes upon stormy
days, though high ideals never desert him. He is as placid in the face
of contemptuous epithets and opprobrious newspaper attacks as he was
calm when stones were hurled at his windows in the provinces. A man
obsessed by general ideas, he is lovable and never a bore, though M.
Faguet and several other critics have cried him stupid. In the "fire
of the footlights" M. Bergeret pales. For the drama M. France has no
particular voice, though he has written several charming playlets. Even
the superior acting of Guitry could not make of Crainquibille much more
than a touching episode.
There is enough characterisation and incident in Histoire Contemporaine
to ballast a half-dozen novelists with material. And there are
treasures of humour and pathos. The success of the series has been
awe-inspiring; indeed, awe-inspiring is the success of all the France
books, and at a time when Parisian prophets of woe are lamenting the
decline of literature. Nevertheless, here is a man who writes like an
artist, whose work, web and woof, is literature, whose themes, with few
exceptions, are not of the popular kind, whose politics are violently
opposed to current superstition, whose very form is hybrid; yet he
sells, and has sold, in the hundreds of thousands. Literature cannot be
called moribund in the face of such a result. His is a case that sets
one speculating without undue emphasis upon a certain superiority of
French taste over English in the matter of fiction.
The Life of Jeanne d'Arc (1908), a work of scholarship and mixed
prejudices, does not, I am forced to admit, unduly interest me. Whether
the astonishing statements set forth therein are true is a question
that may concern Mr. Lang, but hardly the lovers of the real Anatole.
The Isle of Penguins (1908) gave him back to us in all his original
glory.
An art, ironical, easy, fugitive, divinely untrammelled, divinely
artificial, which, like a pure flame, blazes forth in an unclouded
heaven ... _la gay a scienza_; light feet; wit; fire; grace; the dance
of the stars; the tremor of southern light; the smooth sea--these
Nietzschean phrases might serve as an epigraph for the work of that
apostle of innocence and experience, Anatole France.
V