Part 11
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.”
Such are the services of journalism to literature! A man never writes 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.