Part 12
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.”
Doctor Johnson called himself “an old struggler,” and the words come unbidden into our minds as we review M. Bergeret’s story. To us, we must confess, the old Latin professor seems almost as real a personage as the Great Cham of literature himself. We hope he is happy in his new post of honor at the Sorbonne. It was time, surely, that some of the quails and the manna should be found in his basket.
And now it is pleasant to add, by way of ending, that the latest book of M. Anatole France seems to indicate that he also, as well as the man of his creation, has come out into a larger place. His mood is quieter and less satirical, though he is still many degrees more serious than in the old days of “Thaïs” and “Sylvestre Bonnard.” “Sur la Pierre Blanche” is a work of the rarest distinction; not a book for the casual reader to hurry over in pursuit of a story (in a loose way of speaking it may be characterized as a volume of imaginary conversations), but one to be cherished and dwelt upon by such as love the perfection of art and are not averse to knowing what kind of thoughts visit a free-thinking, humanity-loving man, of a philosophical, half-conservative, half-radical turn of mind, in these days of social and political unrest, as he looks back upon the origins of Christianity and forward into those new and presumably brighter eras which we who live now may dream of, but never see.
The motto of the book explains the significance of its title: “You seem to have slept upon the white stone amongst the people of dreams.” Toleration, the spread of peace, imperialism, the socialistic evolution (following hard upon the capitalistic evolution, now at its height, or passing), the yellow peril, so called, the white peril, the future of Africa,--these are some of the larger and timelier questions considered. In general, the thoughts of the book are those of a scholar whose face is turned toward practical issues. The author is not concerned with any Utopia,--absolute justice, by his theory, being not a thing to be so much as hoped for,--but with some quite possible amelioration of the existing order, and some gradual, natural, irresistible approaches (irresistible because they are the work of Nature herself) toward a state of society less unequal, not to say less unendurable, than the present.
Let those scoff who will; for ourselves we rejoice to see the man, like the boy, “dreaming on things to come.”
At the same time, we should not be sorry to believe that, in the heat of writing, and out of the love, natural to all of us, of making facts conform to theory, we may have laid a thought too much of emphasis upon the alterations through which his mind has passed. His days, we suspect, have, after all, been pretty closely bound each to each by natural piety. We recall his fine saying about Renan, brought up in the Roman Church and dying an unbeliever, that he changed little. “He was like his native land, where clouds float across the sky, but the soil is of granite, and oaks are deeply rooted.”
Changed or unchanged, in his first manner or his second, Republican or Nationalist, socialist, anti-imperialist, “intellectual,” or what not, who will refuse to read a writer who can express himself after such a fashion?
VERBAL MAGIC
VERBAL MAGIC
A music-lover and devoted concert-goer of my acquaintance--“uninstructed, but sensitive,” to characterize him in his own words--is accustomed to say that he distinguishes several kinds of enjoyable music. One kind is interesting: here he puts the work of composers so unlike as Berlioz and Brahms. Another kind is exciting; under which head he ranks the greater part of Wagner and the Bach fugues! And still another kind is charming. Whenever he uses this last epithet, he adds an explanation, the word being now so worn by indiscriminate handling as hardly to pass by itself at its full face value. He means that the music thus described--heavenly music, he sometimes calls it (of which his typical example seems to be Schubert’s unfinished symphony)--has upon him an indescribable ravishing effect, as if it really and literally charmed him. Exactly why this should be, he does not profess to decide. All such compositions are highly melodious and in some good degree simple; but then there is plenty of other excellent music to which the same terms seem to be equally applicable, which nevertheless lays him under no such spell. “I don’t undertake to explain it,” he says; “so far as I am concerned, it is all a matter of feeling.”
Analogous to this is my own experience--and, I suppose, that of readers in general--with certain fragments of poetry, which have for me an ineffable and apparently inexhaustible charm. Other poetry is beautiful, enjoyable, stimulating, everything that poetry ought to be, except that it lacks this final something which, not to leave it absolutely without a name, we may call magic. Whatever it be called, it pertains not to any poet’s work as a whole, nor in strictness, I think, to any poem as a whole, but to single verses or couplets. And to draw the line still closer, verse of this magical quality--though here, to be sure, I may be disclosing nothing but my own intellectual limitations--is discoverable only in the work of a certain few poets.
The secret of the charm is past finding out: so I like to believe, at all events. Magic is magic; if it could be explained, it would be something else; to use the word is to confess the thing beyond us. Such verses were never written to order or by force of will, since genius and our old friend--or enemy--“an infinite capacity for taking pains,” so far from being one, are not even distantly related. The poet himself could never tell how such perfection was wrought or whence it came; nor is its natural history to be made out by any critic. The best we can do with it is to enjoy it, thankful to have our souls refreshed and our taste purified by its “heavenly alchemy;” as the best that our musical friend can do with the unfinished symphony is to surrender himself to its fascination, and be carried by it, as I have heard him more than once express himself, up to “heaven’s gate.”
And yet it is not in human nature to forego the asking of questions. The mind will have its inquisitive moods, and sometimes it loves to play, in a kind of make-believe, with mysteries which it has no thought of solving,--a harmless and perhaps not unprofitable exercise, if entered upon modestly and pursued without illusions. We may wonder over things that interest us, and even go so far as to talk about them, though we have no expectation of saying anything either new or final.
Take, then, the famous lines from Wordsworth’s “Solitary Reaper:”--
“Will no one tell me what she sings?-- Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow For old, unhappy, far-off things, And battles long ago.”
The final couplet of this stanza is a typical example of what is here meant by verbal magic. I am heartily of Mr. Swinburne’s mind when he says of it, “In the whole expanse of poetry there can hardly be two verses of more perfect and profound and exalted beauty;” although my own slender acquaintance with literature as a whole would not have justified me in so sweeping a mode of speech. The utmost that I could have ventured to say would have been that I knew of no lines more supremely, indescribably, perennially beautiful. Nor can I sympathize with Mr. Courthope in his contention that the lines are nothing in themselves, but depend for their “high quality” upon their association with the image of the solitary reaper. On such a point the human consciousness may possibly not be infallible; but at all events, it is the best ground we have to go on, and unless I am strangely deluded, my own delight is in the verses themselves, and not merely nor mainly in their setting. Yet of what cheap and common materials they are composed, and how artlessly they are put together! Nine every-day words, such as any farmer might use, not a fine word among them, following each other in the most unstudied manner--and the result perfection!
By the side of this example let us put another, equally familiar, from Shakespeare:--
“We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.”
Here, too, all the elements are of the plainest and commonest; and yet these few short, homely words, every one in its natural prose order, and not over-musical,--“such stuff” and “little life” being almost cacophonous,--have a magical force, if I may presume for once to speak in Mr. Swinburne’s tone, unsurpassable in the whole range of literature. We hear them, if we _do_ hear them, and all things earthly seem to melt and vanish.
Not unlike them in their sudden effectiveness is a casual expression of Burke’s. For in prose also, and even in a political pamphlet, if the pamphleteer have a genius for words, an inspired and unexpected phrase (and inspired phrases are always unexpected, that being one mark of their divinity) may take the spirit captive. Thus, while Burke is talking about the troubles of the time, being now in the opposition, and blaming the government as in duty bound, suddenly he lets fall the words, “Rank, and office, and title, and all the solemn plausibilities of the world;” and for me, I know not whether others may be similarly affected, politics and government are gone, an “insubstantial pageant faded.” “All the solemn plausibilities of the world,” I say to myself, and for the present, though I am hardly beyond the first page of the pamphlet, I care not to read further; like Emerson at the play, who had ears for nothing more after Hamlet’s question to the ghost:--
“What may this mean, That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel Revisit’st thus the glimpses of the moon?”
I am writing simply as a lover of poetry, “uninstructed, but sensitive,” not as a critic, having no semblance of claim to that exalted title,--among the very highest, to my thinking, as the men who wear it worthily are among the rarest; great critics, to this date, having been fewer even than great poets; but I believe, or think I believe, in the saying of one of the brightest of modern Frenchmen: “Le bon critique est celui qui raconte les aventures de son âme au milieu des chefs-d’œuvre.” So I delight in this adventure of Emerson’s mind in the midst of “Hamlet,” as I do also in a similar one of Wordsworth’s, who was wont to say, as reported by Hazlitt, that he could read Milton’s description of Satan--
“Nor appeared Less than Archangel ruined, and the excess Of glory obscured”--
till he felt “a certain faintness come over his mind from a sense of beauty and grandeur.”
One thing, surely, we may say about verse of this miraculous quality: it does not appeal first or principally to the ear; it is almost never rich in melodic beauty, as such beauty is commonly estimated. It is musical, no doubt, but after a secret manner of its own. Alliteration, assonance, a pleasing alternation and interchange of vowel sounds, all such crafty niceties are hidden, if not absent altogether,--so completely hidden that the reader never thinks of them as either present or absent.[11] The appeal is to the imagination, not to the ear, and more is suggested than said. Such lines, along with their simplicity of language, may well have something of mysteriousness. Yet they must not puzzle the mind. The mystery must not be of the smaller sort, that provokes questions. If the curiosity is teased in the slightest to discover what the words mean, the spell is broken. There is no enchantment in a riddle.
Neither is there charm in an epigram, be it never so happy, nor in any conceit or play upon words.
“I could not love thee, Dear! so much, Loved I not Honor more,”--
nothing of this kind, perfect as it is, will answer the test. Mere cleverness might compass a thing like that. Indeed, the very cleverness of it, its courtly gracefulness, its _manner_ (one seems to see the bodily inflection and the wave of the hand that go with the phrase), the spice of smartness in it, are enough to remove it instantly out of the magic circle. Magical verse is neither pretty nor clever. It speaks not of itself. If you think of _it_, the charm has failed.
In my own case, in lines that are magical to me, the suggestion or picture is generally of something remote from the present, a calling up of deeds long done and men long vanished, or else a foreboding of that future day when _all_ things will be past; a suggestion or picture that brings an instant soberness,--reverie, melancholy, what you will,--that is the most delicious fruit of recollection. It suits with this idea that the verse has mostly a slow, meditative movement, produced, if the reader chooses to pick it to pieces, by long vowels and natural pauses, or by final and initial consonants standing opposite each other, and, between them, holding the words apart; such a movement as that of the Wordsworth couplet first quoted,--
“For old, unhappy, far-off things, And battles long ago,”--
or as that of the still more familiar slow-running line from the sonnets of Shakespeare,--
“Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,”--
a movement that not merely harmonizes with the complexion of the thought, but heightens it to an extraordinary degree. Not that the poet wrote with that end consciously in view, or altered a syllable to secure it. Wordsworth’s lines, it is safe guessing, were for this time given to him, and dropped upon the paper as they are, faultless beyond even his too meddlesome desire to alter and amend. Indeed, in this as in all the best verse, it is not the metrical structure that produces the imaginative result, but exactly the opposite.