Anatole France

UNIVERSIT! OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES

A NAT O L E F RA NC E

PIAGET S HANKS

CHI CAGO LONDON THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING COMPAN!

1 9 1 9

CONTENTS

The Child in Old Pari s

‘ The ! outh and the Parnass ian

F rom Natu rali s t to Skepti c : Sylvestre B on nard ( 1879-82 )

The D re amer o f the Pas t : Ea rly Ta les and Thais ( 1883 -92 )

The Monk o f Lett ers : Criti ci sm and the Reaction to Li f e ( 1887-92 )

The D i scipl e o f Vo lt a i re : The Abbé Jerome and F ra Gi ovanni ( 1893 -95 )

The Ironi c Reali s t : Pro f essor B ergeret and “ ' ” the Aﬁair ( 1897- 1901)

The Sociali s t and the Re f ormer : Crainque bille ( 1902 -05 )

I! The H r n . i st o i an a d the Sati ris t o f Human ity : The Pengu i ns ( 1906-1914)

! os scri n n u . P t pt a d Co cl sion

Chrono logy o f the Pri ncip al W o rk s o f Anatol e F rance

Index

P REFACE

MONG the would-be volunteers of 1 9 14 D was the virtual ean of French letters , a man of seventy years . We were surprised , not at his age but at his transformation ; for acifism nearly twenty years he had preached p , and the brotherhood of man . We were sur prised because he was Anatole France . Yet c -five s arcely twenty years before , this radical was known as a skeptic , an intellectual hedon 1 88 ist , a dilettante ; in 9 no one could foresee the future dreamer of reform in the nihilistic i S o inconsis pages of Tha s . his final heroic tenc y is only a part of a greater problem , a ’ single phase in a life s drama , whereby a skep tic and a pessimist developed into a man of action . e This probl m , this drama , must be the excuse of the present volume . Its hero is perhaps our greatest living man of letters . For nearly half a century Anatole France has found the muses viii M gracious . He has climbed the Sacred ount ; he has had for many years his cult and his votaries . But his company might be larger ought to be larger now that we have such ad mirable translations of the master . His com pany must be larger , if reason and humanity are ever to do away with war . If that vision may be brought ever so little nearer , if some individualists and pessimists should find in his pages the Damascus road toward a broader and brighter ideal , this book will find its apo logia .

The story of an intellectual Odyssey , it was prompted by the same optimism as the modern ’ traveler s log . In most books of travel the best things are the illustrations . So with quotations in biography and criticism—prudence no less M . v than reverence requires them oreo er , even the temptation of a re—ady camera is less than the desire to translate to attempt a transla tion of Anatole France , a perpetual challenge ’ despite the quality of one s results . To quote wherever possible , to condense and still quote , and to strive to set one ’ s mosaic in a surface not absolutely disparate is of course a bit p re sump tuons but how else could one present a writer so personal , whose thoughts and impressions and memories are day by day woven into his work ? P With such a literary roteus , no stippled portrait is worth a series of sketches . One must tell the history of his ideas—the story of his ’ S o mind s development . , beginning with his heredity and early environment , we follow the poet and thinker through his first imaginative enthusiasm for science, until his belief in her dies away in skepticism and he returns to the world of poetry and art . After this conflict of youthful illusions , when a victorious intellect has rejected the faith and effort which its phi lo so h p y finds vain , comes the second phase content now to enjoy his own talents , without attempting to coordinate them to any principle D but style , the erstwhile arwinian develops his skepticism philosophically in order to range more freely in the galleries of the past . This is n A atole France in his forties , dilettante and disciple of the later Renan . But he wearies P in the alace of Art , grows sick of self and eager for a stronger draught of reality . Hence the descent into the arena , provoked by the D reyfus affair and the corruption of French : im politics the idealist , the man of heart and a in ti n t l t g a o now dominates the in e lec uel . Then comes the reaction , after less than a decade of — contact with life when the student realizes that man is not the reasonable creature he had imagined , but a selfish animal , bound by inertia and hostile to reform ; and the genial irony of his forties turns to satire , ending in the sneer of a cynic who can only caricature humanity . Anatole France is then an idealist turned inside S out by life , an inverted idealist like wift in his last phase , distilling acid sarcasm until again he is swept from philosophy into action by the world war . Now that the conflict is ended , and statesmen are debating the measures which make for peace , it is well to sharpen our vision and our intellects by a study of Anatole France . It is good to chronicle his long war upon war , his stand against intolerance and social injustice , lest we think that victory falls only by the sword . It will not be useless to review the career of Anatole France , so typical of the mingled idealism and pessimism of the last cen S tury . ecure in the larger perspective of a conflict which ends an epoch , yet remembering the sufferings of a generation defeated and thrown back upon itself by the lack of a hopeful national life , we can understand his personality as we can explain his books . If we read them

in this spirit , which is that of a philosophic v pilgrim , e en uncomfortable inns will merge into the shadows of the panorama viewed from ’ the armchair at the journey s end . To read all of Anatole France is to see how a sensitive artist found himself in an unfavorable environ ment , and by giving us his egoism in patient works of art , proved , even more than by his ” propaganda , a great doer and a real bene “ ’ l a rtiste factor of humanity . After all , doit ’ aimer la vie et montrer qu elle est belle . Sans lui , nous en douterions .

Franklin Inn Club , P hiladelphia .

HE ﬁrst idea which I got of the uni ” in Pierre verse , says Anatole France “ Noziére , came to me from my old pictorial

- Bible . It was a series of seventeenth century woodcuts , with a Garden of Eden fresh and fertile as a Lowland landscape . Every even ing, under the lamp , I would turn its ancient leaves , until sleep , the delicious sleep of child off hood , carried me in its warm shadows , and

- the patriarchs , the apostles , and the lace decked ladies lived on through my dreams their super M natural lives . y Bible had become for me the most vivid reality , and to it I strove to conform ” the universe . His universe at that time was the sleepy old M l P a a ua is . Quai q There , in the heart of aris , n A atole France was born , the sixteenth of 1 8 April , 44 ; and his eyes ﬁrst opened on the S eine and the Louvre, the Cité and the carven D towers of Notre ame . But the universe grows ﬁ e . v with the growing legs of its children At , this little world extended from the Rue Bona “ S - parte to the Ile aint Louis , and the River of ” Glory, which he followed every day with his N ’ nurse , gave him back the oah s Ark of his

Bible in the ﬂoating baths of L a Samaritaine . ’ P d Auster litz To the east , beyond the ont , he saw in imagination the mysterious realms of S P the criptures , and the Jardin des lantes was ’ clearly the Garden of Eden , for hadn t his mother told him that Eden was a garden with trees and all the animals of the Creation ? ier Nozier e S o P re . at least we read in Here , ivre de mon a mi L e in the exquisite L , and in etit P ie rre now Revue de p , publishing in the ’ Paris , is set down a man s story of his boy hood ; and if sentiment in an ironist is an index of candor , these books contain as much truth as poetry . Theirs is no merely symbolic truth , transformed by time and the artistic tempera 1 ment . Real memories alone could yield pages

1 Confirmation o f thi s may be found in a l ett e r o f Anatol e ’ rance to a man o f e ers re ro uce in ran o s arel s F l tt , p d d F c i C “ Auteur: con em orain ou c nfi u t p s ( p . Je v s o e q e tout cc ui ans cc vo ume le L ivre de mm: mm conce rne le e q , l ( ) , p tit ! d Nozré re o rme nu r c e ac de mon enfance so us cet e ré , f é it x t , t se rve q ue mon pére ét ait non médecin mai s lib rai re sur l e qua i Voltai re et que les cho ses do mes tique s éta i ent pl us ét ro it es et ’ pl us h umble s ch ez no us qu ell es ne sont ch e z un pe tit médecin ’ de uar r L r r n q tie . e ca acte e de mon pére n est p as moins co s e rve ans ce u u r i r Mon é r est evenu d l i d docteu Noz é e . p e d ” un omm n ru r e s es ue savan a la fin de sa vie . h i t it, p q t , n so charming, so sig ificant ; not one but reveals

the future poet , already living in his world of

dreams . “ M Pierre No y cosmography, he says in “ ziére , my cosmography was immense . I held M ala ua is the Quai q , where my room was , to be

the center of the world . The green bedroom , in which my mother put my little bed beside

her own , I looked upon as the point on which

Heaven shed its rays and graces , as you may

see in the pictures of the saints . And these four walls , so familiar to me, were filled with mys ter y none the less . “ - At night in my cot bed , I used to see strange faces , and all at once the warm and cozy bed fire room , lit by the last dying gleams of the place , would open wide to the invasion of the supernatural world . “ Legions of horned devils danced their rounds ; then , slowly, a lady of black marble passed by, weeping , and it was only later that I found out that these hobgoblins were dancing in my brain “ According to my system , in which you must recogn ize that candor which gives to primitive cosmogonies their charm , the earth formed a large circle around my house . Every day I would meet , coming and going in the streets , 6 people who seemed occupied with a strange and amusing game , the game of life . I decided that there were a great many of them , perhaps more than a hundred . “ I did not think that they were under abso lutel y fortunate influences , sheltered like myself from all anxiety . To tell the truth , I did not think that they were as real as I was ; I was not absolutely sure that they were real people , and when from my window I saw them pass , v P ery tiny, over the ont des Arts , they seemed to me playthings rather than persons , so that I was almost as happy as the boy—giant in the

- fairy tale, who sat on a mountain and played with trees and cabins , cows and sheep , shep ” - herds and shepherd girls . S uch in embryo is the creative vision , the ’ artist s vision . Certainly it is no ordinary stock which produced this dreamy , imaginative boy . ’ An only son , born in his father s fortieth year , Jacques - Anatole Thibault owes to that father much more than the famous pseudonym . Noel Thibault too was a man of letters and a lover “ ” of the past . France , libraire , for thus he o signed his articles on bibliography, kept a bo k at M ala uais shop 9 Quai q , in the ﬁne old build ing so long occupied by his successor Cham v Ven pion . A Royalist , de outly Catholic , a ’ d een in origins and in every sympathy , he had

- ! served in the body guard of Charles , and he ’ loved the ancien reg ime as he hated the Revo 2 n l lutio . Noé Originally from Anjou , Thibault had all the proverbial gentleness of the Ange ’ vin ; he is depicted for us in Sylvestre Bonnard s memories of his father , ironical , indulgent, dis : il t il sa fa illusioned était fatigué , e aimait ” tigue .

The serenity of the Anjou country, with its — placid rivers and its rolling hills la douceur — ang evine thus ﬁnds a reﬂection in the artist and his art . Yet if Anatole France shows this regional type in its amenity , he has no less the

Angevin shrewdness and irony . Every lover of Taine ’ s theory must rejoice in France ’ s remi niscences of his grandmother , neither Royalist

- nor pious , but keen witted , practical , and pagan , “ She a true disciple of Voltaire . had no more ” “ : piety than a bird , says her grandson she ” clearly belonged to the eighteenth century . S n ig iﬁcant , too , is her prediction that the boy “ An atole would be a very different man from ” his father . ’ Grand mere was right . The child had more than distinction of intellect , a much greater

2 ! et no on kne a er od be er as his earned b b o e w th t p i tt , l i li g ra h p y shows . 8

’ gift than his father s sterile scholarship . He v had the creative itality, the exuberance of fancy and imagination which alone makes the L artist . ike the old Bible, this came to him

from his mother , from the merry , active , beauty-loving mother so affectionately por ’ tra ed . N y in her son s books aive , mystic , can — didly religious a true daughter of Bruges ives o the S aints she used to read to him the L f , and the charm of the old stories “ﬁlled the ” soul of the child with wonderment and love .

A dreamer already, he felt profoundly the mys tic poetry o f religious legend ; his ﬁrst hope of military glory gave way to a dream of saint t hood , and he lived out the sacred stories wi h re all the seriousness of real experience . His fusal to eat , his distribution of coppers and toys to the poor , his attempt to make a hair shirt from the wiry cover of an old armchair , and the whipping he received from an inconsiderate maid , are related with inimitable grace and irony in the eighth chapter of L e Livre de mon “ a mi : f ﬁnally, the di ficulty of practising saint hood in family life” made him resolve to seek P a hermitage in the Jardin des lantes . There , on the morrow , he would live alone with all the o animals of the Creati n ; there he would see , like

Saint Anthony, the faun and the centaur , and

10 that could be got out of a pencil He felt, too , the charm of ﬂowers , of perfumes , the de f lights o food and dress . But what he loved most , he confesses , more than any of these v things , was e erything together , the house , the n air , the light , the life of his very dow y nest . v After all , the practice of asceticism might ha e been hard for this young Epicurean . Not a desert cave , but a desk and a library, ’ And is the proper stage for a poet s seclusion . to such things the future writer turned instinc “ ” tivel b y . I lived with my ooks , he tells us , “ - my pictures , my paste pot , my color boxes , and all the belongings of a bright yet delicate boy , already sedentary , naively initiating him self by his toys into that feeling for form a nd

color , the source of so much pain and so much joy . Already I had a bent toward desk work , a love of pictures cut out patiently by the evening : lamp , a profound feeling for things pictorial

I have never needed , even in my early years , to ” possess things in order to enjoy them . This is the future biographer of Sylvestre Bonnard M and the aid of France .

Given such a nature , a boy needs only a hero

to shape a deﬁnite ideal . The hero appeared

in the person of a collector , a hero of the desk

- and the card catalogue . Clad in ﬂowered dress 11 in - old immor g gown and nightcap , this scholar , talized L e under the sobriquet of Old Beau , passed his days cataloguing books and medals in a house packed to the roof with curiosities . “ S o Anatole, at ten , thought it ﬁner to make

- card catalogu es than to win battles . He would catalogue , and I , with eyes wide open and bated breath , would admire him . I did not imagine that there could be any finer business to give ’ A rinter one s life to . But I was mistaken . p was n ld L e found to pri t the catalogue of O Beau , and then I saw my friend correcting the proofs . He would put mysterious signs on the margin of the leaves . Then I understood that this was the finest occupation in the world , and I prom ised myself that I too would some day have my ” - proof sheets to revise . The picturesque dressing-gown of the dis ci le p is of gray frieze , his cap of red velvet , and - n the proof sheets have come, so umerous that — all the first delight a veritable justification of

- the universe has long since passed away . And it is not hard to see how the old antiquary, in his house piled with all the ﬂotsam of time, set the example of intellectual curiosity and patient scholarship that even a poet needs to see clearly

into the labyrinth of the past . To such an ex

ample, possibly , is due the Life of Joan of 12

Arc . But the reader wonders in vain who was M L e this onsieur Beau , the collector who lives in art by his kindness to a lonely child .

- Was he his father , the book lover and bib liog rapher of the Quai M ala qua is ? After all ’ ’ a father is a boy s first hero , and a father s trade his first dream of his own . Or was he pos ’ “ s ibl le y one of his father s patrons , bibliophile ” Marmier Jacob or the collector , met in the “ quiet old shop where the boy played with dumpy duodecimos as with dolls ” ? In any case we must not overlook the bookstore . It was here that young Anatole grew up , sur rounded by the motley ranks of an ever -chan ging library) Here it was that he got his first i notions of h story and society , from books and from the conversations of his father and his ’ — father s friends a memory which he used later in picturing the book- shop of Paillot ; and as the patrons of this old Royalist were mostly

ci- devant Royalists too , aristocrats and conser va tive s , their remarks on the Revolution could not fail to inﬂuence the future author of L es D ie ut oi ux o s f . It is easy to imagine them some of the older ones , perhaps , wearing the high neck- cloths and tight trousers D aumier loved to draw , unmindful of the shy little lad reading in the corner ; but it was for him that 13

i D i 1 l . sc e s V they talked , after all p of oltaire , they were the ﬁrst to show him , in their endless arguments , the multiplicity of truth . Thus the old bookstore by the Seine became the nursery of a genius . In ludicrous contrast , “ o we have the picture fhis ﬁrst school , a highly recommended ” establishment of the Faubourg

- S . aint Germain There , in a room full of mis chief- loving youngsters presided over by an

- absent minded spinster , he made acquaintance with the world of human society , discovered the practical life and found his ﬁrst friend in a boy who taught him to raise silkworms in his

. oetr desk There , too , the charms of p v were revealed to him , when the melancholy school mistress read to the class her melancholy bal

P a i mr e nne lad e J a . The tears which he shed on that occasion brought him not the cross of honor , but the vision of that beauty which rhyme and rhythm give . P ractical education , however , was not to be gained here . After copying for six weeks the same line of poetry, the boy was withdrawn en ion from the p s by his dissatisﬁed parents .

Although not rich , they now chose for him the S College tanislas , an expensive and aristocratic “ m . S u school directed by Jesuits At tanislas , ” un vieux college peu monacal , he came under 14

the instruction of ecclesiastics , learned the Esthet poetry that legend and ritual inspire . ically the priesthood may well have had its moment of attraction for him . He may have lived in sympathy the episode of young Pieda ’ n l L r e da i In an g e in O m ma l . y case the Church gave him her best for his intellectual training ; like Jules Lemaitre . he enjoyed the discipline “ which perfected the mind of Renan . In the ” o Coi nard Temple, said the good Abbé Jer me g , “were forged the hammers which destroyed the ” Temple .

Nor l n must we forget , in his education , the P estimable inﬂuence of aris . To such a boy ,

responsive to the pictorial , to the charm of the past , the chance of living in the City of Light “ was a veritable godsend . It does not seem to ” “ f a me possible , he modestly a ﬁrms , for man to have an absolutely commonplace turn of

mind , if he has been brought up on the quays P of aris , opposite the Louvre and the Tuileries , S and facing the glorious eine , which runs amidst the belfries and towers and spires of P - Old aris . . There , the book stalls , the curi o sit y shops , and the old print stores display the most beautiful products of art and the most 0 interesting tokens of the past . Every sh p window is an attraction for the eyes and the 15 intellect : the passer -by who knows how to see always carries away some thought , as the bird ” ﬂies off with a bit of straw for its nest .

When Anatole France was a boy, this quar ter was even richer in atmosphere than it is - to day . Old—prints , old paintings , old books , old furniture every foot of the quays was full

- of them . Carved credence tables , ﬂowered Jap i anese vases , bits of enamel , fa ence , brocaded stuffs and ﬁgured tapestries served to illustrate the old books lying so invitingly open : the famous curiosity shop described in Balzac ’ s P eau de chag rin shows what these places used to be . This larger school Anatole France knew before he ceased to wear short trousers and “ embroidered collars ; when we went to the

Tuileries Gardens on holidays , we used to pass V along this learned Quai oltaire , and as we walked , hoop in hand and ball in pocket , we used to look into the shop - windows just like the old gentlemen , and form our own ideas on all these strange things which had come down from the past , from the mysterious past .

Add to this his daily journeys , ﬁrst along

the quays , then down that fascinating Rue Bonaparte which takes one past an endless row of curio—shops to the Luxembourg Gardens and S N the College tanislas , situated in the Rue otre 16

D ame des Champs . Every day he saw the

- shop windows , greeted the white statues of the gardens gleaming against their fernlike back o f ground trees , felt all the multifarious life P o of Old aris . S the streets gave him his ﬁrst understanding of the world . Here he saw the milkwomen - - , the water carriers , the coal heavers at their tasks , and learned the law of cheerful labor which Paris teaches in every shop and ée P . Co alley Like pp , he loved this humble aris , only he loved it still as a spectator . It was all ’ a part of his vision of the universe , a poet s v vision , destined to be engra en in pages ex pressive as a Whistler etching, pages discreetly evocative of the Paris that we love .

He learned , in ﬁne, that busy idling which distinguishes the artist from the scholar . And even in school he retained the same discursive spirit : he was constantly reprimanded for his “ ” devotion to interests extraneous to the class .

Yet he was a good student , particularly in the “ humanities . You may call me an aristocrat n or a mandarin , but I believe that six or seve years of literary culture give to the mind pre pared to receive it a nobility, a force and a beauty which is not to be obtained by other ” means . At Stanislas Anatole France received this

v I would see divine ﬁgures , arms of i ory droop ing over white tunics , and hear voices sweeter than the sweetest music , lamenting in har mony . So Anatole France found in a Jesuit college v the Greek beauty, the ision of life which he gives back to us , the qualitative ideal still dom inant in the many-textured web of his world-old mmetri ris ed . s a culture That ideal , the y p , he v : ne er ceased to cultivate , to worship his fa vorite poets are still the poets of the pagan

- world . And no lover of his well nigh perfect prose , candid and full of charm as only a Gre eian could create , but will exclaim , as he does “ : v in one of his early novels O Athens , city e er to be revered , if thou hadst never existed, the world would not yet know what beauty is ! PARNASSIAN .

PPL E or quince , the fruit to come is shown ’ April s leaves or ﬂowers . So we have quoted rather largely from L e Livre de mon ami , that delightful autobiography of Anatole

France . Read the book , if you would see how a genius unfolds ! After childhood comes ado le scence , , and an account of a ﬁrst love turned “ into tragedy by his fatal reply to his lady, Oui ,

- monsieur . Racked with self recrimination ,

- inept and stupid , the self conscious boy is sent

o ff . on his vacation He discovers the sea , the mysterious ocean which everywhere and for “ every humanist , still beats with the surge and ” thunder of the Odyssey ; he dreams away a summer ﬁlled with vague desires ; and by the ff V sea , on the cli s alone with his pocket irgil , he ﬁnds at last the secret of his trouble in the

- love story of the hapless Carthaginian queen . D Yet sensitive as he was , the fate of ido was P not to be his . He returned to aris for his last 22 year at Stanislas : he was very unhappy and he ” passed his examinations . Of course this was to in be expected ; even then , his is a mind too tellig ent to yield entirely to feeling . Timid in manners , he was already bold in thought , inde an intellectuel pendent , despite the distractions of a temperament distinctly artistic . But he

- had a friend to help him , a fellow student , after ward distinguished for the science he brought ha r a to the study of autographs . Etienne C av y was just the mentor to instil in him the love of

erudition needed in a true historical vision .

Best of all , his development was not hurried .

It was given him to ripen slowly . He was to “ pass many happy years , without writing , lead ” S ing a contemplative and solitary life . ome teaching and a little desultory journalism fell to his lot ; but through it all he had leisure to

read , to dream , to think . Little by little , school

and university were replaced by other teachers , and the soul of the boy became the mirror of a ’ Skeptic s world . “ O sordid old Jews , candid booksellers of the ! quays , my masters , what gratitude I owe you M ore than the professors of the University ,

you gave me my intellectual education . You spread before my delighted eyes the mysterious s forms of a past life , and every sort of preciou 23

’ monument of the thought of man . Twas by

- ferreting in your book boxes , by contemplating your dusty stores , laden with the wretched rel ics of our fathers and with their beautiful thoughts , that imperceptibly I absorbed the sanest philosophy . “ ’ Yes , my friends , twas by reading the worm eaten books that you sold for a living, that I acquired , boy that I was , a profound conscious ness of the passing of things and the nothing ness of it all . I divined that men were but changing images in the universal illusion , and from that day I was inclined to sadness , gentle ness , and pity . This was the youth of twenty- three who in 1 867 was admitted to the noisy sessions of the

P - arnassian poets . They met in the book shop

L emerre of their publisher , to hear Leconte de

Lisle expound the theories of a new poetic art . Romantic lyrists had failed through abuse of - P self confession , so the arnassians renounced all V them save the more objective igny , Gau t - — m . S s ier , and Baudelaire elf repression the y ’ — bol of Vigny s L a mort da lonp was the new ideal ; and Gautier and Baudelaire had revealed

the plastic , picturesque , almost metallic style which alone could ﬁtting ly clothe their imper

v . ro sonal ision of the world Thus , out of 24

manticism , arose a new poetic theory, and as the master had now published L es P oémes bar bares L es P oémes a nti ues as well as q , the word

. S had twice become ﬂesh plendid , barbaric , passionately impassive , a new lyric realism was S alammbé L a born , vivid as the prose of and i - Tenta tion de S a nt A ntoine .

a r Realism was now the dominant mood of t .

It was the child of science , this rejection of the personal element in literature —child of the great scientific movement which swept over Eu D ar rope just after the middle of the century . ’ Ori in o S ecies 1 862 win s g f p , translated in , had been followed in France by Claude Bernard ’ s ’ Phi o hi x rimentale D l s op e e pe . arwinism and de terminism became the watchwords of that gen ration Had e . not Taine just published the E n lis h itera ture preface of his g L , reducing genius itself to the product of the race , the ? milieu , and the moment What wonder then that the new poetry should reflect the natural ism which had spread from philosophy to art ? P oetry , however , must discover an esthetic basis for determinism . Hence it was that L e conte de Lisle turned to India , to find in the philosophy of the Hindus the secret of a fatal ism at once scientific and fervidly religious .

I f science had done away with a personal God ,

view . He had also contributed to another little L e hass eur biblio ra he periodical , C g p , becoming its editor that same year . Bibliographical ar ticles written jointly with his father , bits of dramatic criticism of his own , fantasies in prose -such were his contributions to this review ;

- among them we ﬁnd , however , a pagan Chris tian poem of the Alexandrian age

En cc t emps-la vivait une femme au pays

’ Des E tiens be e et u on nomma ai s . g yp , ll , q it Th Anatole France was now a Parnassian in the bud , slowly preparing his ﬁrst volume of poems . P And as a arnassian , interested in their great precursor , it was not fortuitous that literary piety should have led him at the same time to undertake a serious study of Alfred de Vigny . P 1 868 ublished in , this pledge to scholarship f h o fsets his devotion to the muse . But w en , two years later , the war broke out between c France and Germany, it was still his po ket Virgil which he carried with him to the front ; and he tells us later 3 how he and a comrade sat L a reading it during the attack on Faisanderie , while the cannon - balls fell hissing into the M arne .

“ 2 In th os e days lived a woman fai r i he am In Egypt : Th a s was r n e .

3 litt r ir Vie é a e, II, 309. 27

L es P oemes dor és finally appeared in 1 873 . v Great poetry it is not , but it is fine erse , wrought as carefully as an etching , and deli ‘ l cate . y luminous as its title suggests Indeed , th - e first poem gives the key note to the volume , s — fatalis a unny neo Greek pantheism , serenely tic , the Epicureanism of Renan cast into the verse form of Theophile Gautier .

So s m orce 6 Lumi e re ! et u ssen mes ens e s i a f , p i t p é ,

B e es et s m es comm e toi ll i pl ,

ans la race et la a ro u er sous ta foi D g p ix , dé l Leurs fo rm es touj ours cadencée s !

“ Donne a mes yeux h eureux de vo ir longtemp s encor

En une vo u sere ne l pté i , La B eauté se d res sant marcher co mme une reine

’ u ur nn o r So s ta ch as t e co o e d .

“ Et lorsque cl ans son s e in l a N a ture des ch oses

o rm era me s es ns u urs F d ti f t ,

ev ens ba ner rev ens nourr r de tes ﬂots urs R i ig , i i p ” Me nouve é mo r se5 4 s ll e s m ta pho .

“ 4 L t be ou m s ren ! Ma ou s e ee Oh igh , th y t gth y th ght lik th S m e and a r i pl f i , — evea to me race eace ec are R l thy g , thy p d l m me o Thy li pid l dy . “ Oh Light ! Long let th es e bles se d eyes behold — r e but se rene Th ill d, B eau a r s e and bear n e a ueen ty i , i g lik q r r Thy vi gin c o wn of gold . And wh en Old N ature to her breast rece ives s us to fo rm Thi d t , New ve s e re from come bac come back and arm li th , k, w ” My ﬂow e rs and leave s ! 28

Thus does poetry transform the cold truths D of science . arwin only awakens a forgotten S pantheism , and Anatole France , like winburne just across the Channel , celebrates in the ful V ness of youth a pagan hymn to life . owed to ’ impersonality by his master s example , the ’ young veteran of 70 sings of war only as the eternal conﬂict in the animal world ; and the

- fl fate of the dying stag or dragon y, like the dim instinct of trees or the longing of flower for flower , is but a note in the larger song of D ar life , life and that eternal Eros which for win as for Epicurus long ago , builds without ceasing this world of fact or dream .

“ ’ ’ L Amo ur l Amour u ssan la o u conde , p i t , V l pté fé ,

Vo a le e u ui cr e nce ssammen l e mon e il di q é i t d , Le pére de l a vie et des des tins futurs ! m a ’ ’ e s a r l Amour fa a ar s es u es crue e s C t p t l , p l tt ll ,

’ ’ ue l univers s an me en des orme s us be es ! i f pl ll ,

’ ” h nn it r ur 5 S ac éve et s e co a en des esp it s pl us p s . The volume was dedicated to Leconte de

Lisle . One may trace the disciple here and — ' there in the coloring of Ho ma i and in that

’ ’ 5 Tis Lo ve the od and Lo ve s e g , d light a bu s the o r nce s san Th t ild w ld i tly, - a er of L e and es n F th if , D ti y All B eauty o wns his secre t might ; G rows the wo rld fai re r in our s ight ? om e e r r c er co nsc ous o f C pl t , i h , —i It self in cl earer mind s P rai se Lo ve ” nﬂ nﬁn e And all his co ict s i it . 29

D L a ﬁlle de Cam vivid picture of the eluge, , yet nowhere will be found the midday glory of P oemes barbares Scimi , splendidly oriental as a n tar glittering i the sun . In the lesser poet the richness of the oil- painting fades to the delicacy

- Nor of water color . does the disciple catch the austere religious fervor of L es P oemes ah ti ues No q . Buddhistic renunciation gives lyric

ﬁre to these verses , wholly Greek in their sane and smiling paganism . Even the thought of death inspires only a deeper love of life , as may be seen in L a M ort :

“ Si la vi e rge ve rs toi j ette sous l es ramures L e ri re p ar sa mere 51 se s lévres app ri s ;

Si e e ans son cor s on e e sa le r , ti d d p d t ll it p ix , Le dés i r a g onﬂé s es fo rmes d emi -mures ;

L e so r ans la fo re e ne de ra s murm ures i , d t , pl i f i

’ Si mé an d unir vo s c a rs et vos es r s , dit t h i p it ,

Vous me e de s an eune et de ba se rs ﬂ euris l z , g j i ,

Vo s lévres en ouan e n es du s uc des mure s , j t , t i t ,

“ ’ Si le be so n d aimer vo us cares s e et vous mo r i d ,

’ man s c es ue dé a ane sur vo us l a mo r A t , t q j pl t

’ r S on a i guillon fait seul d un coupl e nu di eu qui c ée .

’ ’ L e n n mmo r n ur m ras r e s i d u i te l e sa a it s e b e .

L oue v er es aman s o ue la o r sacr e z , i g , t , l z M t é ,

’ ” u s ue u l ui e e l i res da ba ser 6 P i q vo s d v z v se i .

“ 6 a ma moc s ou au n in the way If id k y ,—l ghi g Her mo th e r t aught o r runs b eneath the t rees ; ’ If in he r bo som s budding ec stas ies es re b urn s a o u she murmurs na D i , lth gh y 30

m Life and love and death , and all the ystery of beauty i—n this ﬂood of appearances which is the world bits of sunny landscape , forest nooks , nocturnes or marines delicate as an — aquarelle such is the fabric of his verse . S v lighter and less ivid , his pictures often recall ’ Gautier s :

’ Ruines d un templ e of: des lyres

’ en en a des c ev es d or P d t h ill , Oi: des pieds de nymph es encor

ansen en de o eu res D t j y x déli ,

“ ue e la ma son des o s M tt , i R i

E st a ss se comme une veuve i ,

S ur la r ve ro e du ﬂeuve i d it , ” u l n m s anc r d 7 So s es y phée bl s et f oi s .

Books , too , are his inspiration . History and legend give us poems like L a dans e des morts L e r un i tur M ri and e Vénus b rg . S u e s g na e de a e S tua r t Charava , dedicated to y and suggestive

the co o s e r n o o s the even n b ree e If l whi p i g w d , i g z , Lure ﬂ es to ﬂes and so u to sou b e ra h h l l w y, ’ And yo ung bloo d s ar do r j oi ns in amo rous pl ay ! o ur red lip s redd er y et with mulbe rri e s :

’ overs ! ove s on n o s ou ra Oh l If l l gi g h ld y th ll , ’ ’ Tis the ar n e s n a ra s above D k A g l wi g th t t il , She a a one crea es has ma e ou o s ! th t l t , d y g d

r s Immortal h eart s would eve be a s clo d . o ra se e ea ma ens and overs all S p i y D th , id l , To wh om y e owe the rapturous k i ss o f Lo ve !

“ 7 u n o f a ane ere res R i s f , wh ly an n ca rven e s of o H g o p g g ld, 3 1 of long evenings spent over his portfolio of autographs , reveals a deep sense of the romance of history . But it was three years after this , when Anatole France had emerged from his twenties and settled down in his library, like

Bonnard , that he turned to the past and drew from it the exquisite story of L es Noces corin i th ennes .

L es Noces corinthiennes is a dream of Greece set to the music of Racine . Finer than his ear lier sketches , because a larger composition , more lyric because of his feeling for the period , this little drama in Alexandrines is not merely ’ a poet s monument to the land which had re vealed to him the vision of beauty ; it is his ﬁrst Thais historical miniature , delicately etched as . — The very spirit of Hellas so far as we mod — erns can divine it inspires him : the candor of Homer , the lyricism of Theocritus , the mel ody and pathos of Euripides . Here is presented un the Greek view of life , calm and sane and disturbed by any sense o f the inﬁnite beyond

i n . La v e est bo ne ,

’ Car c es un ran mon ami ui nou l onne s a . t g d Dé , , q d

W ere the oo -n m s as o f old h w d y ph , , Dance in g ay deli rious ch o i rs ;

And the a ace s en s p l , il t , till A s a o in her ee s wid w w d , ’ S s amon the ri ve r s ree s it g d , ’ h ar an Mid t e m bl es cold d chill . 32

’ L en an e e en ouan l es o sse e s et rit f t j tt j t l t , Le j eune h omme au s ang vif médite en son esp rit

D e rencon rer l so r er u l u e la v e so s es sa es . t , i , i g l

’ L e b anc v e a r on a e a co urb les au es l i ill d d t l g é ép l ,

ss s au banc du s eu sous les as re s e n c oeur A i il , t h

r e r a men re o ui so n r ur A pa l s ge t j t ch e coe .

Au on des ours de m e et de s eures amé re s l g j i l h ,

S u s doucemen le ﬁl ue te o urnen le s oeres i t q t t M .

’ ’ ’ L omme aux ar en s dés rs uand l Hadés l va ncu h d t i , q a i ,

’ r r m u A dés i é de viv e et n a j a ai s véc .

’ ” r n n l u t n r n 8 C aig o s es vains so h aits et l at e te chag i e . Thus speaks the father of the heroine to her lover Hippias , when the day is over and the D vintage done . But the mother of aphne has a different dream of the world : Kallista is a

Christian convert , burning with zeal for the

Pol eucte . new faith , austere and fervid as y Sick of an unknown malady and eager to secure conse life and health for good works , she has in crated her unwilling daughter to Christ , ’ voking God s vengeance upon herself if Daphne

3 ’ . L e s oo I no if g d, k w, ’ f r s F o r tis a gi t some s pi it do th b e t o w . ’ The c au s o e r the o s he ro s in a hild l gh t y th w pl y, The o u hot-b oo e ans at c o se o f da y th , l d d , pl l y h re e s To mee t the maiden unde rnea th t e t . The ra bear his s ou e rs ben and o ld g y d with h ld t , ’ s b the res o nea the s ars o f o S it y th h ld , th t g ld ,

n e r his ear se scourse at ease . A d ch e s h t with wi di , Oh r en rou mo rn n s one -s ee o r b t e r eves f i d , th gh i g h y w t i t , s Follo w the cl ue the fa tal T ri ad w eave . He h es res too muc ea be a w o d i h , if d th f ll , ll Ha s h op ed to live and neve r li ve d at a . e r s Avo id d el ays th at vex and vain d si e .

have loved , and their ashes are content . There she prepares the poison obtained from the old witch , mingles it with the sacriﬁcial wine of the

- wedding feast , and , resolved to betray neither

God nor her lover , dies a martyr to love , a

Greek Atala . This is in brief the plot of L es Noces cor in thi nn i e es . B r de o o rinth It is the story of the fC , adapted by Goethe from an old tradition . But ﬁner than Goethe ’ s delineation is the picture drawn by Anatole France , and only the fact

dismem that it is a picture , a fresco , not to be bered with impunity , stays us from quoting the D ’ verses of aphne s farewell , her lament for life and love and her shattered dreams of mother hood :

“ ’ r a o u u Et pourtant j e viv ai s si Dieu l av it v l .

No r could the art of the story be shown by S a single page . cene by scene the poem unrolls , and vintagers or wedding-guests or chanting converts provide the choruses which frame each

separate scene . The pagan ideal ﬁnds its foil

in the zeal of the early Christians , as in the author the love of saintly legend and the love of Greek beauty : and the reader sees how the

dreams of his childhood , the Bible stories read ’ at his mother s knee , made it easy for him to 35

h relive the age of fait he describes . In the Preface is found his real attitude : he knows “ there is nothing certain outside the realm of ” i sc ence , but he also knows how unscientiﬁc it is to think with Renan that science can replace “ religion . As long as man is suckled at a ’ woman s breast , he will be consecrated in the temple and initiated into some mystery of the divine . He will have his dream . And what matter if the dream be false , provided it is fair Is it not the destiny of man to be sunk in an everlasting i llusion ? And is not this illusion the very condition of life ?” Such a declaration might well be taken as prophetic . But equally signiﬁcant , and charm ing ly autobiographical are the lines from an ’ of L auteur a uh ami other poem this volume ,

F ati ues vers le so r de la ume et du vre g i pl li ,

ans le roc e ar n nous errons b en souven D p h j di i t,

Tou our r ris ivr t r a er ivr j s su p de v e e de eg rd v e, Nous j etons de vains mots empo rtés p ar l e

Even the Luxembourg Gardens may yield the poet ’ s sense of wonder—wonder dissolved

into skepticism by the acid of thought . Of

9 “ W ea r o f book and en at c o se of da y p , l y, In the old park we stro ll and t alk at e ase ’ S ur r sed to be a ve to a c e s a p i li , w t h lif pl y, W u h n n ree e ca s t our vain tho ghts to t e eve i g b z e. 36

e course , pessimism was then a literary mod or is it the verse which in the ﬁnal line calls for ? those vibrant labials However that be , no words are vain , if only they are spoken by a poet , and some earlier lines , addressed to Theo ’ a re phile Gautier , reveal this skeptic s real pp cia tion of the hidden might of words :

n en c s L a parol e e st divi e et conti t toutes hos e .

eureu ui our ﬁ er son reve n ér eur H x q , p x i t i , Empl oya sans failli r la fo rme et la l ueur Dans le cri s t al des sons fat al ement encl os es

And he goes on to show how words , in their ’ magic , are the poet s immortality . Like Gau tier , the poet survives in the survival of art .

His dreams remain , and break for us the bonds of space and time . In the absence of : ultimate ends , we have at least art art and the gift of living in the mind . For it is not merely the poet , it is the critic , the future dilettante, the disciple of Renan who concludes :

’ ! ue p our nous l univers se baigne tout enti er ” D es efﬂuves ch armant s de la pens ée humaine l 1 1

“ 1 0 S ee n nd o s th o r in fe p ch is divi e a h ld e w ld e . o r una e he who use to ﬁx his ream F t t , d d Imp eccably the ma gi c line o r gl eam ’ L ocke d in so und s crystalline by destiny ! “ 1 1 s ar n s ream o f ou mmerse Oh p kli g t th ght , i ” In beauty all the unive rse ! FROM NATURALIS T TO

III

0 begin with a book of verse is not rare

among French writers , trained in classical metrics at school . After Euterpe comes the M pedestrian use , all the richer for the secrets of color and rhythm , learned from an earlier M D love . aupassant , Bourget , audet , and Riche pin began as poets ; Maeterlinck and Rostand wrote lyrics before they took up the drama . d! But this singing season , usually ende by -five twenty , lasted much longer in the case of Anatole France ; his first volume of verse ap r - ix p ea ed at twenty nine . S years more were to pass before his first novel —years of mingled poetry and scholarship and literary journal- J ism . He was still seeking his way in life, and fate generously gave him time to choose . In 1 874 we find him on the staff of the Senate

Library . But he soon resigned , too much of an artist to endure the deadly routine and petty tyranny of bureaucracy . The situation was 40

curious , for his immediate superior here was - M the under librarian Leconte de Lisle . aster and disciple had grown apart since the days of P the dedication ; an indocile arnassian , Anatole ’ Now France had provoked the leader s disdain . the younger poet found himself in the lion ’ s mouth , and he was soon reduced to the position of a mere scribe . From this adventure sprang the article published in L e Temps when Leconte de Lisle was elected to the Academy , a criticism

i just and fa r enough , but which provoked a public retort .

At any rate , Anatole France bade farewell to - u the desk and the card catalog e . He returned ’ to literature , ﬁnding a poet s joy in exploring the lives and works of the poets he loved . His V study of Alfred de igny , already published

had won a modest success , and this soon brought a number of commissions from L emerr e his publisher . wished him to write biographical introductions for a series of French : M L a classics editions of Racine , oliere , Fon

P a ul e t Vir inie M anon L es taine , books like g , ’ ca ut L e D ia ble boiteux L He ta méron , , and p . 1 8 He began in 74 with Racine , and in the next ten years completed fourteen similar studies , which have now been collected in the volume in h G nie la t . C arava entitled é Besides these , y

Jocasta inspires to suicide the girl whose guilty love and lack of will allows her husband to be No D au poisoned . w the reader is reminded of det, and now of Emma Bovary ; the heroine and her father are both reﬂections of Flaubert .

But the lover , the ironic young doctor , fore shadows in his materialism D octor Trublet of “ His toire comique ; he too ﬁnds in nature the ” scene of an everlasting slaughter , and his bleak determinism shows us the reaction of the age upon the youthful Anatole France . L e hat ma i re al C g is more sympathetic , in though even weaker its construction . It hardly owns a plot , this story of the indolent P mulatto who , brought to aris for an education , drifts through all the gutters of artistic B o h mia - e . A love story , direct and primitive as

- its half savage hero , is added for the sake of climax , but the book is at best only a gallery of portraits : the scheming failure Godet ; L a - P banne the scholar sculptor , who , like ellerin ’ ’ L E a ucation s entimentale in , digests libraries B ranchut instead of modeling ; , the genius whose failure is due to the fact that he has “ two grains of phosphorus in his brain instead ” “ ” ! L e M of one Chat aigre , a tavern where the Bohemians meet to dine and discuss art and found literary journals , is probably a remi 43 niscent caricature of some Parnassian haunt frequented by the author , while the whole novel very likely reflects his first curious exploration P of Bohemian aris , with its studios and its cafés . Thus the story is a bit more sympathetic than o as te D J c . For this another model than audet D is perhaps responsible . France admired ick L e Cha t mai re ens , and in g he found a milieu where the naturalistic formula might be worked u out with fig res both picturesque and quaint ,

ﬁgures not wholly unlikable . Still he remains to the end a spectator of life and an aristocrat ; he tells us that “democracy can never produce ” an art ; and carrying to the logical end his skepticism , he makes one speaker say that every artistic masterpiece is “a dangerous illusion ” and a culpable fraud .

The blight of naturalism , evidently, could scarcely strike deeper . But we have not yet done with its traces on Anatole France . In 1 882 S lves tre B onnard a , one year after y , p eared L es D és irs de ean S ervien ff p J , so di erent in its ethical attitude and manner that it prob ably was written ﬁrst . For the philosophy of the genial old scholar is ﬂatly contradicted by this dreary fatalistic account of a boy ’ s long disillusion , true to the formula of naturalism 44 in spite of all the personal experience which it so coldly veils . It is vain for youth to plan r an enti e devotion to thought , vain to arrange a program of life amid the storms of adole s e on rda nt mores e . V re c co a c nce , and even the student is apt to yield to that imperious call . We need not ask what illusion lay behind this story of a child of the people , cursed by gifts

- of feeling and imagination , over educated and weak , whose ﬁnal ruin hangs on his love for an actress idealized in a Sophoclean role . It is the dreams of the poets which destroy Jean Servien : , as they destroyed Emma Bovary but the boy is ﬁrst spoiled by a culture far beyond his condition in life , following the dying wish of a mother convinced that education alone ” opens every door . The naturalistic formula changes all this to “ tragic irony . It is the education I gave him ” which turned him away from practical life ,

- says the grief stricken father . It was school ” which made him fall in love with an actress .

That is the moral of the story , delivered after Jean has failed in everything—when the boy - re who promised so much , weak willed and pulsed by life at every turn , has perished in the riots of the Commune . The aristocratic stand point is seen in this overemphasis of dete rmin 45

ism , never tired of contrasting Jean with a father content to remain in his class , or with the skeptical , bourgeoise old aunt , so distrust ful of books . It might seem that the author re felt the dangers of his own character , and acted against the idea o f a culture which de velops the mind and neglects the will . Or does he really express himself through the lips of ’ Tudesco o Jean s tutor , that earlier , viler Jer me Coi n ard g , who sings the charms of literature and defends the independence of the sage , who “refuses to sacrifice to the opinion of men a single one of his desires ” ? ean For the biographer of Anatole France , J S er vien represents the dreams of his adol es cence, transposed into low surroundings such as the literary mode required . This is plain by a comparison with the latter part of L e L iz/re de on i m a m . Jean is the adolescent Ana tran smo rified - tole , g by the dark green goggles of naturalism , and his objective confession is undoubtedly earlier than L e Cr ime de Sylves tre — B annard that idyl of the indulgent ataraxy of the sage . Thus Anatole France passed through nat uralism in fiction , as he had passed through the Parnassian school in his verse The true lit e ra r y artist , the lover of books as well as life , 46

ﬁve must begin by imitations . They are the ﬁn er g exercises of his art , necessary, but only the toilsome road to music . What is less orig inal than the background—one can hardly call — it a plot on which is depicted the portrait of Sylvestre Bonnard ? Scholars have pointed out the sources of the novel , and they are plain to every cultivated reader ; but all that is for gotten before the triumphant individuality of o the result . Good old Bonnard is utwardly a

- conventional ﬁgure . He is the absent minded professor of half a dozen novels , but of them n all he is the one we should like to k ow . His

i philosophy of life , his humor , his rony , his inﬁnite indulgence and humanity, make him unique ; like Goethe in his conversations with

Eckermann , he surveys the world from a ram o f part Olympian calm . To create such a ﬁgure and not let him fall into platitude , to make him living and lovable , was at least original enough

to merit an award from the Academy . L e Crime de Sylves tre B onna rd is an im mense projection of the artistic imagination . It is a dream of old age made by a man still

young, true to atmosphere because it grew out ! of that moment of languor which , in the she tered life of a man of books , marks the passing of one ’ s ﬁrst youth and the acceptance of middle 47

ag e and its calmer joys . It shows us Anatole “N ” France in his full maturity , a estor of letters who has attained through study and reflection “ the supreme wisdom of the ages . Time is ” gentle only to those who take it gently , says — his hero an old scholar who has discovered the I n secret of tranquillity in the life of books . an ello cum libello g , no dilettante but an ardent P medievalist , he surveys the world of aris from “ his casement above the river , in the most ” beautiful spot of all the world . Beneath him he sees the streets which he trod as a child , a discoverer no less than Columbus , a discoverer S S - of Life ; and the eine and the ainte Chapelle , — the Louvre and Notre- D ame all this visible beauty of Old Paris with its jewels of carven stone , has become a part of his life , a part of re himself , imaged within him in a thousand “ fl ection s of thought and feeling . Without ” these things I should be nothing , he tells us . “ That is why I love Paris with an unbounded ’ lovef With all this Bonnard has not lost his hu manity . In the winter of his life he looks out upon the world with pity and love , and finding that it holds the granddaughter of his boyhood ’ s sweetheart , devotes himself to her happiness “ in tender piety for an unforgotten past . Clé 48

mentine is dead and her daughter is dead , he writes in his journal when at last he learns the “ fate of his lost Beatrice : humanity is made up almost entirely of the dead , so few are the liv ing compared to the multitude of those who have lived . Everything passes , since you and your daughter have passed beyond ; but life is immortal , and it is life that we must love in its ” - ever changing forms .

What then is the crime imputed to this sage , to this idealized Renan , who sees in the universe only the reﬂection of his own soul ? Merely the abduction of the girl Jeanne, who , thanks to a rascally guardian , is conﬁned in a boarding

- school where she is constantly ill treated . As her re Bonnard is unable to help , through his fusal to accept the advances of the virginal directress of the place , the candid old scholar ff simply carries her o . But he is saved from the consequences of this rash action by the

ﬂight of the shifty lawyer , and , appointed guar dian in his stead , lives to see Jeanne married and to provide her dowry from the sale of a

- library collected through self denial and toil . Such is the slender plot of L e Crime de Sy! t o n rd ves re B n a . The story is nothing : our interest is in the portrait which it frames . All the romance of the intellectual life is shed upon

nox era t V . Of course , this is the of irgil But Virgil only strikes the ﬁrst chord : it is

Sylvestre Bonnard who develops the melody .

Besides , would such as he look at the world through other than classical eyes ? Like his : creator , old Bonnard is a Grecian despite his

- medieval studies , the book shelf next his hand is filled with the poets of antiquity . He under M stands the classic world , and when adame Tré of S p rails at poor barren icily, she provokes an outburst which her butterfly soul is hardly fitted to comprehend : “ M l . This land is not frightfu , adame This

land is a land of glory . Beauty is a thing so

great and so august , that centuries of barbarism cannot so blot it out as not to leave something to adore The majesty of D emeter of old still

hovers over these arid hills , and the Greek muse , which sent its notes divine echoing over the M enalus Arethusa and the , still sings to my ear on the denuded mountain or in the dried- up M ’ spring . Yes , adame , in earth s last days when ,

- lifeless as the moon to day , our globe shall roll

through space its pallid corpse , the soil which bears the ruins of S elinonte will keep through

the death of all things the traces of its beauty . And then there will be no frivolous lips to blas ” pheme its solitary grandeur . 5 1

’ L ri r A r o ole One is reminded of a p e e s ur l c p . And indeed Sylvestre Bonnard is so like Renan that his portrait could only be the work of a dis cipl e This Bonnard is a scholar : after ex haustin g the thirteenth century , he turns to bot any as a recreation—but he is a scholar who knows the vanity of documents proving the sale

- of a rabbit hutch six hundred years ago . He is a philosopher too , for his fruitless trip to Naples in quest of a manuscript ends with the “ admission : We are eternal children and we ” never cease to run after new toys . A lover M of books , he accepts philosophically adame ’ Trépof s passion for collecting match - boxes : “ After all , they were making a collection , and could I laugh at them without laughing at my self ?”

In ﬁne , he is a disillusioned scholar , saddened by the thought that his effort to preserve a dead “ world is both laborious and vain . All that has ” lived is the destined nutriment of new lives , and so the selling of his library to provide Jeanne ’ s dowry is as signiﬁcant as his turning

from philology to botany in his old age . Yet we must not conclude that Anatole

France ﬁnds science less vain than philology . His change of attitude on this subject is re ’ ' vealed in the D is cours aux etudiants 52

’ as a warning against youth s habit of hasty “ -he generalization . In those days refers to — “ the period of his ﬁrst novel in those days we D were arwinians , evolutionists ; natural selec tion , systematic selection , the survival of the

ﬁttest , seemed to us immutable laws . And we were already working, with all our hearts , to ’ draw from Lamarck s experiments and D ar ’ win s theories a philosophy, a system of ethics . social laws , a political constitution and every !” thing else — No w listen to Sylvestre once more o r rather to Anatole France as he expresses himself four i r o i years later in L e L z/ e de m n a m . “Phenomena ! Whom do they not attract ? D S oes cience herself , whose claims are being constantly dinned into our ears , go beyond ? P mere seeming What , pray , does rofessor S o - and-so ﬁnd at the bottom of his microscope ?

Appearances and nothing but appearances . As

Euripides has said , we are vainly driven about ” 1 by dreams .

To the generation of Anatole France , it seemed that Science was to solve the riddle of life . He , too , had embarked with her on her quest of ﬁnality , only to ﬁnd that the end of the expedition was to store the shelves of a

1 L o i c c t. 206. . , p . 53

L ed museum . into erudition by its romance , as an alchemist is lured on by the dream of the ’ S philosopher s stone , ylvestre Bonnard realizes at the end that “those who were worth more than he , the masters , the great , have died at their task without discovering that something which , having no body, has no name , yet with out which no intellectual labor would be under ” taken on this earth . S o , disillusioned , Anatole France turned from science to art , to explore the past to which his imagination called him , and to crys ta llize it , not in history , but in tales atmospheric

’ Th r r t d e as ais and L e p ocu a eur de Ju e . n But we must ot run ahead so far . Sylvestre -o r — Anatole , if one prefer is now forty, tak ing his ﬁrst backward view . Imagine the mem o r ies of childhood reﬂected in a mind so richly — ’ — stored in a father s mind and heart and you i i have L e L vre de mon a m . Imagine him at the -

- same time composing a fairy tale for a child , A eille and you have b . For Sylvestre Bonnard Nel mezzo del is Anatole France at forty . cammin di nos tra vita V , he can iew the great milestone equably, and now , a little past the middle of the road , look forward to a tranquil journey down the farther slope . The vanity of the passions is known to him , as he has told S4

l ean S ervien us in . He will repeat the lesson

L e L s rou e His toire co mi ue in y g and q , because the artist deals with life as he finds it , but he n will use his own senses as a basis for reflectio , limit his hedonism mainly to an exercise of the intellect . This is the second phase of his talent , and the fruit of that intellectual Epicureanism L e ivre de mon ami L a Vie we shall find in L ,

’ itter ire l a . , and the early tales L i r mi 1 e L v e de mon a dates from 885 . Bon nard had said , unconsciously defending his “ ” choice in life , the future is made of the past . No w , when Anatole France turned back to his Golden Age , he repeats it as an excuse for

setting down the story of his life as a child . And nothing could be more charming than — the book which came from it the book drawn

upon so largely in an earlier chapter . This ontes volume surpasses even the ﬁnest C , for no sophisticated art can give the delicacy of an ’ artist s feeling for stories he has lived . It is as if he had recovered something of the um “ tarnished sensitiveness of childhood . There

are times when everything surprises me , times when the simplest things give me a mysterious

thrill . And he senses the perpetual miracle of ’ a child s life , full of poetry because enwrapped 55

i in llusion , because each step forward is led by the mirage of the unknown .

’ Tout dans l immuable nature E s t mi racl e aux petits enfant s ;

Ils na s sen et eur ame obscure i t , l Eclot dans des enchantements

“ ’ ’ L inconnu 1 nconnu d n , i ivi

Le s ba ne comme une eau ro onde ig p f ,

On les ress e o n eur ar e en va n p , l p l i , Il s habitent un aut re monde

“ Leur tete legere et ravi e S onge tan di s que nous p ensons Ils font de fri s sons en fri s sons ” L c l 2 a dé ouverte de a vie .

This is the spirit of the second part of L e i re mon i L v de a m . After the story of his own childhood , Anatole France shows us a father realizing through sympathy the life of his little daughter . The rest of the book is less personal , narrative giving way to argument and discus

“ 2 o u the o r unc an n ro s Th gh w ld h gi g ll , All is won der to the child ; L e to e ar n s ou s if , littl d kli g l a ns in on enc an men s m d D w l g h t t il .

“ ’ ’ Tis the un no n s ma c s e k w gi p ll , ’ Ho ld s th em nea th its mighty surge ; Va n to s ea to em o r ur e i p k th , g , r In a fai rer wo ld th ey dwell . “ L e ea s a- ream n s ittl h d d i g till , Not for th em reﬂection gray ; ’ L fe s scove re rs are e i di th y, ” n r Living in an e dless th ill . 56

sion in the essay or dialogue form . Anatole ’ France emphasizes the folly of children s books , books written for children only—as if the child were not ﬁlled with the thirst for the beautiful and the desire for the unknown ! He would have children read the Odyssey in translation , D on Quixote , or Robinson Crusoe ; he would never give books of popular science to the very “ young , or tell children about guano instead of ” fairies . And so L e Livre de mon ami marks still more clearly his revolt against science . Our world is full of pharmacists who fear the imagina ” “ tion , he cries , and very mistaken they are . c With all its falsehoods , it is imagination whi h sows all beauty, all virtue in the world . Only ! through it are we great . Oh mothers have no fear that it will destroy your chilrden ! On the contrary it will keep them from vulgar faults and facile mistakes . N t Imagination is everything . o by the fac ulty of laughter does man rise above the ani mals , but by the gift of dreaming . The story teller remakes the world after his own fashion , gives to lesser men , to the simple , to children , a chance to make it over in theirs . He helps n man to imagi e , to feel , and to love . “ To know is nothing , to imagine is every

CHAPTER IV

THE DREAMER OF THE PA ST : EARL! “THAIS ” ( 1883

66 T is not science, it is poetry which charms

and which consoles . That is why poetry is more necessary than science In the story of Abeille ( 1 883 ) is found for a third time the ’ text of the dialogue , with its poet s protest ’ No against the stiﬂing of childhood s dreams . , “ surely Abeille was not meant for the rational souls who despise triﬂes and call for constant ” - P instruction . Such a fairy tale errault him

Nodie r self might have written , or told to his L e ivre daughter by the evening ﬁre . Like L ’ de mon ami Abeille , springs from a scholar s idealization of fatherhood ; and so too do the nursery stories of Nos E nfants candid and idyllic as the pictures drawn for them by M Boutet de onvel . D id these books turn the poet back to his art ? Did the tiny heroine of A beille charm him away from the uglier life of to - day ? A little child shall lead them , even the misguided ones who 62

i n Ser e . write of heroes like Jean v At any rate , this charming tale gave its author new wings , and now for a decade he was to neglect the modern novel for the conte and the caus erie litt ra ire é . His ﬁrst sheaf of tales was gathered under the title B althas ar Abeille of course was included , but of the other stories only two are modern . And these get their plots from hypnotism and suggestion : Anatole France is still pursuing romance among the marvels of science . But the tale which gives its caption to the volume is made of Biblical ﬁgures : his tory and legend are ever drawing him more deeply into the past .

Balthasar is the pagan king of Ethiopia . He S loves the queen of heba , that mysterious Balkis Nodier who , for us , lives on in the tales of and

t-Ant in Nerval and L a Tenta tion de S ain o e . He woos this languid beauty , protests his desire to serve , until she admits her one unsatisﬁed de “ sire : I should like to be afraid Curious as the Roman ladies of the decadence , she longs to meet danger , to face the unknown , the ter r ro s of the night and its mysterious qualms . ’ So they seek adventure in the Queen s capital , ’ their golden raiment doffed for beggar s garb . “ The night was black . Balkis was very tiny 63

in the night . Yet tiny as she is , the love of danger makes her brave , and she leads her

- lover to a pot house of the slums . Here , in the company of porters and prostitutes , Balkis tastes t he unknown savor of salt ﬁsh and on ions . But having forgotten to bring money, they are set upon with threats and blows , and the King only wins their freedom by main force . Not until then does Balkis tell her burly cham pion that she loves him .

Balthasar has shed his blood for her . And he sheds it again before the adventure ends , and they are rescued from the brigands who

ﬁnd them sleeping in the hills . Struck down h now in her defense , unconscious throug days and nights of raving , he rises from his bed to

ﬁnd her closeted with a new lover , and to his mage he complains of the evils of this world . “ ” Wisdom makes one happy , replies the astrol oger , and the King sets out in search of wis dom .

He builds a tower to observe the stars , and “ then he knows the blessings of the sage . While

I am studying astronomy , I do not think of

Balkis , nor of anything whatsoever . The sci ence s are useful ; they keep men from thinking . S embobitis , teach me the knowledge which de stroys feeling in man , and I shall raise you in 64 honors among my people So his mage in structs him in the secrets of the sky .

He learns how to draw horoscopes . At last m he can draw them as well as S e bobitis himself . Has he discovered the way of truth ? Are his ? “ S ” predictions accurate cience is infallible , “ replies his teacher , but scholars are constantly ” mbobiti making mistakes . And S e s denies the ’ King s discovery, a new star , a wonderful new star which promises well for some unknown nativity . Meanwhile Balkis learns that the King has forgotten her , and straightway knows that she D loves him only . ismissing her new lover , she

- sets out to ﬁnd the old , and her camel train winds its way across the desert sands toward

- the astronomer king . From his tower he des cries her , in all her beauty , but despite the ter rible force that draws him earthward , he lifts his eyes again to the wonderful star , and it bids him follow its light to One who , in reward for his seeking , has promised him true riches and joy and love . S o he sets out to meet Gaspard and Melchior M already on their way . any days they follow the star , until it rests over the manger in Beth “ lehem . And entering the dwelling , they found M the Child with ary His mother , and they

morse that I may ﬁnd pleasure , shows that Anatole France had not entirely forgotten Bau delaire and his breviary of Satanism . There is something of Gautier ’ s fancy in this story of the deathless Leila ; something of Gautier , too , L a eta A cilia in the tale of , a resurrection of

Roman and Christian antiquity , contrasted as A r i M ar el P in r a c la . iquant and typical of the mixed ideals of our author is the apposition of these two worlds in the types he has chosen ’ c the Roman senator s wife , rich , aristo ratic , and contemptuous of this new religion of slaves , M M and the ﬁgure of ary agdalene , already — used in a poem published in 1 876 a sinner saint like the heroine of his next volume .

This , of course , is the contrasted motif of L e No e orinthiennes Th is s c s c . a But , a year later , shows even better the conﬂict of interests H which sways this intellectual Epicurean . u “ manist and skeptic , a pagan with a Catholic ” imagination , Anatole France now turned to that Alexandrian age whose poets had been his delight in days at school . From his boyhood ives o the S aints on he had loved the L f , and at exer ﬁfteen he had already written , as a school

i inte - Ra de onde L a v e de S o . cise , g The Chris tian anchorites had always fascinated this monk of letters , and now setting one of them against 67

the paganism of Alexandria , he limned a fresco full of contrasted and exotic color .

Thais is a legend retold , and gilded in the k M a s telling . Every one nows the story that senet has made into an opera . But the web of this fabric came from a library— from a ’ P a h medievalist s library . The original life of p nutiu s i is a na ve Latin drama , written in the days of the Emperor Otto by a Saxon nun . Anatole France was deeply interested in this conventual blue- stocking and her miracle - plays witness the pages on Hro switha in the third ’ i itt r ir e volume of L a V e l e a . — i In this primitive miracle play, Tha s is a

courtesan redeemed by a holy monk , who gains — admittance to her in the guise of a lover s ub s eci m toris I p e a a . n the version of Anatole France the anchorite pays the price of his con ceit by yielding at last to a passionate love of

his fair convert . The despiser of the ﬂesh is conquered by the ﬂesh : no penance and no dis ci line S p avail . inner is changed to saint and

saint to sinner ; Aphrodite is avenged , and the amiable skeptic who had voiced the fear of her N resentment , icias the Cyrenaic , is seen to be

the ideal of the author , an intellectual hedonist ,

an ironical dilettante of the senses and the arts . Such is the simple fabric that Anatole France 68

Thai s has embroidered into . But only an artist , with an artist ’ s imagination and a painter ’ s touch , could have clothed the rude skeleton of the legend with such living flesh . Only a great artist could have breathed into his Galatea the mingled fire and languor of this cultured and corrupted age , posed her against so rich a background— Alexandria with its shining roofs N under a hot blue tropical sky , the yellow ile P and the yramids , and the desert dreaming its infinite dream before an unseeing Sphinx . Rich ’ ’ as Titian s or Tintoretto s pictures , and no less ff P Tha is indi erent to uritanism , stands out like an oil - painting against the softer water—colors

L es Noces corinthiennes — of similar in motif , but inﬁnitely stronger in texture and impasto . ’ conte hilos o hi ue V It is a p p q , like oltaire s ; a fresco ﬁlled with all the philosophies which

ﬂourished in the ancient world , before the scroll was erased and written over into the palimpsest of Christianity . Thais roces is a pageant of metaphysics , a p No sion of the systems . t one but has its advocate

— - — as in L a Tenta tion de S aint Antoine a t the symposium in the second chapter . And the dis cu s s io n S only ends when the toic , full of years and wisdom , dies conversing with his friends , a voluntary Socrates who might be suspe cted 69

M of having read arcus Aurelius . Yet if every attitude is presented in the story, it is really skepticism which prevails . The disciple of Pyrrho alone may accept equally all the philos ’ O hies p , enjoy as poetry all these sick men s ” “ dreams . For the systems constructed by the sages are only tales invented to amuse the eter nal childhood of man They , too , are part of

e ternal flux ff the , seen di erently by all the chil “ M dren of men . The pyramids of emphis seem , at daybreak , like cones of rosy light . At sunset they appear like black triangles against the ﬂaming sky . But who shall penetrate their substance N ever , perhaps , was philosophic nihilism so beautifully arrayed . But poetry and philosophy are not so far apart , after all . The philosophy may be taken largely from a book on the Greek o L a Vie skeptics , as Anat le France admits in ’ 1 litteraire , but the touch of the poet has trans formed it , as Flaubert changed erudition to art

t ti mt- Antoin in L a Ten a on de S a e .

Clearly , Flaubert served as model here , as ocas te Tenta tion he had done in parts of J . The , S too, is a metaphysical and mystic orgy , a atur

1 s u r en fr m Amé 134. an rea c o c es e e a so a o II , M y li ti t h w l t k ‘ ' m r e na rance bo u m o L a Thébaia e ev e b o e a s e. l t, , i w d y A t l F t thi ti 70

. too nalian revelry of philosophies Here , , we Tha is find the Gymnosophist of , the comparison between Buddhism and Christianity, the oppo — s ition of the Spirit and the flesh that real struggle which , as a foil to the dilettantism of the banquet scene , completes the paradox of Thais . The setting of the final chapter , when the too heroic monk goes back to his desert and new his temptations , the Egyptian tomb with — its wall paintings , the monsters , the pack of jackals , are all reminiscent of Flaubert . The agonies of Saint Anthony fall also upon Paph nuce , but in his case the cross does not conquer f at the end . Too blind to see the salvation of ered to his soul in useful labor , the monk vainly carries his temptations to a pillar and thence to a desert tomb : now he cannot distinguish the D . V voice of the evil from the voice of God ain , and too , his final yielding to the hopes of life love so long despised , since he reaches his con vert only to see her die , a saint , while her sisters in piety drive him away from the body as if he were a vampire . Christianity had triumphed over paganism in i i Th is L es Noces cor nth ennes . In a the pagan spirit triumphs in its turn . One other stand point remained , to show the new faith ignored by the old , insignificant and virtually non 71

existent in a mightier social and religious order . This point of view is vividly presented in L e ro ur teur l p c a a e fudee . ’ L E tui de nacre The story is found in , pub lished two years later None of the tales is so faultless in technique , none so char acteris tic of Anatole France in its psychologic n i sight and atmosphere . A touch of his magi ’ cian s a — a wand , and we see Bai e of old marble city bathed by a sapphire sea . We walk the

- o vine clad hills above the t wn , watch the meet ing of Laelius Lamia and his old friend Pontius P ilatus , hear their reminiscences at the dinner in the villa , sympathize with the former proeu un rator , now deprived of his province , in the merited disgrace which has fallen upon him M after a lifetime devoted to the Empire . ore than this , we share his resentment at the cause n of his ruin , the obsti ate cringing fanatic race which had refused his aqueducts and opposed his justice and zeal in their behalf . Then the two friends speak of the religion of the Jews . Half mockingly , Lamia remarks that some day the Jewish Jupiter may ﬁnd a place P P in the antheon of Rome . ilate smiles , con v inced that a people still quarreling over its dogmas cannot impose them upon the outside world . He recalls to Lamia the mad intolerance 72

of the Jews , their zeal in persecuting heretics , their constant appeals to him for the death of the unorthodox . Forced as a Roman executive to sanction their decrees , unable to make them tolerant and reasonable in matters of religion , he has had his very justice made the basis of

’ complaints to the proconsul , so that in the end he has lost his province thereby . And he con cludes from such unreason that the Jews must be destroyed .

Lamia tries to calm his virtuous wrath . He speaks of the simple hearts he has found among this people , of the heroic heretics he has seen die for a cause . For he too has lived in Judea , P ’ ilate s guest for many years , after his indis creti ns o had banished him from Rome . Then he praises the beauty of their women , while Pontius blames him for a conduct which has given no children to the State . Yet Lamia con tinue s S , vaunting the grace of the yrian dan cers , like the voluptuary he is , until he comes — to mention an old love a girl who left him to join the band of a young Galilean thaumaturge , P Jesus of Nazareth . And he asks ilate if he remembers this man , put to death for some for gotten cause .

P . ilate knits his brows Then , after some moments of silence he replies :

74 the French Revolution which make the last half i of the volume a promise of L es D ieux ont s o f . ' ’ M emoires d un volontaire is a literary mosaic , made up , as the author tells us , of real happen ings in the eighteenth century, while some of the other tales are borrowed from anecdotes 2 i r i ﬁrst told in L e L v e de mon a m . The physi cian who neglected the sick dauphin in order to care for a peasant woman in childbirth , the aris tocra t who hid a refugee between the mattresses

- of her bed , the fatal love letters thrust under a sofa when the patriots surprise Milady in her ’ a ube M a task of destruction , reappear in L , m ti s ld t e lo b da e de uz L e e t o a d m . L y, and p p

As we have seen before , Anatole France is fond of quoting himself . But criticism is disarmed when , at the end of the last episode , the author states his belief that he has already heard that a indul story somewhere , and we turn b ck gently to the earlier version , wondering if it is D id truth or poetry . these things really hap

- pen to his eighteenth century grandmother , and did her unwritten memoirs inspire in the grand son his interest in the French Revolution ?

However that may be , the stories bear the i stamp of historical truth . The imaginat on of Anatole France was quick to catch the generous

2 L o - c cit . 89 94. . , pp 75 ardor behind the ﬁrst Revolutionary dream of 1 — equality . The hopes of 789 with the Bastille destroyed and the Golden Age brought back to earth—that vision of fraternity which only too soon degenerated into suspicion and denuncia tion—how all this age of idealism lives again aw for us , relieved against the prison and the ful shadow of the guillotine ! He loves this ’ ancien re ime g , with its Epicurean poise, its irony and its quiet heroism , and when he de picts a g rande dame renouncing her hope of love and freedom to save a turnkey’ s daughter L a victime volontair e ( ) , one can see his native sympathy for the culture of the eighteenth cen w tury , the last ﬂo er of a forgotten chivalry and an outworn Renaissance . “ I love the things of days gone by and I like to live in the company of the dead , says this

- scholar poet . And we may add with him , “Who of us does not like to live in the past ? Who of us does not sometimes feel the need of ? it It would be too little to live in the present , for the present is but a point that flees inces ” s antl o y . S Anatole France wrote his tales of other times , finding in them not merely the joys of a scholar and an antiquarian , but the door which best offered an escape from unromantic reality, from the dull prose of a scientific and 76

- materialistic age . It is a dream country to which he carries us in these vivid fables , a strand far from the barren factory- dotted land o f — scape the present Rome or Alexandria , the i na ve age of faith , the fiery Renaissance , or the stirring days of the Revolution . But by its definition the tale must transport the reader to the land of dreams . Anatole France takes us there in a magic boat . There are none who may not embark , set sail with him for enchanted seas . None will fail to see how a real vision inspired these voy ages , but only the scholar , conscious of his sources , will know the toil which built the fairy ship or freighted it for our delight . For the author himself is speaking in the confession of “ : Gellius Jacques Tournebroche Like Aulus , who brought together the finest pages of the A ttic Ni hts philosophers in his g , like Apuleius who put into his M eta morphos es the best of the fables of the Greeks , I give myself the labors of the honey- bee in order to distil a nec tar divine . CHAPTER V

OF L ETTERS : CRITICI SM AND THE REACTION TO L IFE ( 1887 rs ub s ed in the S ewanee Review Fi t p li h , re r n b k nd e rm s s on f the o r p i ted y i p i i o edit . V

FTER the story, we turn again to the story

teller . Books like these , certainly, are ’ only born in a poet s mind . None but a poet could have dreamed Thai s and the desert and

N . the ile , and the white city by the inland sea Onl y a poet could have lived again in sympathy the lives of the saints , thrilled to the mingled horror and heroism of the Revolution , seen in

- Pontius Pilate the spirit of a world empire .

But to realize these dreams of a dead past , to make them vivid and clear and convincing as a modern novel , took something more than mere imagination . Call it clairvoyance if you will ; clairvoyance of this sort is really histor ical insight based on critical scholarship . The - is story teller a poet , but he is also the subtlest of critics .

Too subtle , perhaps , for great lyricism . In any case , one may catch too early the trick of L e ivre de mon mi rationalizing emotion . If L a 80

a is confession , this sensitive boy needed no priestly training to show him how to apply dia l ctics e to experience .

L e t us go back to his literary beginnings . N aturally, the poet found expression ﬁrst . But as we have seen , verse was not his only inter : in P est even his arnassian days , his other tal ent was leading him to biography . As early 1 868 as , he had made his study of Alfred de

V L emerr e igny , and had given him the editor o f ship a series of French classics . S o he wrote the lives of many a favorite author , now col

’ lected and reprinted in Genie la tin In 1 8 74 , he had published the ﬁrst of these inter Ra cine 1 8 B ernardin de esting studies , ; in 77 , ’ ’ S aint-Pierre L Abbe P r evos t M olier e , , and ; in 1 8 8 L e S a e 1 8 M ar uerite de Na 7 , g ; in 79 , g r int -B euve h teaubri nd va re S a e a a . , , and C From 1 88 1 to 1 890 his growing success as a novelist S carron M a dame de la reduced the list to , t L F ont ine B en amin ons t t F a e te a a an . y , , and j C ’ Theocrite , which has the place of honor in the 1 8 6 collection , dates from 9 , when his labors as

’ prefa cier were almost over It is well to have these juvenilia collected and

reprinted . They are the beginnings of the critic who , for good or evil , broke the last bonds of criticism . If not scholarly biographies , per

It is sympathy which leads the artist to the o heart of his model . S this young critic turns instinctively to types like himself . First he takes up his favorite Racine , and the portrait is rich in glimpses of the artist who drew it . “ With Racine , Anatole France knew the charms of a pious education for the ardent young souls ” that it does not stifle ; he too had known the malady of the cloister , its dangerous gift of intermingling life and dreams , to lose oneself 1 ff therein . But when he adds that religion o ers ” to voluptuous souls la volupté de se perdre , we realize suddenly that this gentle classicist is also an admirer of Baudelaire ! The ’ prentice critic finds it hard not to read himself into his model . Be the subject well chosen , his own experience serves as a divining rod . S o for Anatole France there is no contra diction in the mocking sallies of le tendre Ra “ cine : The same nervous sensibility which ex cites one to weep at many things provokes ” 2 laughter at many others . With Racine , he had thrilled in boyhood to the beauty of the classics ; he too had known the visions which float through a poet ’ s soul before the words 3 come to set them free . And in spite of all his

- self suppression in these studies , which were

1 2 i 3 i o Ib d 1 . I b . L c t 1 9 . 44 d 1 ci . . 3 . . 39. . , p , p , p 83 written at the same time as his early essays An in naturalistic ﬁction , atole France already declares that what we love and value in others is “only the points of relationship which bind ” 4 them to ourselves . Thus he foreshadows the subjective critic of

’ i itt r ire L a V e l e a . The later digressions may be lacking , but never the tender irony , the play ful grace and wit that mark the personal atti tude . He frankly admits that he has not read P L e M onde moral a serious work of revost , ; but his portrait of the soldier -abbé and de frocked Bohemian does not suffer by the omis N o sion . aturally , the future creator of Jer me Co ig na rd will see the picturesque in such a man : he will like to explore that heart divided between the love of religion and the loves of No this world . one could be more clever in be his setting of the background , as when he gins a study of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre by a swift sketch of his native seaport , or relieves a portrait of Chateaubriand against a sombre Breton landscape of barren heath and donjon and never silent sea . No one quicker to see the universal humanity in his sitters , or to illustrate a modern text from the golden stores of the Greeks . And if he cannot resist the

‘ i Ib d 150. ., p . 84

temptation of an occasional quaint archaism , he knows that to be truly classic one must be “ ’ simple and natural . Ce n est pas en faisant ’ ” u d grec qu on ressemble le plus aux Grecs . M He will be himself , and it is not oliere nor S L e S carron nor age , but the poets Racine , S - ainte Beuve , and Chateaubriand whose por traits stir him to freest self—expression “The works that are least vain were created by those who best saw the vanity of all things . One must pay for the pride of thinking in sad ” 5 ness and desolation . This is found in the essay on Racine . Thus the very ﬁrst of these 1 8 studies , dating from 74 , reﬂects the earlier , dis illu essential Anatole France , the seeker s ioned dis illu and bitter , before he has taken sion for a mask . This is our skeptic at thirty, judging his youth ’ s attempt to solve the riddle of the universe by nineteenth - century science

- and eighteenth century philosophy . When , thir Cla retie teen years later , he replaced Jules as L e Te m s literary critic of p , he had learned , M like ontaigne , how easy it was to sleep in peace on the pillow of doubt —and even to dream delightfully upon it . He had become “ ” ’ the mocking Benedictine of his editor s fancy , a philosophic monk of a dilettante Abbey of ”bid 1 4 5 . , p .

' Add to this his very evident admiration for the M 7 great modern relativist , ontaigne , and you have his exemplars during the six years of reading which prepared him for L a Vie litté i ra re . ? What is this dilettantism It is , for Anatole “ ’ ” l am r - e s use . France , don de de soi meme It is intellectual Epicureanism “one wearies of ” everything except the joys of comprehending .

It is a religion of universal curiosity, spiced by S erudition and guided by taste . keptical of absolute values , it accepts the game of thought ’ for the game s sake , and it builds no philo sophic system . Hence its inconsistencies , its contradictions : since those who follow the great M M god ood must , like ontaigne , possess two “ or three philosophies . Woe unto him who ” does not contradict himself at least once a day, had said Renan . Anatole France will say, in P “ the reface to his second volume , I am afraid ” 8 of absolutely logical souls . ‘ Breadth extended even to inconsistency will S o hardly be dogmatic . this critic builds no

theory of esthetics . Artist that he is , com

elled p to choose because all art is selective , he does not exalt his personal preferences into a

7 i t i t III as s m. V e li ., , p “ ” 8 L es am s e em es de ou o sme me on eur e x pt t t ill gi f t p . 87

theory . I believe that we shall never know , “ says he in a preface , exactly why a thing is ” beautiful . To him , Beauty is a part of the universal illusion . It is the eye of man which creates the beauty of the heavens and the earth . We confer beauty upon things by loving them ; love contains all the mystery of the ideal . But , idealists or realists , we are all alike the play f things o . Beauty is the only reality we are permitted to seize . ’ o We think at once of Plato s P r tag oras . But all the philosophers are known to this destroyer of philosophy . The very procession of the world- systems has made him more skeptical : in philosophy too , as in the things about him , he sees only relativity and change . And yet he loves philosophy as the history of man ’ s thought , loves it as a scholar and a humanist . ' P “ For him as for ascal , thought is man in his ” entirety , the source of his dignity and the ” secret of his despair . He loves it also as a master of dialectics , as we may see in his essay on Jules Lemaitre , and for Anatole France thought is philosophic doubt . L t e us see what —he has to say of his fellow Renanist Lemaitre and incidentally of him “ ” self . His fortunate perversity, reads the

9 69 III , . 88

’ essay , consists in doubting incessantly . Tis the condition to which reﬂection has reduced him . Thought is a frightful thing . It is the acid which dissolves the universe , and if all men were set to thinking at once , the world would immediately cease to exist . But this misfortune is not to be feared . Thought is the worst of things . It is also the best , for if it is true to say that it destroys everything , one can also say that it has created all things . Only through it do we conceive the universe , and when it demonstrates to us that the universe is inconceivable , it does but shatter the bubble it ” 1 0 has blown . How all this recalls the D ialog ues philos o hi ues ! p q Only Renan , surely, could keep his paradoxes dancing so skilfully upon thin air .

Only Renan , before him , could blow them so rich in color and beauty, yet light as thistle down . To juggle with ultimate things like sil — ver balls Renan alone had done that : now that skill is shared by Anatole France and bv N his mocking Cyrenaic icias , whose incarna Thais 1 88 tion , in , dates from this very year ( 9) ’ S o from Nicias s creator we can expect noth “ ing but subjective criticism . As I understand P “ it , he says in his ﬁrst reface , criticism , like

1 ° 173 II, .

’ i mers only swung in empty air . Brunet ere s attempt to refute the subjectivity of knowledge was hardly more successful than those of all the philosophers before him , and over the ruins of his logic the butterﬂy hovers still .

Our concern moreover is with the butterﬂy . L et us keep the image , for it alone translates the volatile grace of these literary chats . Such M might be the essays of ontaigne reincarnate ,

M chr oni ueur aris ien a ontaigne turned q p . Like him , like Elia too , Anatole France follows his “ : e e t fancy where it listeth j cause , la causerie

a ses hasards . S o perfectly natural does it seem that at ﬁrst one is more than half de N ceived . one the less , chance is not master here . Well does this critic know what he would —o r ! i say leave unsaid He may say it na vely, a rs es t el r t but c a e ar em . He always says it

simply , with a grace borrowed from antiquity . V True to his mentor oltaire , he never forgets

that he is writing for the larger public , and these years of newspaper work will do much

to make his prose vivid and supple and sure . His method—but that may best be left to his

own words . Renan had just published a vol

ume of his great history, the task of a lifetime . Remember Anatole France was speaking of the 91

—f n work of a master o his ow master . And here is his introduction : “Must I try to describe for you the impres sion I felt in reading this second volume of The His tory ofIs ra el ? Must I show you my mood ‘’ ’ ( l etat de mon ame ) while I was dreaming from page to page ? ’ Tis a sort of criticism for which I have only too much inclination , as you know . When I have told what I have felt ,

I can hardly ever say more , and all my art is scribbling on the margins of books . A leaf turned over is like a torch put in my hand ; it sets to dancing twenty butterﬂies which spring

from my brain . If I drive them away , others

come , and they seem to murmur with their ‘

P . w e beating wings : We are little syches .

too are seeking Eros , the secret of life and of death And ﬁnally it is always one of these little Psyches who writes my article for me !

How she manages , Heaven knows , but without u ” 1 1 her I sho ld do far worse . P And what the little syches bring him now , after a descriptive paragraph based on his rev ’ erie over Renan s masterpiece , is the memory ’ of his mother s Bible , with its seventeenth

century woodcuts , and these occupy him almost

to the exclusion of the book he is set to review . 1 1 I I , 317. 92

So for Anatole France criticism becomes a marginal note . It is a gloss ; a gloss creative L a Vie litt ra ire as the text it adorns . é is a ournal intime j of literary impressions , of gen —“i ” eral ideas t is so agreeable to philosophize . It is a portrait of the artist ; and if he has no “ ” systematic tendency , tendencies he certainly “ has . Breadth ﬁrst , for one has less chance of being absolutely mistaken when one admires ” 1 2 things which are very diverse . Yet he insists upon style , the simple style of the Greeks , and he hates neologism and Goncour is me as he hates the platitudes of Georges Ohnet or the monstrous rhetoric of Victor Hugo . For Ana tole France , as for his beloved eighteenth cen tury , taste is the ﬁrst canon of literature “

Without taste , one shocks even those who ” 1 3 have none . S o he likes the tale better than 1 4 “ the novel , and confesses a secret preference ” 1 5 : for little masterpieces . Taste means restraint “To tell everything is to tell Taste “ means beauty , and in art everything which is ” 1 7 not beautiful is false . Hence his chief abom ination is naturalism , and nothing could be " ﬁner than the conclusion of his study of Zola ,

1 2 1 3 17 . 99. I , I , 1 4 1 5 I 1 150. V, 3 9. I , 1 6 1 7 79. 78. I , I , 1 3 236 ‘ I , .

94 minal , whose epic force had impressed him n through all his Hellenism . This recog ition occurred long before the personal rapp roche ent D m of the reyfus affair . Of course his antipathy to Zola ’ s naturalism is what we should expect of a poet . Classic naturalism , so ﬁnely wrought out in the seven teenth century , he accepts as a humanist , and he loves and strives for the classical ideal of ro form . Yet by his feelings he leans to the — “D mantic and openly avows it . espite all our attempts to be reasonable and to love only the truth , there are times when common reality — ceases to satisfy when one would like to e s Poe cape from As had said , any where out of the world ! So Anatole France will explore the cosmos in search of the mar — — velous which he knows does not exist and is never happier than when illuminating some miracle of popular legend or medieval hag iol ro ogy or modern spiritism . With the same mantic curiosity he will ransack the sciences , choosing of course writers “fond of those gen e ralizations from which a curious mind can draw immediate pleasure and How

often , for instance , will his restless imagination

1 9 2 ° 11 . 371. I 7 III , , 2 1 IV, 350. 95

find in the marvels of astronomy a new thrill and a new metaphor ! So might one plunder all the universe to store P a alace of Art . But our skeptic knows that “ everything in this world must be paid for , and ” 2 2 pleasure most of all . Before the end of the second volume , we find hints of a reaction , a growing desire to quit his ivory tower . Take the page in which he depicts the farmers win — mowing wheat a page worthy to set beside the L a M a r e o u dia ble classic prologue of , and “ mark the ending : Oh the joy of accomplishing ! S a fixed and regular task hall I know , to night , whether I have brought home to my granary the good grain ? Shall I know whether my words are the bread which giveth life

There is , then , an ideal of truth , an ideal for life , unknown to him though it be . And now ,

’ L a Vie littera ire in the last two volumes of , a new note enters , despite the rather signiﬁcant ers on i fact that p al a come less readily to his pen . This note is ﬁrst struck in the review of Bour ’ ” L D is ci e e l . ve get s p Here , Anatole France hemently defends the right of the thinker to a free expression of his thought , regardless of “ any practical or moral consequences . It is

2 2 2 2 3 55 . 254. I , II , 2 4 4 5 . III , 96

thought which rules the world , he avers , yes ’ ” r a s - te d y ideas make the morals of to morro w .

And if he still loves his skeptical poise , still believes with Montaigne that “to die for an ” idea is to set a pretty high value on conjectures , none the less he does virtually deny his old “ quietism in this statement : Whoever thinks he possesses the truth must declare He “ knows , now , that life is not innocent , as he “ had hoped it might be , that we live only by ” “ devouring life ; nay, that even thought is act which partakes of the cruelty inherent in ” 2 6 every act . And not many weeks after comes the realization that , even for a hedonist , pas i i s v ty is death . Reviewing the career of a for V D m gotten connoisseur , ivant e on , he tells us “ ’ that la mollesse est l ennemie des vraies volup ” 2 7 " tés ; discovers , even more signiﬁcantly , the ” ’ defect of that fortunate career in D enon s re “ fus al to allow himself to take up arms in any ” cause . It is clear that these two essays mark the turning- point in the development of Anatole

France . He had been one of those described P “ in his ﬁrst reface , one for whom the universe ” Now is only ink and paper . his window open

2 5 6 62 73 . III , . III ,

2 7 179. III ,

With all this his pessimism increases through No these later volumes . illusion gilds for him P the present , as it had gloriﬁed that alace of Art where his skepticism had found peace in “ ” books and in the silent orgies of thought . He knows this world of ours for the drop of mud that it is ; realizes that even the physical uni ff “ verse o ers no hope of better things . He ﬁnds it horrible to think that children will become

’ 5 menf sees that the unchanging base of human “ nature is tenaciously selfish , jealous , sensual , ” 3 6 and cruel . He even wonders , at times , whether life is not an accident , a mould , a 8 7 planetary disease . And believing all this , dis 3 8 illusioned in his hopes of science , in his belief 3 9 in history , conscious of the sadness of the “ everlasting flux , knowing that in much wis dom is much grief , he asks himself every even P 4 1 “ ing with the reacher , What profit hath a man of all the labour which he laboureth under the sun ?” Yet through it all he retains his confidence in the reason , in that curious eight

enth e century which , believing in progress won through reason , inaugurated a new era for 99

humanity . Only his ﬁrst trust is now tem pered by experience, by the realization that “ things do not move so quickly as we used to ” “ think . Convinced , now , that one must follow circumstances , use the forces about us , do in a word what we ﬁnd to this defender of truth in the abstract is only waiting for the hour P and the call . The critic who , in the reface “ of four years before , had blessed books be cause they made of life a long and gentle child ” hood , is ready for his anticlerical campaig n .

Five years more , and he will ﬁght side by side D with Zola in the defense of reyfus .

4 3 III, 348.

NE tires of everything , even of correct

- . 1 8 2 ing proof sheets In 9 , Anatole France gave up his regular contributions to L e Tem s p , and his later occasional work in this

s . al l ﬁeld is till uncollected After , literary journalism had been mainly a pleasant by-path 1 888 for his curiosity, since the years from to 1 8 2 B a lthas ar Thais 9 had also produced , , and ’ L E t i a re u de n c . Henceforth , he was to make

ﬁction the vehicle of his criticism of life . The by-path merges into the highway with ’ L E tui de nacre ' , synchronous with the last ix volume of essays . S stories in that collection were staged against a Revolutionary setting . From the drama back to the comedy which pre — ' ceded it frorn 1 78 to his beloved a ncien ré — 9 g ime was no long step for one who so ad mired the prose of Voltaire and the liberal thought of the eighteenth century . Hence his conte hil os o hi ue next book, a sort of p p q , racy as 104

Candid e and ﬁlled with reminiscences of its characters and its style . L a Rotis s erie de la reine P éda uque purports

- to be an eighteenth century memoir , written by the student Jacques Tournebroche . His father it is who keeps the cook- shop of Queen Web s foot , with its painted signboard ymbolic of M —a other Goose , redolent hospitable hearth where gather the chief characters of the story . o Co i na rd hu Here we ﬁnd the Abbé Jer me g , manist and Bohemian , unctuous and genially disreputable , who , for a daily meal , consents to instruct young Jacques in the humanities . Hither comes the strange ﬁgure of the Marquis ’ d A stara c , an adept of alchemy and the Rosy

Cross , to point out in the ﬂaming ﬁreplace a ’ salamander suspiciously like Cellini s vision ’ So sure portent , to him , of a mystic s destiny . A s tar a c takes Jacques and his master into his service , and sets them to work in his library to translate Greek manuscripts , while he in his laboratory seeks the philosopher ’ s stone and the secret of life . In this temple of learning they M o saide meet the Rabbi , who , after sixty years P of study in the Great yramid , explores for the alchemist the lore of the Hebrews and the : Egyptians there , too, they meet Jahel , the old ’ Jew s lovely niece . How Jacques mistakes her

1 06 .

these gentle spirits , upon a condition very easy to all true adepts , an inviolate preservation of ” chastity . P Like Alexander ope , Anatole France found 1 L e co mte de a balis in G his principal source . He knew this contemporary satire of the Rosi crucians in the fascinating Voyag es imag inaires ’ for Monsieur d Astarac is sketched

. v after the frontispiece In the same olume , Amant s alamandre too , may be found an ; in ’ z L e D ia bl mo reux Ca otte s e a u . the next one , But more to us than these details is the roman tic curiosity which led a skeptic to the choice of such a subject : far more signiﬁcant is his interest in the scientiﬁc possibility of invisible beings , here or on other planets , already noted ’ ’ L Vie litteraire in a certain page of a . For a “ - poet skeptic , fascinated by the supernatural , to ”— believe nothing is to believe everything in the realm of art !

But it took a poet , with all his imagination and candor , to limn the rational madness of the alchemist , despite the cosmic curiosity and i na ve faith in science which make of him , in a way , an earlier portrait of Anatole France . Candor alone could have depicted the simple

1 ran ue 2 1 1 L a G de Rev , Nov. 5, 91 . 2 I, 186. 107

’ Jacques , and especially the pupil s portrait of r m r his friend and master Jé é e Coig na d . The Abbé Co ig n a rd is of course the center of the — story a mellow rascal who through all his fa lapses never loses our sympathy . In his vor ite o - b ok shop or in his favorite tavern , translating Zosimus or mingling potations with philosophy , he is always genial ; he may break ’ - ﬂ a sk a wine over a lackey s head , but when v he repents of this moment of iolence he is , as always , the imperturbable sage , and not even the accusation of cheating at cards can shake his poise or spoil his subtly intellectual charm .

We love him for his humanity , for the humani ties whose grace he breathes , and no scene in the book is more ludicrously typ i cal than the o one where Abbé Jer me , who has fought like a laym an in the brawl ending a Bacchic sym o s ium p , is found sitting on the wet margin of a street fountain , cursing the moon for her stingy light , as he seeks for an appropriate text in his pocket edition of D e Cons ola tione Philos ophia e ! Of course the Abbé Jerome is the mouth piece o f his only true begetter Even the disguise is signiﬁcant , for who can sketch a rascal or a vagabond so well as your cloistered ? o Coi nard is scholar Intellectually , Jer me g 108

a Anatole France , mask of philosophic dis enchantment—Epicurus with the heart of a S aint Francis . He too is a skeptic in practical life , with a marvelous leaning toward doubt which inclines him to mistrust even common ” sense . He too is a rationalist , for churchman “ that he is , he rejects everything contrary to ” reason except in matters of faith , and when “ ” he adds that here one must believe blindly , we can see that Anatole France is attacking dogma after the manner of Peter Bayle in his D i ti great c onary .

After dogma , Christian morality has its turn . ” Like crows , virtue makes its nest in ruins , “ observes the good Abbé . I have only suc ceeded in smuggling virtue into myself through the breaches made in my constitution by suffer ing and age . And every time I tried it , too , my spirit was puffed up far less with virtue S o than with pride . I keep making to the ‘ : Creator this prayer God , keep me from virtue . ’ if it withdraw me from holiness . Ah holiness . that is the thing we can and must attain ! There M a ! is our true goal . y we reach it some day !” In the meantime , more wine

No w the purpose of the novel is revealed . It is—rather surprisingly in the tolerant skeptic — of the essays a subtle but violent anticlerical

110

watertight compartments , fearing that reason might enter by surprise into the things of faith . Well ! Isn ’ t the last trait parodied for us in the religion of Jérome Co ig nard ? This ration conse alist , who despises the vulgar prejudice “ crated in human codes , adores divine law even in its absurdities , which wound our reason only because they are above And Anatole France is evidently following L es L ettres pro vinciales in the casuistry of the good Abbé , who believes that the greatest sinners make the greatest saints , since a moment of contrition can change years of transgression into holi “ ness . To use this as a justification of evil is f su ficient proof of satiric intention . Coi n ard In externals , of course , g resembles our old friend Abbé Prevost or the Pangloss n i of Ca d de . But in spirit he is a new Anatole now V France , influenced by oltaire rather than

. V o Renan Like oltaire , Jer me and his creator both believe in reason ; both champion that free spirit of inquiry which alone strips r e spectabil 6 o ity from old abuses . S the author soon added

L a Rotis s erie L es o i to a companion volume , p nion de M ons ieur erome Coi nard declar s J g , 7 “ ing : It is useful to wield the broom a bit

4 - 5 id 160 Ib . . . L oc cit . 156 7. . , pp , p 7 29 O nio ns . 203 . Ibid . . . pi , p , p 11

wildly in the dark corners . . Things unjust or foolish or cruel do not strike us as familiar we see the faults of our ancestors and not our own Thus , according to the ﬁctitious editor , “ L es Opinions should help us to examine our own consciences , to see . that our laws are still a lair of injustice, that we esteem riches ” L es alone and do not honor labor . Reading

O inions - p in the light of to day , our social sys tem would appear what it really is , a system precarious and wretched , a system undermined by the justice of things in the absence of human justice , a system whose ruin has begun . It is the present which the critic is now strik — ing at the present under the domino of the M f past . For the ississippi a fair we must read P Rock stron the scandal of anama , for g the politician , Rochefort . In fact , the whole book i r e is a l v e a cl f . Here begins the socialistic or radical tendency in Anatole France , but coupled with a pessimism so deep as to view any projected reform of society with alarm .

As he sees history, no human progress is pos sible : a change of leaders brings to the front only inexperience and greater tyranny ; a revo lution merely consecrates liberties already won . So he prefers old governments , because they are weaker and more tolerant ; all the advan 112 tage he ﬁnds in democracy is the fact that its shifting bourgeois ministries can never , like an absolute monarchy , combine and carry out a

- long plotted war . And to him war is a relic of ’ man s barbarism , the desire to kill and plunder “ which he shares with the beasts . That most frightful plague of civilized nations , military ” service , he views as a monster masked in false — glory and false honor a monster grown more cruel with the progress of civilization and the increase of armaments , and destined to perish only from sheer obesity when its time has come . Equally monstrous to him is the idea of hu man justice and capital punishment . The very thought of an execution spoils for him the light An d of day . he shows that all law is based — upon the respect for property a manifest ab surdity when philosophy teaches that man has nothing of his own but life and the power of thought . Yet he has no faith in reform through legislation , no conﬁdence in the return to nature “ or the natural goodness of man . When one wishes to make men good . . one is inevitably led to wish to kill them all .

A sombre pessimism , in ﬁne , colors all the i n r be opinions of Jérome Co g a d . Once he ’ lieved M d Astara c in science , like onsieur , whose joy ous atheistic fatalism sees in Nature

114

: what I say , my son truths discovered by the intellect remain sterile ; the heart alone is able I to give life to its . t is by feeling that the seeds of good are sown in this world .

Reason has no such power ; and I must say that , hitherto , I have put too much reliance on rea S o o f son . my criticism laws and customs will fall without fruit and wither like a tree bitten by April frosts . If one is to help mankind , one must reject reason and rise on the wings of enthusiasm . Anatole France has plainly fallen under the spell of romantic humanitarianism . One might trace the beginning of this in ’ L i litt r ir te re st in certain pages of a V e é a e . But it only crystallizes in L e p uits de S a inte laire C , published serially this same year in the E de P ris cho a . For the simple old priest whom we meet in the Prologue is not merely a sort of o Abbé Jer me turned Franciscan , a scholar grown contemptuous of human reason , a Chris tian socialist moved to mild irony by the comedy

—he of government , justice , and militarism is a dreamer who even hopes for the redemption D - of the evil , a tender hearted dreamer who longs for universal peace and the kingdom of

Go d upon earth . It is this modern Saint Fran

8 296 III 38 1 etc. II , ; , ; 115

S ’ cis who , on the margin of anta Clara s well S L e at iena , relates the stories which make up

it i t - re p u s de S o n e Clai . These tales are among the best of Anatole m France . With a new irror of refraction , the old fascinating conﬂict of paganism and Chris i i n a tiro re t an ty ﬁnds another focus . In S a S is lated the temptation of the poor Franciscan

Fra , for whom a pagan tomb gives up a phan tom rout of satyrs and elusive nymphs , trans

formed in his nightmare into toothless hags .

Tormented by his vision for many days , the good brother comes at last upon the ghost of S an S atiro , a satyr who had lived with the ﬁrst

Galileans , helped them and served them ; and

11 15 whose tomb , consecrated after demise , had become sanctuary for a myriad of pagan wood

folk , forgotten deities grown tiny and light as

- the chaff that ﬂies before the winnowing fan .

The story is full of touches from Apuleius . l In an ear ier volume , Anatole France had once compared the Golden As s to the legends of the M ” iddle Ages . There , too , he had announced , S an S a tiro many years before , the theme of “Up to the Middle Ages the monks lived in a ” - never ending spell . But here the whole fairy tale becomes a fable of the eternal passing of

9 Vie htt 121 I . 116

- the gods , as the phantom satyr saint tells the ff poor Franciscan , before he dies su ocated by the sponge the vengeful witches had put in place of his heart . ’ S o n S a tiro thus reminds one of Pater s Ap ollo i i r n P ca dy . The fate of forgotten deities plainly M es s er Guido fascinated Anatole France , for in Cava lcanti a , inspired by Boccaccio , another p gan tomb gives up its ghost in a vision , to tell the eager young humanist that in the grave there is no knowledge and to spur him on the “ way of Learning . But later , seeing that the purest souls are not without alloy of terrestrial M a m passion , esser Guido is seduced by the bitions of the ﬂesh and the powers of this ” world , so that his experience of life may be “ full , and he may die knowing that it is equally ” cruel and useless to think and to act . This disenchanted disciple of Epicurus was evidently conceived in an earlier , darker mood .

Then comes a story suggested by Vasari . L ucifer shows the danger of maligning the P D rince of arkness , for the luckless painter who had caricatured him receives in a dream the Adversary who forsook Heaven in order to become the prince of this world . To this Manichean fantasy succeeds a vaguely social is tic parable , the story of a selﬁsh banker who

118 justify the intellectual curiosity which has de stroyed all that , in order to console himself for “ ” its loss . Hence the human tragedy , the story of Fra Giovanni of Viterbo .

Humblest of Franciscan friars , the playmate of children and the friend of beggars and lep —“ ” ers , fearing to think for thought is evil Brother Giovanni knows all the joys of lowli n ness and ig orance ; and being happy, is proof “ against the temptations of the Adversary . For ’ a man s thoughts are only stirred by sorrow , and his meditations by grief . Then , tortured by fears and desires , he turns anxiously in his ” bed , and rends his pillow of lies . So it happens with this simple- hearted child of God . An angel touches his lips with a burn ing coal , loosens his tongue that he may pro claim the Word of Life . Fra Giovanni goes forth to preach charity and poverty and hu on man brotherhood earth , talks with a laborer o and comes to see society as it is , ruled by p — pression and property and trafﬁcking a world in which the poor man is bound to defend the good things belonging to the rich . He declares the iniquity of the laws and is cast into prison , but he consoles himself for his treatment by the thought that he will die for Truth . Then One appears to him to show him the nature of 119

- that Truth for which he would die , tells him that Truth is white but not pure , and shows him the vision of a vast wheel , like the rose window of a cathedral , made of numberless moving ﬁgures , men of all sorts and conditions , each with a scroll of a different color issuing ra from his lips . F Giovanni reads these scrolls , various in matter as in hue , and ﬁnds among them none that does not contradict the others , but every device ends in the words : Such is the ” Truth .

And while he sighs at their contrariety, mar veling at the heretics and Arabs and Jews and atheists who ﬁnd place on the wheel , seeking in vain one scroll of white to console him for the blood- red motto of the Pope -when he calls at last for pure Truth , the Truth for ! which he is to die , behold the wheel begins to revolve . Faster and faster it turns , until the devices show only as circles , until the circles s themselve disappear , until at last the huge disk looms before him like the moon , white and stainless and dazzling . And he hears a voice , “ crying : Gaze now upon that white Truth which you wished to know . Thus the D evil destroys within him the desire for martyrdom . Then he leads the prisoner away with him to the hills , gives him to eat of 120 the Apple and reveals to him the beauty and No sadness of life . w Fra Giovanni recognizes his tempter and his teacher , but knowing that he has given him of the fruit of knowledge , ff taught him to feel and will and su er , taught him to know life as it is , his heart can only turn toward his teacher in gratitude and love .

No need to point the moral of this epilogue , told with a simplicity and a depth of feeling P which prove it a confession . lainly , Anatole France has a new evangel and a new hero ; he has been touched alike by humanitarianism and by the moral beauty of the great Franciscan . Now — , of course , his radicalism his idealistic — o anarchism is wholly theoretic . If like Jer me Coi na rd f g , the Fra a ﬁrms that law is not cor rected by law , he also says that it is not reme of died by the destruction law , since violence begets violence and the reformer becomes like the judge he has slain . We must not strike the wicked , lest we make ourselves like them ; we must oppose to force not force but gentle TO1 ness . And it is interesting to compare the stoyan mildness of this doctrine with his later D ff speeches , when the reyfus a air had destroyed his poise and made him an active enemy of

Church and army . ’ L humaine tra die Compared with g é , its com

122

part of the novel , which is episodic , digressive , and lacking in unity and characterization . Ex uisite q bits of landscape, vistas rich in a double a a tmosphere of time and space , sketched in phrase , yet full of delicately complex beauty, gleam and tantalize through the long weary intrigue of love and jealousy ; and one carries away the vision of a theater more precious than the comedy . All the charm of mystic Italy, the D S Italy of ante and aint Francis , all the candor v sk e ti of a bygone age , relieves the per asive p cism of the ultramodern actors , worthy com panions of the cynical , disillusioned Therese .

Only two are idealists , the sentimental English poetess enamored of Renaissance art , and the Choulette C vagabond poet , dreaming atholic lyrics and preaching Christian socialism in the intervals of a life ﬁlled with debauch and r e en n M ta ce . ff p But iss Bell , with her a ected

P re ra haelite French and her p verses , is cer tainly a delicate caricature of a well - known - Choulette English blue stocking ; and in , the

- sinner saint , the mad weak lovable dreamer , every reader will recogn ize an old associate of — Ges tas ff the author the original of , the ine able P V aul erlaine . Now and again Choulette reminds one of ' ’ - Gerard de Nerval or Villiers de l Isle Adam . 123

He has something too of Anatole France . His S admiration for aint Francis , his sympathy with the lowly and outcast of society , his con “ o f tempt human laws , which forbid the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges , beg ” or steal , are all traits grown familiar before ’ we hear them on this satyr s lips . But it is he who remarks that “only desire and idleness ” make us sad , who tells the heroine that sensual love is alloyed with anger , selﬁshness , and hate .

This perhaps is the moral of the story . For after Therese wins her sculptor , after she has learned from him ( like Fra Giovanni !) “the ” delicate joy and sadness of thought , she loses him because of her former sin . And the book “ ” becomes a psychology of jealousy the j eal ous — y of a morbid sensitive artist mind , crystal lized in the despairing cry of the ﬁnal scene “ ” I see the other one with you all the time .

Therese sums up a philosophy in her epigram , ” Souls are impenetrable to souls . Before her i n r Jerome Co g a d had said that . But one must expect to ﬁnd the same phrases , just as we ﬁnd the same ideas on art or literature or militarism , in stories born from a subjective mind . Of course the mask is changed ; here it is Paul V ence , the critic , disciple of Renan and preacher of irony and pity , who takes the place of the 124

P . V Abbé aul ence , man of the world , skeptic and author of a socialistic novel , is a modern portrait of Anatole France : the soiled old cas sock had only been the picturesquely satiric domino of his first venture into realistic art . Thus L e Lys roug e marks a step toward the ’ L Orme du mail final realism of . First of his real creations—for his ’ prentice novels are imi tative and Sylvestre Bonnard a wholly subj ec fi ure — B althas a r Thais tive g came and , purely m romantic as the S alam bo of Flaubert . Grown broader in sympathy , Anatole France created o Coi nard Jer me g , a product of that inverted romanticism which finds food for its curio s itv in the picaresque . Then he portrayed modern society, not as the pure realist or naturalist of His toire contem oraine p , but as an idealist who , “ ” reviewing the novels of Gyp in L a Vie litte ra ir e , had looked with longing on the delights of this world , at the pageantry of life among those for whom life is in itself an end . Hence the bitterness of his story , revealed alike in — both matter and manner an acrid cynical ’ - after taste of disillusion . And as Gyp s novels had sent him back to his study content , so now L e L s rou e he draws from y g its own lesson , the lesson which he gives us in the placid pes ’ r i E i ure s imism of L e j a d n d p c .

126

finds its physical law in evolution . For this fruitful travail we can feel increasing in our own breasts , keeping us marching toward a ” goal inevitable and divine . So the philosopher of the Palace of Art is at last resigned to living . Without illusions as to o Coi nard his importance , for like Jer me g he does not exempt himself from the irony and pity he would accord to men , Anatole France is now ready to take up his task , to add his imperceptible share to the unknown future . “ Like Candide , he will henceforth cultivate his ” ’ garden . And this resignation is no coward s the virtue . Through all bitterness of doubt , in a universe filled with evil , Anatole France calmly rears his pyre of hopes beneath the empty sky, snatching from pessimism itself a torch of courage , a torch which burns with gloomy magnificence through the black nihilism ’ L e rdin E i re of j a d p cu . CHAPTER VII

PROFESSOR B ERGERET AND THE “AFFAIR” ( 1897

130

’ published L Orme du ma il and L e M annequi n ’ d os ier a , the ﬁrst two volumes ofJ series called His toi o te or in re c n mp a e . This is not a history ; it is not even a story ; it is a chain of episodes and conversations bearing on vital questions of the day . First written week by week for a newspaper , then gathered into books like the four volumes of essays , these scenes of con temporary manners have every quality except “ : a plot each chapter stands by itself , a slice of life which is also a criticism of life . Begun as journalism , the work became a new form of ﬁction ; and no four volumes bound down to a plot could have painted this living pano rama of provincial prejudice and dulness and P petty intrigue . ublished while the events it satirizes were going on , it is not merely real — ism : it is a ctua lis m life dissected in the mak — ing . A bitter impassive irony the irony of Flaubert —runs through this series of contem orar p y drawings , etched deeply as by some new aqua fortis , gloomy as Zola but lifted far above him by selective vision , universality , and style . Zola had ignored half of life , sunk the mind in the body : here we have both sides of ’ man s existence , and even sensation becomes material for subtly ironic thought . This picture of provincial life is largely a 13 1

group portrait defined in dialogue . All classes are presented , from the archbishop and the prefect down to the cobbler and the vagabond — a kaleidoscope of prejudice and selfishness dissolving into absurdity at each turn of the ’ author s hand . Only petty interests absorb this community , where intellectual stagnation views with suspicion all those who submit its tradi tions and its prejudices to reason . But if the events described are trivial , they are pregnant with meaning for the student of French his tory . Indeed it is not impossible that future research may find in His toir e contemp oraine the most valuable of the works of Anatole

France . What are the portraits in this unintentional masterpiece ? First the clerics : around the corner always lurks a cassock . There is the diplomatic archbishop , a man of the world who entertains state dignitaries with game pur o chased fr m a poacher . There is the papal nuncio , a passionless automaton , receiving the rival candidates with the same questions , the same replies . There is the retired army chap lain , who sees the ruin of the military virtues in the decline of faith ; there is the young priest

infatuated with hunting , and the old priest

madly eager to get into print . But it is the 132

’ contest for the bishop s ring, running through three volumes in a brilliant series of vignettes , which gives us the best of these clerical por : L antai ne traits g , the superior of the Seminary , itr l Gu e . S and his rival turdy , orthodox, and L anta i ne uncom rom fiery , g is the type of the p ising cleric : his character is painted in his dismissal of a favorite pupil suspected of weak — ness of faith . Against him symbol of the — Guitrel inhumanity of virtue plots the Abbé , tactful and shrewd and dissimulating, traf ficking in influence as he trafli cs in vestments ’ to deck the parlors of the Jewish prefect s wife . For this is the way he lays the foundations of a his future bishopric , winning the favor of C esar by rendering to him the things that are not his .

- The curio hunting Jewess , who sends her daughter to a Catholic convent , is a portrait worthy of Flaubert ; so too is the oily , jovial P Hom iS ' refect . Flaubert hated a Anatole “ - France despises Worms Clavelin , who listens with his mouth , hates this politician who, contemptuous of creeds as of parties , remains an anti - Semite and a turncoat and an exp edien ist t to the end . Thus Jew and Christian alike are held up to ridicule . There is , however , a distinctly n i n friendly touch in the portrait of L a ta g e .

134 life story stirs the usually unruffled scholar to e an expr ssion of horrified doubt . Clearly, the author of this chapter has already taken sides D ff in the reyfus a air . Another judge , brave enough to condemn three “anarchists ” for the circulation of pamphlets preaching universal brotherhood , typifies that intolerance of free thought and free speech from which Anatole France is soon to suffer with the ironic pro fes r so . ff For Bergeret does su er . As a critic of con r temporary politics , assailing the t iple domina tion of priest , soldier , and financier , he is hated by Republicans and Clericals alike . Timid and f untactful , he suf ers in his university , making enemies of his rector and his dean . And with ff all this he su ers in his home , having married — — the wife so often chosen by o r choosing his P i kind . ractical , uneducated , and proudly g m ! orant , his antippe sees in her lord only a

weak incapable dreamer , and as she does not

understand him , she has always despised him . V V — Finally , she treats him as enus did ulcan to re borrow the euphemism of a French critic , g a rdles s of her matronly unﬁtnes s to play the o r le of the Cytherean queen . The Vulcanization of Monsieur Bergeret is the chief episode of the second volume of the 135

’ r L e M anne uin d os ier se ies , q The wicker ” work woman is the dummy upon which M a dame Bergeret drapes her dresses , shoved out of the way into the professor ’ s damp and dismal study . Headless and heartless it stands against

- the well worn backs of his Latin poets , a wooden lady, a hymeneal symbol . To this study comes the young soldier and former pupil who serves as Mars in the story : and Bergeret here deals his thrusts at militarism and that folly of arma ments which must end only in war or bank M ru tc . p y adame Bergeret enters , and the scene that follows clamors for quotation : “ ’ Monsieur Roux removed Freund s D iction ary from an old armchair and gave a seat to M M adame Bergeret . onsieur Bergeret con templated in turn the quartos pushed against M the wall , and adame Bergeret who had taken their place in the armchair , and reﬂected that these two groups of matter , differentiated as W they then ere and so diverse in appearance , nature , and use , had presented an original

—a similarity similarity long maintained , when both the dictionary and the lady were still ﬂoat ing in a gaseous state in the primitive nebula . ‘ ’ ‘M For after all , he said to himself, adame

Bergeret floated about in the infinite of time . ff shapeless , unconscious , di used in flickering 136

c gleams of oxygen and arbon . The molecules which were to make up this Latin dictionary , circled at the same time , for ages , in this same in nebula , which was to bring forth monsters , sects , and a little thought . It has taken an eternity to produce my dictionary and my wife , monuments of my painful existence , creations M defective and at times annoying . y dictionary ’ is full of mistakes . Amelia s coarse body con tains an even coarser soul . That is why we can scarcely hope that a new eternity will some day create Knowledge and Beauty . We live for a moment and we should gain nothing by living forever . It is neither time nor space that N !’ ature lacks , and we behold her handiwork “And Monsieur Bergeret still asked his rest ‘ : less soul But what is time , except the very N movements of ature , and can I say that they are long or short ? Nature is cruel and com m n la e o p c . But whence comes it that I know it ? And how can I stand outside of Nature to know her and to judge her ? I might have a better opinion of the universe if I held a dif

r fe ent place in it . ’ B er eret s That is g portrait , painted by him D self . isillusion and irony have drawn the lips , but the eyes are restless , and the brows intent upon the eternal question . His is no

138 the antimilitarism of the book prepares us for D his stand in the rey fus case . How deft his thrusts at the simplicity of the soldier , the bait of the uniform , the illusion of glory so carefully “ ca n kept up by the State . The least we do is ” to flatter those whom we send out to be shot . How bitter his denunciation of the militarv “ code , the court martial , fit only for a chamber of horrors in a museum . A pacifist , he can hope onlv that war may be staved off by the mediocrity of cabinets or the greed of High “ Finance . A socialistic Europe will probably be friendly to peace . For there will be a social ’ ” istic M l Abbé Europe , onsieur , says he to “ L anta i ne g , if indeed we may call socialism ” that unknown power which is approaching . Evidently Bergeret has changed—like Ana tole France ! In his universal curiosity the scholar has left his study, now and again , for the streets , and in the streets he has seen the life of the unfortunate and the oppressed . And he has not seen the injustice of it unmoved . Hence the social pity in the brilliant sketch of ’ P d Alouette and the wayfarer ied , the pity irony combined in the portrait of the cobbler Pi n l edag e . Only a living experience could have written these chapters ; a heart once thrilled by the story of Saint Francis here touches life it 139

self , to draw from its bleeding core a lesson of universal love . ’ - The professor s spectator phase is ending . t Bergeret does not adopt a par y, range himself with the anticlericals of his sympathies , for he knows that parties and party disputes are S useless , that nothing matters to the tate so much as the conditions under which its citizens 2 live . But events in France are forcing him A ﬁair e D r e us to enter a party . The yf had just shown the enormous power of the army ; it had ’ Ac revealed the injustice of the army s cod e . cu s ed of selling military secrets to Germany, a young captain of artillery had been condemned behind closed doors by a court martial ; and now , after a public degradation , was paying in exile for the honor of the army and the mis o f fortune his Jewish birth . As usual , the “ country was betrayed , and at ﬁrst no one D questioned the justice of the verdict . But rey fus ’ s friends were active and did not rest until they had interested the public in this violation of human rights . Hence the constant satire of i t r ine the military code in H s toire con emp o a . Published in an anti - D reyfusard journal ’ L E cho de P aris ( ) , these pages still moulded Opinion : intelligent readers knew how to take

2 0 c t 16 . i . . 3 . p , p 140

their ironic detachment , and even the literal might here read both sides of the question in volved . M P eanwhile , the heroic Colonel icquart had tried to reopen the case , only to be sent to Tunis

- - . S for his pains cheurer Kestner , vice president

S . of the enate , had also failed Esterhazy, sus ected P p by icquart , was triumphantly white P washed ; icquart was arrested , and Emile Zola 1 8 8 published on the thirteenth of January , 9 , his charge against the judges of D reyfus and '

Esterhazy . Even this daringly brilliant letter , whereof every paragraph begins failed of immediate effect Zola was con demne d : the Minister of War brought forth “ D new proofs , got the Chamber of eputies to ratify the judgment of the court martial ; and when Picquart declared that these s o- called proofs were irrelevant and false , he found him self arrested again . Then came the confession of the original Pic forgery by Colonel Henry , successor to ff quart ou the General Sta . Esterhazy now “ ” confessed : he had forged the ﬁrst evidence used against the victim . Thereupon the Court of Cassation annulled the decision of the court and martial ordered a second military trial ,

at 1 8 . which began Rennes in August , 99 The

142 methods of the court martial and defend Drey fus . ’ ’ ’ L Annea u d a methys te ﬁrst presents us to the

- anti D reyfusards . From the very beginning : Guitrel they declare themselves , the abbé ; the Royalist and anti -Semite D uc de Brece ; L e

- rond , the ex judge , now pleading for the con g reg ations ; and the old general whom we have already met in active service at his desk , com manding an army of soldiers in his neat boxes

- N t D . o of name cards one but condemns reyfus , and with him all the traitors who call for r e “ vision ; not one but thinks these Freemasons , ” anticlericals , and Jews the real enemies of

France . This is the litany we hear in the chapel D of the Catholic uke , in his chateau where black—robed ladies knit beneath the portraits of their ancestors and the princes of the Bourbon line : and even the fair Jewish widow of the neighboring estate , so eager to enter this aris tocratic -D circle , shares the anti reyfusard vio lence of her wild soldier lover . Under her roof Guitrel reappears , still pulling wires for his bishopric ; and there we meet her crafty, ego istic No . w , degenerate son a new thread is brought into the weft , for this little Jew wants ’ l e bouton des B recé — , the coveted button which will admit him to the hunting parties of the 43

Duke ; and to obtain it he must promise to sup port the Abbé . Then the story returns to Mon sieur Bergeret, and we leave realism for a while to listen to a philosopher .

Freed at last from his wife , Bergeret would resign himself to life as it is . But his reverie on Hercules is a parable on that Force Incar nate to which Europe bows ; all his utterances in the academic book- shop condemn secret trials and class justice and judicial infallibility . And since his attitude provokes general reprobation , since he is left alone in his martyrdom , his good housekeeper bethinks herself of bringing to her master a stray dog , in the hope that he may ’ Not lighten the scholar s loneliness . to spoil by quotation this delightful chapter , the half “ ’ ui n éta it discouraged professor , q pas triste , makes acquaintance with Riquet, through an accident which reveals the affection of his canine friend . Henceforth , the pages where

Riquet appears are the best in the book , for he alone can evoke a forgotten indulgence in a master embittered by his intellectual participa “ ff tion in the a air . "m F o r M onsieur Bergeret , progressively ideal ized from the beginning of the series , we may be permitted to substitute Anatole France . He , D too , had already supported reyfus indirectly ; 144 his free discussion of the army and of military justice had revealed his real sympathies . Then , provoked beyond measure by later develop f ments , he found irony insu ﬁcient , and signed with the ﬁrst the petition for revision which ’ ’ appeared on the morrow of Zola s letter J a c us e P r otes ta tion de I ntellec c . This was the s tuels , and it brought to its signers all the hate P and obloquy of the mob . Visitors to aris in

1 8 8 - 9 will remember the mass meetings , the violence of the military press , the mad battle waged against this new Leonidas and his little group of heroes . Hence the note of pessimism sounded so early ’ ’ L Anne améth s te D in au d y . iscouraged by his

ﬁrst encounter with real life , the man of books decides for the moment that action , too , is vain . “ Work amuses our vanity, he tells us , work deceives our impotence and gives us the hope of some good result . We ﬂatter ourselves that Not it helps us control destiny . understanding the necessary relations which bind our efforts to the mechanics of the universe , it seems to us that this effort is directed in our favor against the rest of the machine . Work gives us the illu sion of will , of strength and independence . It ” n makes us divine in our o w eyes . This reversion to determinism is of course to

146

o S through plain lives and high thinking, ’ ’ ’ t t L Anneau d ame hys e progresses to its end . Guitrel gets his bishopric , supported as he is by women and inﬂuential Jews , and this media tor between Church and State promptly turns against the latter in support of the over -taxed

- congregations . The wealthy anti Semite Jewess loses her soldier lover , implicated in the for “ ” ri ff P g e es of the a air . rofessor Bergeret is P S called to aris , to give a course in the orbonne , and prepares to quit the town which his depar ture transmutes for him into a mere empty His image . And we close the third volume of toire contemp oraine struck by the sociologic character of its dialogue — evidence that its m author is now seeking a living prag atic truth . ’ ’ ’ L A nneau d amethys te is the real climax in this essay in realism . Lacking in plot , the nar rative scarcely allows a new Parisian back i . So M ons eur ground despite the professor , B e rg eret a P a ris ( 1 90 1 ) seems rather like a sixth act in a play . The plotting of the Royal ists N , the ationalist movement , are , to be sure , “ ff ” sequels of the a air , and the author finds means to draw most of his provincial types to P aris , but the reader wearies of politics , of its turncoat social climbers , of women who sell c n themselves for political ends , of the whole y 147 ical farce of opportunism hidden in filthy back Po s stairs behind the posters of the tricolor . s ibly this is why Anatole France wearied of it ? too . Why should he continue He had shown how a novel might be written without a plot and realize every perfection except climax . He had shown that satire need not destroy art , the ’ art of L e j ardin d Epicure ; for even its finest pages attain no higher level than the episode of ’ P Al uett Riquet or ied d o e . Fine pages of course are not lacking in M ou s ieu r B er eret (1 P aris g , especially in the early chapters written in the tenderly reminiscent i r mo i manner of L e L v e de n a m . !Transferred to the capital , the scholar finds at last a suit able apartment , though he hates apartments for the inartistic uniformity of their multi cellular life . Once more he gathers about him P his wandering enates ; and in his new study, talking with the carpenter busy at some new - e book shelv s , he first reaps a word of praise for his martyrdom from this proletari an D rey

fusard . Of course poor Riquet must bark at the de parting workman . For Riquet bows to clothes as men to uniforms , and like men he detests ’

. So the new to his master s tender irony , the Pecus dog becomes a symbol of , of the brute 148 herd which had taken the side of force and in justice and falsehood . Riquet , too , follows the prejudices of his race . Riquet , too , is turned away from pity and justice by fear , by the fear which was father to the gods and to every crime . Riquet , too , will raise his voice against be the new divinity Justice , admiring force i M cause he ﬁnds t sovereign . And onsieur Ber “ geret concludes : You do not know that force devours itself . You do not know that every weapon must fall before a just idea . You do not know that our real force is in wisdom , that only through it are nations great . You do not know that what makes national glory is not the senseless clamor of the mob , but the august thought hidden in some attic , which will some day overrun the world and change its very face You do not know that they honor their ff fatherland who for justice have su ered prison , ” exile , and insult . You do not know . Action has made Anatole France believe in — justice he who ﬁrst believed only in irony and Now pity . he will even question pity , for if he “ still gives to the beggar , he knows that alms ” debase equally the receiver and the giver . Alms only keep up the reign of injustice ; real charity is the participation of all in productive “ labor and its fruits . We have nothing to give

150

? ” common to all To air and light , our primi N tive dowry from ature , have we not already the added the roads , the rivers , the royal parks , ? libraries , and the art galleries Certainly, com munism will improve at least some of the con “ ditions of life ; so , believing that men are less ” malevolent when they are less miserable , the generous scholar will give his hand and his “ faith to the task of improvement . We must work at the future like the weavers of high warp tapestry , without seeing what we are ” weaving . And if this dream of his , this longed for City of Light , prove only a mirage , he feels that the vision will not be wholly lost . It is “ good for men to build their Utopias . For the dreams of philosophers alone excite men to ” “ action , and it is thought which really creates

. S the future urely , a living word will some day sweep all social iniquity away, and if he may not see it go , he knows that it must dis appear as surely as did the giant saurians of our geologic past . S o we are not surprised to ﬁnd Anatole France ready to carry his new truth to the D people . rawn at last into the streets , the man of letters will soon mount the tribune of reform . He will speak to socialists and radicals and v e m students , add his word where er men dr a 151

No generous dreams for France . vain optimist , but chastened by life , he will do his share in the “ secular task of progress , sure that slowly, but will bring to realization ’ its sages dreams .

VIII

HE His toire contemp oraine had not occu pied Anatole France exclusively during “ 1 the troublous years from 1 896 to 1 90 . One must sometimes seek distraction from the affairs — ” M of to day, onsieur Bergeret had said , iron ically explaining the fables in sixteenth - cen tury French which adorn the last two volumes of the series . But insomuch as these chapters still satirize the present in their allusions , it is clear that the novelist found distraction only Pierre Noziere in his other books of this period , i and Cl o . Both volumes preceded M ons ieur B erg eret 61 is Par . Both may be classiﬁed as digressions ; lio and if C , a collection of historical tales , nat urall reminis y falls in our next chapter , the cent P ierre Noziere demands an excursus in

this one . From now on we must be prepared

for books like this , second harvests of mem ri P ier o ier o e s . And no reader of r e N z e will 156 be sorry to find the book a companion volume L e ivr e de mon ami to L , or regret that the old Anatole France has not entirely passed away in the new . A truce to satire ! The tired publicist now returns to his youth , to the old Bible and its quaint woodcuts , to the mother who told such charming stories to her little boy . He tells us of his nurse and her scapegrace husband , of the old curio merchant , of the bookseller of the quays . He will draw the portrait of his first editor , sketch again the two artist comrades of L h t m i re - e a a . C g Then , in mid career , his vein suddenly runs out : narration gives way to “N fragmentary impressions or memories , otes written by Pierre Noziére on the margins of his ” P ens e big lutarch . Now he inserts a p é which ’ L e ardin d E icure recalls j p , now a dialogue probably written in the days when he used to imitate Renan . The dialogue proves to be a ’ skeptic s criticism of intelligence , but the reader will agree , with one of the speakers , that the ’ whole diatribe is only a lovers quarrel , attack ing a beloved mistress because “she does not ” yet rule the world . The last half of the volume is filled with travel - impressions evidently drawn from some old diary : P r o menades de Pierre Noziere en

158

his wanderings , reading its history in the old stones which he would leave unrestored to the S touch of time . For each little city peaks to him , tells him of those who have called it “ mother , of those who are gone . They pass , but I remain to keep their memory green . I am their commemoration . That is why they be owe me everything , for man is only man cause he remembers . I have received wounds which men thought mortal . But I live because

I have hoped . Learn from me that sacred hope which saves the fatherland . Think in me so as to think beyond yourselves . Work for your children as your ancestors have worked for you . Your sons will know what j ewels you in your — turn have set in my robe of S o at last we ﬁnd a page to link with the present this

sheaf gathered from the portfolios of the past .

Born of a vacation mood , it is an interlude in

an optimistic key . For all this time his main interest IS i n social satire : he is still concerned M with politics and onsieur Bergeret , and when His toire contem oraine at last he drops p , it is r n e i e only to write the story of C a i qu b ll . Cr a inquebille is an attack on the iniquities

of the law . After the military code comes the

turn of civil procedure , whose real injustice

3 b d . I i . 240 , p . 159

. N had long been evident to Anatole France . eed ’ less to recall the Abbé Coig nard s strictures against the laws , or the satire in the story of Fra Giovanni and the Opinions of Professor

Bergeret . But it is always interesting to seek o Crain uebille un the genesis of a bo k, and q , doubtedly , is an expansion of the incident of the ’ l simple Pied d A ouette . L e Arrested on suspicion , the vagabond of ’ M annequin d os ier leaves his prison unscathed . In Crainquebille the law consummates the ruin in of its victim . Condemned for a pretended sult to a gendarme , the poor huckster pays the e penalty of his ignorance, sinc his unreadiness of tongue only weakens his defense . In spite of his lawyer , in spite of the witness who ex onerates : him , he goes to jail and when freed at last after serving his time , he ﬁnds himself without customers , the byword and the laugh ‘ - P ing stock of the quarter . oor human cart e horse, d nied his bread after forty years of brutalizing toil , what wonder that he turns to drink ! But the irony of Fate has not yet done r n i l C a i ueb l e . S with q unken , at last , so low that he regrets his prison and his prison fare , “ ” D 0 he really cries own with the c ps , this time to a grave patient gendarme who rebukes , but refuses to arrest him . And the derelict of the 160

law is forced to resume his hopeless , homeless way .

The cold , biting irony of this story recalls M O ini ons s ociales aupassant . Reprinted in p , it was given a larger audience in a pamphlet published at half a franc , and ﬁnally it was turned into a play . The cheap edition came out in the B ibliotheque s ocialis te pre ceded by the even more brutally satiric Conte ’ ’ our commencer l a nnee p . In this , the typical ’ sugary New Year s tale is turned into a bitter — farce the chimney -sweep marrying the daug h — ter of the rich man by necessity a satire of social pity from an author convinced that the poor need not pity , but justice . The same idea lo recurs in another chapter of the pamphlet , C — pinel the story of Monsieur Bergeret and the i te or ine H s to ire con m a . beggar , drawn from p ’ Then comes B erg eret s conversation with the Ro r t inion o i les u a . O s s c a carpenter , p p which i re runs through two volumes in this ser es , ’ prints in fact all of the master s views on ques tions social or economic , all that the Abbé Coig na rd or the professor had said in criticism of things as they are . It is really a tract , a tract - S against the clerical party and the anti emites , against the army, the press , and the injustice

of the law .

162

Maupassant adds the morbid psychology of

Bourget or Zola .

Anatole France thinks the story comic , “ that is to say, concerned with comedians . He might have explained the adjective by Scar ’ Ro mi ma n co ue . ron s title, q But there is noth ing comic in this glimpse of the greenroom and its sordid life , disclosed as by the pitiless glare — of the footlights a world of compromise and carnal love and grosser egoism cloaked by the

- name of art . When the story teller speaks in his own person of “that social hypocrisy which makes it possible for people to look at each ” other without horror and disgust , one won ders if Anatole France has taken a step back

. S ward uch bitterness , such pessimism either a mark moment of reaction , or prove the novel , L e L s r ou e like y g , a work of several years . Such an observation shows us the author o ff “ his guard . For the rest , his irony ﬁnds vent through the lips of his characters , bitter and nihilistic in the dramatic author Constantin M D arc , indulgently Epicurean in octor Tru ffi blet . This genial old skeptic , attached o cially to the theater and unofﬁcially to the pretty comé diennes— D S this octor ocrates , who laments “ the deplorable misunderstanding which , eight

een centuries ago , put humanity on bad terms 163

with nature , is another Anatole France , smi ling through that ZEsculapian mask which he te had worn in focas . Perhaps the mask is adopted to justify the ’ D Trublet s pessimism . At any rate octor opin ions are old and familiar . Like the hero of “ the earlier novel , he too believes that life is ” “ murder . For him , stupidity is the necessary ” condition of ‘ happiness morality the consent ” of all to keep what they have . So might one string a chaplet of despair from the maxims of this scientiﬁc fatalist , who , certain of human irresponsibility, certain that free will is an illu

sion , sees the only hope of moral improvement

in a change of material conditions for men .

Thus , he thinks , even that primal law of mur

der may pass , fall before the progress of chem

is try or the useful arts . In so much at least he

resembles the new Anatole France . But , if this

result is not possible , if the world is , as it seems , b viveur irremedia ly bad , the old consoles him self by the thought that he has at least enjoyed

the spectacle it has given him . Trubl et I ocas te takes us back , not merely to ,

but to its author , the naturalist and disciple of ? Taine . Is he the real Anatole On revient

toujours a ses premieres amours . Anatole

France returns , not as an idealist of science , 164 but as a skeptic content to accept truths merely “

. Trublet pragmatic I am a physician , tells “ - u stification - us in self j , I keep a drug shop of lies . I give relief , consolation . Can one con ? ” sole and relieve without lying And he adds , “Women and doctors know how necessary and how helpful lies are to men . Trublet M en has lost faith in absolute truth . are not created to know , men are not created to ” understand . If we know more than the dog , “ it is but a trifle , and our illusions increase with ” our knowledge . We can know nothing , attain no certainty , do nothing ; and like Bergeret , Trublet draws a bleak comfort from the thought that the future already exists like a book unread , a reality which we only uncover as we turn the “ leaves . It is possible to think that we all died M long ago , observes this modern arcus Aure “ lius . Think so , and you will be at peace . Such pessimism undoubtedly reflects the au ’ ff ” thor s disappointment in the a air . The fail ure of action results in the denial of action . But it recalls also his youthful view of the world about him , reflects its gloom and magnifies it . “ ” To know society as it really is , says a journal ist of the story , would make us all fall swoon “ His ing with disgust and horror . Certainly,

‘ o t 211 L c ci . . . . , p

166

u builds p his case against the Concordat . And the conclusion of the pamphlet is a ringing appeal to Frenchmen to stop this control of

France from without , to destroy this political force by abolishing the divi s i on of power agreed upon by a despot a century before . No r was his role as a propagandist to end le te m meilleurs . Vers s s here In p , made up of 1 8 8 1 0 6 all his speeches delivered from 9 to 9 , ’ the publisher of L E g lis e et la Rep ublique car ried out deﬁnitely the task of bringing together — all his propaganda a task only begun by the fragmentary pamphlets of the B ibliotheque s o i lis te c a . Half a hundred speeches , addresses . and letters were collected , a panoply of good counsel for the proletariat in its struggle for Not better conditions . to listen to the preach f “ ” ers of su fering, for it is joy which is good , but to trust in reason and science which free men from the vain terrors of theology ; not to support the Nationalists or the contractors who urge increased armies and armament , nor the politicians who seek to involve France in im

erialism p , but to work for the peace universal which the proletariat of all nations is prepar — ing such is the perpetual refrain of these : o pages optimistic pages , in ﬁne , for if s ciety “ is now only organized barbarism and regu lar 167

‘ ized injustice , still it is thought which , despite ” the victories of force , conducts the world .

Two fine tributes , one to the heroic spirit of —“ Emile Zola il fut un moment de la conscience ” — in humaine another to Ernest Renan , are l c uded ; in the latter , the magnificent discourse of Pallas Athene has often been compared to ’ L a riere s ur l A cro ole p p . But always he is preaching the cause of humanity and human solidarity , branding the Armenian massacres , scoring the murderous treatment of the revo l ti ni ts t P u o s in S . etersburg . And just after ’ P the Czar s visit , while arisian crowds are “V ” still shouting ive la Russie , he has the cour age to unmask and denounce the capitalistic interests which have contrived this political comedy in order to pay for the Japanese war out of the French stocking . Loan and alliance are another victory of capitalism over the mas ses , a victory cloaked by a secret diplomacy which no republic should allow . In his vision , France should be the leader in a sane prepara “ tion for a pa cifistic Europe ; for universal peace will be realized , not because man will become better , but because a new order of things , a new science , new economic necessities ” will impose peace .

All this in spite of Germany, with her per 168

feet corporal , the corporal Hohenzollern , the L corporal ohengrin , who , corporal in soul as in mustachios , was destined by profession and ”

. 1 0 by nature to make war For if , in 9 5 , this superman had proved himself eminent in every h ? t ing except that , who were responsible The S German ocialists , concludes Anatole France ; -falling into the naive error that national wars “ ” can be averted by the Internationale . ﬁc N i . a ve , but generous surely A writer of tion may be proud of such a dream . And not withstanding all this polemic activity, Anatole

France was still a writer of ﬁction . The story of Cra inquebille was rounded out to a volume with other sketches , realistic and contemporary and for the most part satiric of militarism and justice founded on property — still reﬂecting ’ ” the author s reaction to the affair . Two stories of the occult and a mystic legend are exceptions , as well as the inimitable account of P utois the imaginary , a fable on the growth of a belief . The volume seems to be made up of odds and ends ; it contains several detached chapters evidently left over from M ons ieur B er eret a P a ris P utois g ; and next to , its best P ens es de Ri uet pages are the delightful é q , a La parody of Bruyere , satirizing from a canine

170

the Stoic doctrine with the old beliefs , rises to the conception of a single God , obedient only

S . to his own nature , the God of the toics Yet in his wisdom he would show his companions the value of diversity of religion , since such diversity alone guarantees tolerance and per immor sonal freedom . And they speak of the tality of the soul , the immortality of the gods , and wonder what god will succeed Jupiter when he follows Saturn into oblivion . At this point the Proconsul is interrupted by a band of quar D reling Jews , claiming an audience . espite the protests of his friends , Gallio yields to duty, knowing that this turbulent race , full of new D ionysiac sects whose propaganda admitted no tolerance , must be watched as a menace to peace in Corinth no less than at Rome . And all deplore the inﬁltration of this Asiatic poison through the Empire . M ff eanwhile Gallio listens to the plainti , who , chief of the synagogue , accuses a certain Paul of inducing men to worship God in a manner contrary to Jewish law . But Saint ’ “ P : aul s defense he will not hear , declaring If it were a matter of wrong or of wicked lewd u ness , I would bear with you , but if it be a q es tion of words and names of your law , I shall be no judge of such matters . And he rejoins 171

his friends , all unconscious of having dismissed the co- founder of a world- religion destined to supplant the Stoic philosophy and the pagan

Gallio sought the future . The future comes ff to him and he knows it not . Indi erent to the deformed little Jew whom he takes for a fanat Pro ical follower of Orpheus or Adonis , the consul turns the conversation back into its t former channel , and leaving the Apos le to be stoned by the Jews , he sets forth his view that Hercules is destined to dethrone Jove and rule the world . Ga llio is thus suspiciously like an attempt to r r T repeat the success of L e P rocu a teu . he story ﬁnished , sources are cited and discussed . Tacitus and Seneca have added coloring to the — l silhouette of the Bible story , deve oped from a hint found in a passage of Renan . For the historian of Christianity had also remarked the irony of the situation , although his inference

from it was far less ﬂattering to Gallio . S u r la pierre blanche now reverts to a dis cu s sion on the growth of religions , and the evolution of morals which prepared the way

alike for Stoicism and for Christianity . The

cyclic theory of cosmic life , the more immediate ’ future as seen in man s various Utopias , are 172 touched upon ; then the talk returns to the possibility of prediction . Surely the history of man should yield certain analogies , certain par allels or probabilities . The progress of labor from slavery and serfdom to an equality with capital may indicate the future triumph of the proletariat , as the decline of paganism suggests ax a like fate for Christianity . The virtual p Romana of a world uniﬁed by conquest and

- commerce may presage a new world truce , after colonization has brutally imposed a new soli P darity . eace may come , concludes Anatole a France ; for , if Germany and America still p pear belligerent , his fatherland has certainly lost under the Republic her old love of things military . At the little table of the Roman restaurant where the company dines , another manuscript — is read a dream of the future conceived after M the manner of William orris and H . G . Wells . P A young arisian , bored and disillusioned and 2 2 0 skeptical , awakes one morning in the year — of the Federation of the Peoples 2 2 70 a ccor ding to our chronology . He ﬁnds himself in a country transformed , a sort of endless suburb

filled with tiny houses and their gardens . Over head huge birds and fishes are gliding through the air , or pausing to fill the empty streets with

174

u oulez confess they are not happy . But q e v vous ? No one at least is miserable , and by abolishing property and cities they have been able to do away with crime and litigation . The dream concludes with an episode show ing the relation of the sexes , freed from the personal servitude of marriage and apparently from the Petrarchistic illusions of courtship !

And the reader , laying down his manuscript , receives the placid comment of a classical quo “ ta tion : You seem to have slept upon the white ” stone , in the midst of the people of dreams . D ! So reams , possibly , the whole Utopia is not to be taken very seriously in the author . For if like Renan he accepts the possibility of Cali if ban , we may attribute to him the statement “ of one listener , I do not wish for socialism, ” it — he but I do not fear , does put his dream of the new Atlantis under the decidedly am “ bi uous g rubric , Through the Gate of Ivory , or through the Gate of Horn !” CHAPTER I!

AND THE SATIRI ST OF HUMAN IT! : THE PENGUIN S ( 1906

178

Nozi ere u , and give to all the ﬁg res of legend ” and history their real characteristics . Thus a minute archeological exactness , such as Flau S alammbo bert had attempted in , is the key o f lio note C , dedicated , by the way , to the cham

D . pion of naturalism and reyfus , Emile Zola Not Hector , but the singer of Hector , opens the panorama . A world poetic in its very real ism , baldly poetic as the humbler scenes of the L e chanteur de Odyssey , is revived for us in

’ K me y ; the poor old minstrel , rude yet pro foundl y human , has something of the heroic ’ P ens eur candor of Rodin s . Living meagerly with his faithful slave , patient and laborious , the ancient bard teaches the children of Kyme the Fair the songs he had received from his father , and his father from the muses them selves . These sacred songs must not be changed . he tells them , hiding the fact that he has added ’ whole cantos to the muses inheritance , sung

- so often at the tables of the shepherd kings . b ec Everything in the pic—ture is presented o j tively : his ign orance for he knows by his dreams that the dead still live in some dim

shadowy world ; his resignation , which accepts without bitterness the hard contrast between the lot of the bard and the warrior ; his love of ’ beauty, his idealism and disgust at life s brutal 179

ities . When the banquet of one of these rough

Chieftains ends in a battle, and the aged poet is hurt by a ﬂying torch , he picks up his lyre , curses the house and its occupants , and walks calmly ff seaward on the moonlit cli , until the earth which had borne him so long fails beneath his s — faltering step For this objectivity , Homer — himself furnished outlines and colors even ﬁg N ures , like that little sister to ausicaa , whose

slender beauty , glimpsed by the wayside , de lights the weary minstrel no less than the draught she gives him from her own cupped

palms .

The clear sunlight of Homer , uncannily vivid in a picture where no brush - stroke betrays the

modern , now changes to the mistier skies that ’ dome the forests of Caesar s Gaul . The Com mentaries lend color and sparkling directness ’ ’ Komm l A treba te to the tale of , huntsman and ’ warrior and collector of his enemies heads . After the defeat of his savage fellow-tribesmen

by the Romans , Komm becomes an ally of these demigods of the catapult and the magic roads ’ a of stone, goes to Britain in C esar s service , and i mﬁ r witnesses his triumph and d sco tu e there .

Then , won over to rebellion by resentful Gauls ,

Komm plots against the Romans ; and , escap ing the dagger -thrust by which Titus L abienus 180

had hoped to dispatch him , swears vengeance and joins Vercingetorix .

The rebellion fails . A fugitive now , living by the chase , Komm stumbles one day upon the stone city which had taken the place of his old D camp . isguised as a pedlar , he enters the town , marveling at its corruption and its lux ury, for not understanding, he hates the arts of Rome . At last he comes to the new amphi theater , and there slays by stealth a young Roman writing poetry to his mistress in the twilight of early dawn . M arcus Antonius comes to Gaul as quaestor . shav Gradually the Gauls become Romanized , ing, dressing , and building as the Romans do .

An exile in the forest , Komm has fallen to guerilla warfare , then to mere indiscriminate brigandage . Hostages are legally murdered for his misdeeds ; an unsuccessful expedition is organized against him . Komm keeps in hid ing until he has satisﬁed his private vengeance L abienus against the tool of ; then , ﬁnding his enmity gone with his revenge , he sues for peace a and obtains it from the qu estor .

Thus , by a masterly choice of incident , the story becomes typical of an epoch . A world policy is crystallized in this purely objective o relation . Rome conquers in the end , by p

182

And France outside the convent walls . finally, L a M uiron M an D re in , we meet the of estiny turning from Egypt , calm and confident in his long flight through the English squadron , trust ing in the star which points to the land of his glory and his fall . Fascinated by the problems ff of a temperament so di erent from his own , Anatole France had already discussed Napo leon in L e Lys roug e ; now he presents obj ec N tivel . y his earlier analysis apoleon , to him , is the perfect type of the man of action , who lives wholly in the present , the automaton of determinism who believes in Fate rather than “ ’ in human will . Etre grand , c est dépendre de ” tout . And as Anatole France feels the phi loso her p is a far superior type , he naturally adorns his hero ’ s fatalism with some touches of superstition . ’ lio Thus ends C , vivid as Flaubert s tales , colorful as the illustrations drawn for the book M by Alphonse ucha . One regrets that the vogue of the artist has long since exhausted the edition , so that it is now almost unobtainable outside the greater libraries .

History is an art , and one succeeds in it ” only by the imagination . Ten years before lio C , Anatole France had come to this conclu 183

S lves tre sion , set down in the second edition of y ’ B onnard L e ardin d E i , in the essays , and in j p

r cu e . But this denial of historical science came from a student of history , from one who had early learned her boasted methods ; and al l through these years given up in part to histor Vie de ical ﬁction , he had been working on his ’ Jeanne d A rc . Back in the eighties he had conceived the basic idea of his treatment , con ’ 1 signed at once to the pages of L a Vie litteraire ; and if Professor Bergeret so often reverts to M a lter e o the aid , it is because his g is deep in : research so deep , in fact , that he found it most natural to adopt that professorial mask . 1 0 8 In 9 , Anatole France published two bulky “ volumes , the fruit of these two decades . I have M ” restored the aid to life and to humanity, he P ’ declares in his reface . And every reader of her story, so simply and beautifully told, will carry away a portrait of Joan both living and human , and far more real than any ecclesias tical or transcendental interpretation . He will

carry away, too , a vivid picture of the age , i nor with all its lawlessness and cruelty , its g ance and superstition ; he will realize the long

martyrdom , the grievous travail by which the

French nation was born . For never does the

1 2 269 n s e on. II , . E gli h diti 184 author let slip a chance to clear up a point by an illumi a parallel , to quote a legend , or tell nating anecdote . The hasty reader may balk at this , but the student who would learn will only praise .

Thus conceived , not as a saint , or a seeress , but as a mystic and an heroic girl , limned in the style of the old chronicles , a style at once simple and rich with expressive archaism , the

ﬁgure of Joan has all the directness and pathos , all the human unity of a heroine in a great his

to rical . novel Only occasional touches of irony, called forth in the main by ecclesiastical stu i N dit . o p y or guile , reveal the author patho logical discussions mar the narrative ; here at P least , as he says in the reface , he accepts “ Joan as a saint , a saint with all the attributes ﬁfteenth- of century sanctity , but he does show re the natural cause of her visions , trace her S semblance to similar visionaries , like aint

Catherine of Siena and Saint Colette of Corbie .

By these and by other parallels he explains her , with her heroic hallucinations , ﬁnding beneath the directness of her actions the automatism of all the mystics . And thus he makes her hu man and understandable , after the manner of Vie de és us Renan in his J . M atters of science like these , however , are

186 all the tasks of the rural calendar ; peasant women whose broad coifs are still worn by nuns ; and I drew near to these folk , who were ff our fellows , and who yet di ered from us by a thousand shades of thought and feeling ; I ” lived their lives ; I read their hearts . This is perhaps why Anatole France has achieved so real a portrait in his Life of Joan “ o A r f c. To succeed in history one must have i ” magination , an imagination directed by

. u love And if, beg iled by his vision , he possibly drew with too free a pen , if his references were corrected by Andrew Lang and others , no pro fe s sional scholar could be quicker than he was to acknowledge his mistakes and to correct “ them . I have written this history with ardent , ” “ tranquil zeal , he declares , I have sought

Truth strenuously , I have met her fearlessly . Even when she assumed an unexpected aspect I have not turned from With this afﬁrmation we must leave to time and the ma num o us historians the evaluation of his g p , which he defends with quiet dignity in his In i n troduct o .

’ L a Vie de eanne d A rc As we have seen , J

was more than twenty years in the making .

u histo r With it , Anatole France had beg n an

3 n ro uc on n s e on. I t d ti , E gli h diti 187

ical novel , not to be completed until four years b later , after a period of relaxation marked v three volumes of satire . Last of his serious L es D ieux ont s oi 1 1 2 novels , f ( 9 ) harks back to those Revolutionary times of which he had given us so many anecdotes in earlier works . - 1 It is a picture of the every day life of 793 , a novel in which people eat and drink and sleep , ff 1 1 indi erent , as many of us in 9 4 , to the tre n me dou s drama of contemporary history . Weary of the dream of fraternity which they have not found , their interest turns solely to ro pleasure parties , to songs and plays and mance s : the scarcity of food is more to them than the Republic ; each great event dwindles as it enters their dwar ﬁsh minds and becomes as insig niﬁcant as they . In the background rages the Revolution : we hear vaguely of mili tary disasters , of foreign plots ; we get a pass M ing glimpse of arat and of Robespierre , of e “ the godd ss Guillotine , of the woman An ” toinette on her way to the block . But never absent from the picture is the Revolutionary

Tribunal , constantly growing in power , until

bote m s ti ue at the end it becomes a y q , like the “ r mina l Ge . mine in The prisons were full , the public accuser worked eighteen hours a day .

To the defeats of the armies , to the revolts of 188

the provinces , to the conspiracies , the plots , and the betrayals , the Convention opposed the ” Reign of Terror . The gods were athirst . The hero of the story is the young painter

Gamelin , austere and rigid as the works of his D M master avid . ade a member of the Revo lutionary Tribunal through the offices of a scheming adventuress , he is transformed by his conception of duty and patriotism into a judicial machine , inhuman and unfeeling as the knife itself . In the end he becomes a monster , sacrificing friend and foe alike, inflexible even to the claims of a mother and sister . Against this type , so antipodal to the humanitarian hedonism of the author ( remember his s tric tures on the inhumanity of Pascal ” ) is set the

- B rotteaux ﬁgure of the ruined tax farmer , a ” joyous atheist , contented even in the attic where he makes jumping- jacks to earn his bread , enjoying life still as a spectacle , and reading his pocket Lucretius as he waits his im . S turn in the bread line miling , suave , B rotte aux maculate in his threadbare coat , old typiﬁes the eighteenth century of the “philo sophes , the placid skepticism as well as the n ien r e i e grace and manners of the a c g m . His is the philosophic nihilism of the earlier Ber geret and of D octor Trublet ( was he conceived

190

as the pagan Horace to their impending doom . For well they know that

Omnes eodem c0 g imur : omni um Versatur urna : se ri ns ceins

Sors exitura et nos in ae e rnum , t ” Exiliu im si ur mbae m po t a cy . Thus the novel sets forth the grace of a fallen aristocracy, a society ruled by hedonism . It is a pagan protest against the rigid ethics of Corneille—against that pure idealism which makes men monsters like Gamelin . Epicurean after its ﬁrst vanished dream of a millennium , this was just the period to fascinate one like : 1 Anatole France in 793 , the vortex of events shortened human life to a span hardly longer

. S o than the lives of ﬂowers he loves this age, loves it for its tragic brevity— that is evident in the perfection of his masterpiece , so long caressed by the patient graver and the ﬁle . If the plot is still loose , if the novel does not end at its real climax , dragging a bit after the fall of Robespierre and the execution of Gamelin , the construction elsewhere is marvelous in its contexture of sombre realism and lyric idyl .

Exquisite the modulation of the rhythm , the “ ” dying fall of the chapter - endings ; wonder ful the art which turns the commonest incident to a symbol ; the jumping- jacks of Father 91

Longuemare , the roses heaping the merry cari s ’ ole , the carnation blooming in Elodie s win — dow a scarlet thread running gaily through their story, until the last blossom falls at the feet of the doomed lover in the tumbril , borne ’ past her chamber to his patriot s end .

’ Maintenant j e pourrais bien m amuser um ’ i peu . Inev tably , one thinks of Renan s ex

- cuse , when , his life work of research ended , he turned his weary pen to dialogues on chastity ’ and euthanasia and dramas like L A bbes s e de ’ ar a Jou r . At the unveiling of the Treguier 1 0 statue , in 9 3 , Anatole France quotes this saying of his quondam master , a bon mot which might well have served him also to explain the less serious books with which he was to diver if s y his scholarship and amuse his old age . No w he gives us four volumes of satire . Fin ishin M g his study of the aid , he relieves the r later inte vals of this task by a parody , a bur le s ue q history of France . Written more rap ’ L Ile des Pin idly , because written more easily , g onins also bears the date 1 90 8 : but if Jeanne ’ d A rc followed the spirit and method of Renan , this mock history is conceived and written in the manner of his later model , the author of L P e M om il a uc lle and L e o nde c me va . 192

V A modern oltaire , Anatole France now turns to caricature the legends he had loved so well in earlier years . He tells us of a certain S M e aint a l , a Breton monk famous for his mis i s onar . y zeal Long used to travel over the seas , as the early missionaries , in a miraculous D trough of stone , he is tempted by the evil to ﬁt out this Heaven - sent boat with sails and S o rudder and prow of wood . , by his eager ness to reach an erring ﬂock , he puts himself unwittingly in the power of the Adversary .

A frightful tempest springs up , and , driven out of its course , the evil boat carries the monk far away to the frozen Antarctic seas . At last the good man recognizes the devils blowing into his sails , exorcises them with the sign of

- the cross and , worn out and half blinded by the spray and the glittering ice , he lands safely on a little isle . There he ﬁnds a colony of penguins , which he exhorts in myopic faith as the human inhabitants of the isle ; and hearing them quack assent in their barbarian tongue , he baptizes them one and all . Imagine now the consternation in Heaven , the confusion among the doctors and saints , the problem suddenly D f presented to the eity . What is the e fect of this baptism ? Is the sacrament valid through its spirit or through its form ? Are the penguins

194

Prera haelitism Ruskin and English p , and very sig niﬁcant are the pages in which the author rehabilitates Virgil from the quasi - conversion D M a rbo ux r de a en e s . related by ante , f

By such characteristic fragments , the parody is brought down to modern times , to things which Anatole France had seen and chafed under . But as he caricatures Boulanger , the “ ff a air , and the corruption of modern politics tainted with Clericalism , Royalism , and amor ous intrigue , the matter of his text is suddenly expanded beyond all proportion : half the book is given over to these chapters , which leave the balder style of the chronicle for the circum s tantial realism of a novelist or a modern his torian . This may indicate that the earlier por tion was sketched in before His toire contem poraine : but it certainly proves the ineffaceable imprint of a world seen too well from Monsieur ’ B er eret s s — g eye Finally, the historian turns “ his gaze to the future . Houses could never be ” “ built high enough , he tells us , fifteen mil ” lions of men toiled in the giant city . Built hu on capitalism and industrial oppression , a man ant-hill with no vision save the pursuit of lucre , this blind , cruel , spawning monster perishes at the hands of a few idealists , a vast holocaust to the goddess Anarchy . Then fol 195 lows a period of decadence and barbarism : centuries pass wild huntsmen pursue the bear upon the site of the forgotten capital . Cen turies pass , nomads and shepherds and rude farmers live there in turn . At last , after many invasions , many wars , the straggling villages grow to towns , the straggling towns unite to “ form a capital . Then houses could never be built high enough ; fifteen millions of men toiled in the giant city . Thus the story ends , break ing off abruptly its endless cycle of despair . Here is a prophecy not to be reconciled with ur ierr blan he the optimism of S la p e c . Has the author repented , since he returns now to the fatalism first expressed in Jocas te ? Critics ’ have called L J le des Ping ouins the burial of an illusion , finding the author in the idealistic

- astronomer Bidault Coquille, who by the side of Colomban the sociologist ( Zola ) , leaves his P rot D tower to ﬁght for y ( reyfus) , unjustly accused of selling eighty thousand bundles of hay to a hostile empire . Bidault does not ﬁnd among the Pyrotins that pure love of truth

which spurred him to action , and so he goes

back disheartened to his tower , glad to escape “ ” from the crowd again . You imagined , he “ c says to himself , that at one stroke you ould establish justice in your country and in the uni 196

verse . You were a brave man , an honest ideal ist , but lacking in the philosophy of experience . e And now that you hav lost your illusions , now that you know that it is hard to redress wrongs and that the task is never ﬁnished , you return to your asteroids . You are right , but - Co have no pride in your returning , Bidault ” quille ! Is this more than a moment of discourage ment ? Certainly the Introduction of ‘the con ’ temporaneous Jeanne d Arc affi rms the optim o f ism the author , his faith in human progress and the coming of universal peace . But con signed to a book , a moment of discouragement seems permanent ; a sensitive artist may dwell upon defeat until it crystallizes into a M ephis t h li n e ndi op e a s p culum mu . “ ’ Alas , one s power to love declines and dies away in old age , like all the other energies of 1 1 Did said Anatole France in 88 . his irony lose its indulgence , not because life made him bitter , but because all irony corrodes its ? vessel in the end At any rate , this purely satiric vein goes on : all the foibles of human character are held up to ridicule in his next L es s e t emmes de la B rbe-bleue . a volume p f . “ ” based on authentic documents , is , to be sure , ‘ S lves tre B onnard . 98. y , p

198 — another penitent , converted by the miracle the P innkeeper . The inscrutable ways of rovidence are at last explained ! S Then there is the story of leeping Beauty , or rather of the dissolute minister of the royal court who , after his secular slumber as before , still denies the existence of fairies . This is a satire of cheap skepticism , .the skepticism of the French middle classes But better than this

- piece of eighteenth century badinage , whose humor displays an unusual indelicacy of taste , is the tale which ﬁlls the last half of the book , L he is a C m e .

Transplanted to a modern setting , this is simply the old story of the royal M a lade imag i naire who was told to endue the shirt of a perfectly happy man . The King , who seems to be drawn after the pleasure - seeking Leopold of

Belgium , has no evident reason for melancholia . His well - managed constitutional government gives him little trouble , for having found his ff actions ine ective , or productive of the wrong ff e ects , he has learned to leave it entirely to his n ministers . He is free to follow his ow pleas ures , as he has always done . But he is bored , bored with everything , ridden by melancholy M an ea as by the Old of the S . He loses sleep f in and appetite , suf ers vague pains , which 199

crease in spite of every treatment . Finally he seeks aid from a new physician , a believer in m natural remedies , who decides that the eces sary tonic is a shirt imbued with an optimist ’ s excess of joy . Two courtiers take up the quest of the shirt , or rather the quest of the happy man . But the noble lord who is ﬁrst approached secretly laments that he is not yet a marquis , the popular orator regrets that he is not an aristocrat . An heroic duke , the savior of his country , is senile and the victim of his servants ; one millionaire is a dyspeptic and another lives in fear of being robbed . The connoisseur , in his palace ﬁlled with treasures , is vexed by a ’ - chimney stack which spoils his view, the ladies favorite is mated to an old hag . One fears death , being a Jansenist , another because he is an Epicurean . The famous musician is secretly

- jealous of the popular song writer . One happy man they do ﬁnd , but he has just taken the M resolution to die . eanwhile the King is sink ing fast ; in desperation , a huge commission now examines hundreds of men a day . Women are excluded , for the prescription must be fol lowed literally . Besides , as one of the courtiers “ observes , in our class they do not bring up their children , do not direct their households , know nothing, do nothing, and kill themselves 200 with fatigu e ; they consume themselves in shi ’ ” ning ; theirs is only a candle s life . Finally, after a search in the remotest parts of the king dom has yielded but one hopeful case , a chari table priest , and he has confessed the secret anguish of his loss of faith , they discover a

- poor half witted vagabond , careless and merry — he as the day is long . Yes , he is happy admits the condition although he does not know the word ; but when they offer him a fortune for his ’ ! shirt , he hasn t any

- This is the very whip lash of Voltaire . Wielded gracefully but lightly by Jerome Coig nard , its strokes had gained force under the ’ hand of Bergeret ; until the master s gymnastic swiftness was reenforced by something of his terrible vigor—something of that sarcastic strength which always lifted from his victim ’ s ’ back the bleeding strip of skin . But Voltaire s inﬂuence , persistent as it is upon the later irony of Anatole France , is mingled and diluted in all hu these books with that of other humorists , mo rists more likely to amuse than that terrible D . Trubl et postillion of humanity Like octor ,

P be like rofessor Bergeret , Anatole France is come a great lover of Rabelais and his kind . “ M - P Oh ilesian tale writers , oh subtle etro ” N du Pro nius , oh my oel Fail , exclaims the

202

no taste , and even an artistic nature may be swept away by his rollicking humor into a li cense which ceases to be unconscious and inno So cent upon the lips of a modern . it happened with Anatole France , when age and ennui had broken down the bounds of his earlier classi cism ; and the result of this evolution was L es Contes de Jacques Tournebroche ( 1 90 9) and L a Rév olte des a ng es The ﬁrst of these is a collection of amusing but trivial tales and sketches , at times gross as L e o eux B uffa lma cco j y , and mostly written in the French of the sixteenth century . Remark able for the ease with which he handles this archaic idiom , they are quite lacking in the philosophic depth which alone might excuse their lapses into broad humor . The author is i simply amusing h mself , giving free vent to that love of the scabrous which the scholar , so bound by constraint in ordinary life , sometimes displays in the smoking- room of his favorite

’ L Revolte des n es club . But in a a g the humor has its moral—its implication rather—for any thing like a conventional moral will be invisible except to pagans like the author . This implication is enwrapped in a Mani ’ chean fantasy such as inspired L humaine tra ’ “ ” die g e . The Revolt of the Angels is the story 203

of a new conspiracy against Heaven , against the Jahveh of the Old Testament and the Ta! mud , whom Anatole France, like Renan , sees as a cruel despotic demiurge , opposed to that science and enlightenment which he personiﬁes in Lucifer . This dualistic theory of the world Thais had interested him since he wrote ; now , P with contemporary aris as a setting , he de scribes the plot suggested to one of earth ’ s fallen angels by the many- voiced volumes of a library ﬁlled with theology , science , and philos h o . p y The chief conspirators are cherubim , seraphim , and archangels , drawn to earth by motives often far from angelic , and living there as Russian nihilists , musicians , Bohemians of every sort . But more than this , their historian makes them subject to very human frailties , the ’ B er eret s everlasting frailties of g favorite tales , and to their clear deterministic vision opposes the moral prejudices of men , so that the young Frenchman involved in their circle becomes in the end protector to his own guardian angel . We learn of their secular role in the history of man , who owes to them his progress , his learn

ing , and his civilization ; and the chapters in which the ﬂute- player Nazaire ( P an ) relates in dreamy recollection the long course of celes tial and human history are perhaps the best in 204

’ a the book . Here we are told that Lucifer s t tack upon Heaven had failed only because of the thunderbolts launched against him ; but with that secret of the demiurge laid bare by the Quaker Franklin , this disparity need no longer exist . So the conspirators prepare a great store of bombs , organize their force , and seek the Adversary to implore his leadership .

Then Lucifer has a dream , a vision in which he does conquer Heaven and drive out his enemy, only to ﬁnd that nothing is accomplished after all . For with the recognition of Rome he only grows cruel as the power he had hated , while opposition now makes his enemy tolerant

. S o and just , realizing that victory has merely o inverted their r les , that wars only engender ff wars , he refuses the pro ered generalship , preferring the lowly scene of his past labors

i nor to Heaven , and the greater victory over g ance and fear to any conquest of the skies .

The meaning of the story , full of repeated epigrams and effects ” and vaguely recalling L a Rotis s erie without its taste and moderation , is thus the uselessness of war Such was the message this modern Lucian once more gave — —in 1 1 . his country and Europe February , 9 4 — Six months later the Republic and Europe were plunged into the world war .

V S i N the beautiful little illa a d , with its stained- glass windows opening toward the — ’ Bois de Boulogn e a scholar s retreat filled with books and works of art chosen to reflect the period which he is studying —the pan ’ demonium of war interrupted an old man s quiet . He answered the call like a hero and a philosopher . In that first wild hour of pas s ionate hatred , when the whole Republic was clamoring for vengeance , he wrote a letter

- recalling his fellow citizens to moderation , urg ing Frenchmen not to forget that humanity is n above all ations . Then , when the real peril of invasion made patriotism paramount , and the storm of criticism and obloquy broke upon his 1 8 0 head , the veteran of 7 put aside his pen and ff o ered his sword . Too old to pass the physical examination in October , he was allowed to help his country in other ways , and his next book , written and sold for the profit of the wounded , 208 was a glorification of its defenders fighting or S ur la voie lorieus e fallen , g P acifist that he is , Anatole France at once “ saw and admitted the necessity of war : We must destroy from top to bottom the military power of Germany , take from that barbarous people all possibility of pursuing their dream “ of a world empire . For they have taken from the art of warfare all its laws , all its mod c ration , all the humanity still left in it . They had killed peace , now they are killing war . They are making war a monster too ugly to live . “ He knows now that it is criminal to make ap peals to peace , to desire peace until the forces ” : of oppression are destroyed indeed , one letter even preaches the duties of neutrals toward the champions of civilization , united to the last socialist among them . Every page of the vol ume breathes the same fire of patriotism , from the Christmas letter to the soldiers through the final appeal to Frenchmen on their national holiday : What you are defending is your native land , that smiling fertile land , the fairest : in the world it is your fields , your meadows

. What you are defending is your own

- church belfry , your roofs of brick and slate , the tombs of your fathers and the cradles of your children . What you are defending is our

2 10

We do not remain one moment the same , and yet we never become different from what ” 1 we are , said Anatole France at thirty . But what is the stable element in this restless soul ?

Is it the poet or the naturalistic novelist , the dilettante or the patient historian , the mystic or the rabid anticlerical , the amiable skeptic or the bitter polemic , the cynical satirist or the ff reformer , the sco er at men or the humani tarian and builder of a new Utopia ? What is constant in this changing kaleidoscope of phases or moods ?

Halt your kaleidoscope at any figure , and take it apart . Some of the colors are covered by others , but underneath lie all the elements of every pattern . Take Anatole France in any of his phases , and you find , balanced or con flictin g or dominated one by the other , his two basic elements : an imagination essentially ro mantic and a Voltairian keenness of analysis . And under all their changes of pattern plays the s ens ibilité nerveus e which he early noted in ’ Racine : in other words the artist s tempera ment , vibrant and sensuous , richly responsive — but a shade too delicately poised a nature which after its first contact with life is bound to

1 n la tin é ie . 309 G , p . 2 11 turn away from its ugliness to that softer re

ﬂection of reality given by literature and art . “There are times when everything surprises me , times when the simplest things give me the ” 2 thrill of a mystery, he writes at forty . This is the faculty which makes the poet , the mystic , “ the curious and eager dilettante . Imagination turns into an artist a man whose feeling is ” 3 stirred , and a brave man into a hero . This is the faculty which makes the idealist and the

dreamer of reform .

Fond of the marvelous and the exotic , enam

ored of the past , subjective and sentimental “ beneath all his irony , ﬁnding in memory une M ” 4 use divine , his imagination is undeniably

romantic . But against that inﬂuence works V ’ the acid of an intellect analytic as oltaire s , solving or dissolving all ; and if its rational v acti ity , which gives us the scholar , the philos

opher , and the satirist , does not invariably end

in cynicism , one may be reasonably sure of that result in a temperament self- betrayed by its visions and wounded through its abnormal sen iti s venes s . Before that ﬁnal change , however , his intellect ﬁnds pause on Montaigne’ s pillow

of doubt , and happily warmed by imagination , ’ enjoys for over a decade a sage s dream .

’ 2 Livre e on i 3 i 4 m 6 d. Anneau d am . . Ib . 279 L 1 . . 9 , p , p , p 0. 2 12

v Who , could we choose , would not li e the golden forties with Anatole France ? In those adole s cloister days , protected like his long “ ” cence , even the nervous sensibility of the artist combines suavely with his mental facul ties , urging fancy and intellect alike to explore . “ Rooted in an ardently sensitive nature , that — “ high curiosity , which , as he tells us , was to cause the confusion and the joy of his life, devoting him to the quest of that which one ” 5 finds never , now leads the poet and the scholar to a past infinitely more attractive than the present . An egoist , an intellectual romanticist , loving the past less for truth ’ s sake than for the ff re escape it o ers to his imagination , where it ’ fl ects itself as richly as a woman s beauty in a Renaissance mirror , he loves too the ideas of the past , the ideas of the present , the marvels of science , the Utopias of the reformers , the ’ poetry in all of man s pageant of philosophy , whereof he believes not a single word . We may rightly blame the selfishness of this attitude , but even an idle curiosity may produce for us the o gift of beauty . S with this intellectual hedon ist : in his richly furnished mind each new im pression echoes and reechoes , until somewhere down the gallery of memory it strikes to music

5 P ierre Noz ére . 14. i , p

214 pure as the gaze of the good gods and soft as the breath of the goddesses . Awakened like Bergeret by stones crashing through his library window, an oversensitive type will turn back to his books , longing , at least momentarily, for ’ the hermit s life which will remove him deﬁ nitely from the incongruities of a world not ’ made for romanticists . S o Bonnard is transformed into Bergeret , who , despite his worship of ataraxy , reveals a latent capacity for emotion—the romantic sen s iti enes s—in v his praise of irony and pity . But in the course of life one gets used to living , learns to love life , to love it even in its ugliness , “ ’ L hemi e M i a s . o like the atheist in C , j aime la ’ vie , la vie de cette terre , la vie telle qu elle est , ” la chienne de vie . S o the mature Anatole France attains the pessimistic tranquillity of D Trublet B rotteaux Ilettes octor and des , in whom imagination has at last yielded to in tellect , philosophers grown serene with age , no ’ B er eret s - longer lamenting g dream villa , but content to gather uncomplaining the crumbs

of beauty life offers by the way .

In ﬁne , one cannot help thinking that Anatole France looked into the mirror when he drew

7 M ann 3 e uin . 33 . Livre de mon a mi 69 q , p , p . .

B arbe- l b eue . 258. , p 2 15

D h r r L L r ou e ec a t e e s . in y g Like the artist , “ he too is a restless mobile spirit , egoistic and passionate , eager to give himself, prompt to t wi hdraw , loving himself generously in all the ” 1 0 beauty which he ﬁnds in the world . He too is one who lives for self , for the pleasures his fancy and his intellect and his temperament

can . give This makes him an artist , and this “ gives him the defects of the artist . There are people who are masters of their impressions , ” 1 1 o but I cannot imitate them . S he is the vic tim of his qualities , unable to coordinate or “ discipline either intellect or imagination . I v ob ha e never been a real observer , for the server must have a system to guide him , and I have no system at all . The observer directs his vision ; the spectator lets himself be led by his “ 1 2 eyes . The results of this yielding to self are shown

° in his art . - All his longer stories are formless lack of true constructive ability is the real basis of his preference for the tale . Unable to force his talents or coordinate them , he requires twenty years to ﬁnish his one piece of serious scholarship . But discipline would have curbed that universal curiosity which is his life’ s chief

1 ° a i t 1 1 i r a i L c c . r N z ére . . 99 P e e 27 , p . , p . 5

’ 1 1 L vr mo mi 11 i e de n a . 5 . , p 2 16 interest ; the dilettante cannot subordinate his talents , the skeptic can build no system save the skepticism which indulgently tolerates them all .

A man of moods , living after his moods , his subjectivity will always limit his creative imag — inatian . His best characters the only truly living characters of his novels—are invariably “ ” portraits of the artist . Aside from that , he can only draw directly from life—as he did — with Choulette o r sketch a ﬁgure cleverly characterized by the externals which impress his sympathy or his impassive hate . Rather signiﬁcant , in this connection , is his denial of “ the creative imagination : All our ideas come to us from the senses , and imagination consists , ” 1 3

. So not in creating, but in assembling ideas , too, he defends plagiarism and makes creation “ v a matter of style Ideas belong to e erybody, but as a thought has no value save through t its form , to give a new form to an old though is art in its entirety and the only creation pos

i sible to human ty . Yet it would be easy to push this criticism too far . The originality of Anatole France is to depict his multiple self , to mould ﬁgures into which he can breathe his own ideas , and to make them of enduring metal rather than the

” nd ﬁ 280. , p .

218

: control , creates his ﬁnest prose it is this sen suons vibrancy that gives such an atmospheric afterglow to his pages , which stir the senses and trouble the soul like the poignantly ﬂeeting beauty of a sunset sky . It is a glamor we can “ only feel , created by one who would rather feel than

An Epicurean gifted with an active mind , a restless soul ever seeking the unknown , will of course enjoy a longer cycle of pleasures than “ a mere sensual hedonist . One wearies of ” everything except the joys of comprehending . But books trouble restless and though comprehension remains a pleasure in the long ranges of the mind , when it comes home again “ to self its joys are turned to torment . Our ’ ign orance of our own r ais on d otre must always be a source of melancholy and When youth is gone and self- centered intellect alone remains , dissolving that hope and illusion which is the spiritual basis of life , when the bitter skeptic has deﬁnitely put down the poet and the f idealist , he must rea ﬁrm himself by action , and the cloistered Epicurean knows no form of a c tion but writing . Even the skeptic must write — write to regain an illusion for living . He

1 5 Vie litt rai r 1 1 1 6 i é e 9 . Ib d I vii , II, . , ,

1 " ardin 67 J , p . . 2 19

may not know whether the world exists , but as an artist he does know that his art exists ab l l so ute y . We must all believe : the very gym noso hist p , sitting in mud on the Ganges banks , hugs a negative belief beneath his squalid im

. act mobility We must believe and , or die “ Whatever be our philosophic doubts , we are forced to act in life as if we had no doubts ” at all . S o F aus t like the homunculus of , the roman P ’ tic yrrhonist yields to life s imperative call .

He turns to his desk , and there makes a stand against the flux of appearances which Herac litus first taught by the Ionian sea . He ex o f presses himself , like all us ; and it is well that his generous impulse toward self- expres sion should seek instinctive form . He may ex cuse his inconsistency by saying , like Anatole “ France , that it is better to speak of beautiful ” things than not to speak at all , but at heart he knows that he is only the blind instrument of the light that is in him , the slave of a Word that must be made flesh for the salvation of his soul .

And thus , even in his cloister , the artist like the philosopher justiﬁes his existence to the world . He is judged by his results . If the man of stronger passion and simpler mind—the 220 — man of action ﬁnds his s elf- expression in

fighting the universe without , his broader vis ion and more timorous judgment will retire from that unequal struggle with an age of low ideals , to find a field of action in the universe within . He will live , not in life but in books , that agreeable dilution of life , which even a world of “service” may well allow to those who distil honey for its delight . And if , as with

Anatole France , his is too vital a temperament to stay there forever , if ﬁnally the same nervous sensitiveness which had led him to art brings him out of his study in generous pity for the re oppressed , we must sympathize with him Not turning in disillusion . that such a man

: needs it he still has , to console him behind his study doors , the intellectual life , the much needed critical Spirit which alone will make the ’ liberty of our children s world . And some day . reviewing his work and noting in his later loss

y of poise the brand of the conﬂict , posterit will regret that Anatole France did not stay in his “ library , content to remain one of those for ” whom the universe is only ink and paper , con soled by the fact that ink and paper and broken marble is all that is left of those who laid the foundations of modern Europe in the little Attic

. S town To keep to his books , to hut the door

222

ground , a panorama of life such as is revealed in the monumental creation of a Balzac . To be sure , something of this kind of realism may be found in His toire contemp oraine and others of his modern novels . But from a philosophic standpoint , these are far less signiﬁcant than Thais or the tales , which , under the mask of history, present symbolically a spiritual and intellectual portrait of the later nineteenth cen tury in France . Anatole France typiﬁes his age in its dom

inant . interest , the historical spirit Revealed to S us by Walter cott , developed by romanticists eager to follow imagination in a flight from — fortified reality , in Flaubert and his school , by archeology and psychology, the great mod ern study finds in this writer a characteristic devotee . His keen perception of human iden tity beneath all the manifold differences of time and place teaches him that man ’ s duty is to : rewrite history yet , despite an increasing real o f s eudos cientific ism , he is no dupe the p school of historians . To the end he remains a critic re- in and an artist , creating the past through sight and imagination . He typifies the excessive individualism of this age of democracy . Even in his conservative days he is ardently personal : he cannot keep 223

Not self out of his creation . merely subjective , like the romanticists , from whom he differs by a greater intellectual reserve , he carries sub ectivit j y into the things of the intellect , and to u j stify the dilettantism of his attitude , exalts ske ti it ﬁnally into a philosophy . Hence his p ’ cism S , eager to how the relativity of other men s

realities , rising under attack to a devotion toward philosophic nihilism which is a devo tion to his own form of dialectic . Barring a few years of pragmatism , this is his dominant attitude : from ﬁrst to last he is an intellectual anarch , reducing all things to his measure ; and in his reaction against all absolutist formulas he has become a large ﬁgure in the new philos o h p y of Humanism .

His pragmatic period , and indeed his whole later evolution , reﬂects our modern humani tarian and socialistic interests . A corollary of his subjectivity, confessedly grounded upon 1 8 an Epicurean sensitiveness to pain , this social pity is still real enough to lead him into thorny paths for the sake of justice . Here at least his idealism overrides the Skeptic . For as he “ says , if the object for which one sacriﬁces

- sacriﬁce oneself is an illusion , self is none the

less a reality , and that reality is the most splen

1 8 a in rd . 56. J , p 224 did adornment that man can put upon his moral “ And though , to him , earth is only a grain of sand in an inﬁnite desert of “ : celestial worlds , none the less he adds But f if men suf er only upon earth , it is greater than It all the rest of the universe . . is everything ” 2 0 and the rest is nothing at all . How different this attitude from the roman o f tic contempt ordinary humanity, from that hatred of the bourgeois which all his life held ’ Flaubert aloof in the artist s aristocratic pride . Yet Anatole France is one with Flaubert in his cult of art . He too has that devotion to style , born of romantic example and grown into a religion with the Parnassian poets and the m P S alam bo. author of rimarily a stylist , even L e P a rnas s e his reaction against , his rejection of their “splendid” diction for a classical sim licit p y , is still a devotion to form , a devotion whose labors only a stylist can fully under P r stand . To the end he remains in spirit a a nassian , polishing his seemingly artless phrases until all trace of effort or workmanship is ﬁled S o away . for him there is no unconscious sim li i “ p c ty . A good style is like yonder beam of in light , which owes its pure brilliance to the timate combination of the seven colors Which

1 ° i 2 ° rdin 6 Livre de mon am . 124. a . 5 . , p J , p

226 art of inverted statement which Co ig nard and Bergeret take from Voltaire ; it is also the im o f passive irony Flaubert , recounting in cold moderation abuses which clamor for emotional n treatment , for the lash of sarcasm or indig a tion . And with all this it is the irony of Renan , those indeﬁnable overtones of an ironic tem erament in p , divided between imagination and

ll P - - te ect. oised condor like over a serio comic universe , this fantastic humor seizes contrasts which startle or appal .

If primarily intellectual , his charm is also due to qualities which belong to the poet as well as the philosopher The art of Anatole

France is a product of his imagination , his taste , and his musical sense . Symbolic of his whole creation is his statement concerning the ballad which ﬁrst revealed to him the virtue of poetry : “ In my prose will be found the dis j ecta membra ” of the poet . This is plain enough when his

work is read aloud . Only thus can one realize the

ﬂexibility of his diction , which runs the whole gamut of melodic quality without ever losing its purity or its power to express his changing moods : a ﬂexibility which gives the reader all

the delicacy of the impression , in a music which n seems stolen from the very ﬂute of Pa . Yet with all his sensuousness he rarely falls 227

into stylistic exaggeration . His taste may break down as regards matter , but never in his man ner or form . It is this which keeps him from the bathos so common in esthetic or rhythmic prose—taste and an intellectuality which the sensation never quite obscures . They save him from that pitfall of French writers , rhetorical emphasis—from that love of sonorous or dra matic effect which makes the theater the dream “D of every literary Gaul . ans tous les genres , ” il nous faut des Marseillaises . Taste turns him from this to the poetry which life itself distils , perceptible only to those whose ears are not ﬁlled by noise alone . An instinctive tact seems to have led him naturally to the Greeks , rather than to the oratorical Romans so dear to

French classicism , and when his old Ciceronian professor of rhetoric criticized him on this point , suggesting that he read the complete D ” works of Casimir elavigne , he felt already “ o ho that he had found something better . S p cles had given me a certain bent which I could ” 2 2 not undo . And all through his life that same taste has kept his genius from the contamina tion of northern literatures , making him the most truly classical of all the moderns . Alone among contemporaries , Anatole France has

2 2 Li r i 1 v e de mon am . 70. , p 228 grafted the living ﬂower of Hellas upon the

- Gallo Latin logic of form . “ You are the genius of Greece made French , said Alfred Croiset in his memorable tribute to “ Anatole France . You have taken from Greece her gift of subtle dialectic , of smiling irony , of words which seem endowed with wings , of poetry delicate yet deﬁnite and full of luminous reason ; and you have Shed upon that Greek

- — beauty the grace of the Ile de France , the grace which invests her familiar landscapes, and which also lends its beauty to the style of our dearest writers , those who are most delight ” fully French .

Greek , yet subtly national , this is why Ana tole France has taken his place among the great

French classics . This is why he must remain a classic . For if literature is the least durable of all the arts , dependent as it is upon words and metaphors which never cease to change , he alone in his generation has chosen the Sim li it p c y which suffers least from time . In the last ﬁfteen years , a new literature and a new hope have succeeded the pessimism consequent 1 8 0 upon 7 , and when the tinkling poets and

- morbid self dissecting novelists are forgotten , when the sickly symbolism or the cruder sen suality of the end of the century has passed like

OF THE PRINCIPAL W ORKS OF ANATOLE

234

Le u s e a n e- a e P it d S i t Cl ir . D ur r n i sco s de éceptio . ’ L e Manne u n o q i d s i er. ’ L rm u ma O e d il . Au e onheu rove r m i u e a a e . p tit b r, p b dr t q La e on en a ri e L c bi pp s . ’ ’ L Anneau d améth ste y . e rr N zi r Pi e o é e .

Clio . F e et a n ill s g rco s . Mon r e s eu e r e a. ri i B g r t Pa s . ’ L affaire Crain u bill q e e . O n on p i i s soci ales . H s o r com u i t i e iq e . i u i l Cra n eb l e u o s ue etc . q , P t i , Riq t , ’ L E lis e et la u ue g Rép bliq . S ur la erre anch pi bl e . r l m m ur Ve s es t e ps e ill e s . ’ L Il e n n des Pi goui s . ’ L a ie e eanne Arc V d J d .

L es o n e c u T urn r h C t s de Ja q es o eb oc e .

- L e s s e emmes de la ar e eue etc. pt f B b Bl , Aux u n u d a s d sco rs . ét i t , i L a u comédi e de celui q i épousa une fermn e muett e . L e s D ux n i e o t so i f . L n e Gé i e latin. La vo e c e an Ré lt l s ge s . ur l S a vo i e glo ri euse . Ce ue s en n r q di t os Mo t s .

s er es of En s rans a ons now near n com e i on ( A i gli h t l ti , i g pl t , is ub s b o an r e n L e New ! o k . p li h d y J h , )

238

as s c sm o 8 2 2 e al s o o u oso h c 8 i 1 1 2 1 Cl i i , s , 4, 7 ; @ D bt, phil p i , 7 , 3 , 9 ;

ree ce et c. e S e c sm. G , s e a lso k pti i

o 1 1 1 5 1 82 . re us ix n o 1 1 85 Cli , 5 5 , 5 7 , 7 7 , D yf . , 94. 99 . , 3 4. 3 . o m e d e ce u ui é ous a u ne 1 1 6 1 8 x 2 9 C édi l i q p 47 . s. 7 . 9 5 . 9

emme mue e 2 0 1 . f tt ,

ommun sm 1 f. uca on o u ar 1 61 . C i , 49 Ed ti , p p l , ’

omt e d e Gabal is L e 1 0 f. is e et l a u u e 1 6 f. C , , 5 Egl Rép bliq , L , 5

Co ns olat ione Phil as o hiae D e 1 0 . cure an sm 1 0 2 1 2 1 62 p , , 7 Epi i , , 7 , 5, ;

o ns a n e n am n 80 . n e e c u a 86 2 1 11 s e e C t t, B j i , i t ll t l , 54, , 7 ; ’ Co n e our comme n cer l anné e a s o e o n sm. t p , l H d i

1 60 . cu rus 2 8 1 0 8 1 1 6 1 8 1 . Epi , , , ,

on es d e ac u es ourne r oc e u r e s 1 1 2 . C t J q T b h , E ipid , 7, 3 , 5 ’ L e s 2 0 2 . E u de nacre 1 6 1 0 . , t i , L , 7 , 3 a i n u e il Cr q b le, 1 5 85 , 1 68 .

r me de S ve s re onnar d L e a re e r d n an d 1 2 . C i yl t B , , F b . F i , 9 - x 5 1 8 2 2 a r a e s 6 61 6 . 4 . 43 . 4 5 . 3 . 5 F i y t l , 5 3 , 5 , 5 7, , 5

r c sm erar 80 11 8 ti 1 f a r na a e Uberti 1 8 1 . C iti i , lit y , , s , 9 ; F i t d gli ,

eo r o f 8 a us 2 1 . th y , 9 . F t, 9

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