CHAPTER XIV

ANATOLE FRANCE--VERSATILE STYLIST IN FICTION AND ESSAYS

The prize of 1921 has been awarded:

Anatole France (Thibault, Jacques Anatole), Paris, born 1844; died 1924: “in recognition of his splendid activity as an author,--an

## activity marked by noble style, large-hearted humanity, charm and

French _esprit_.”[136]

When Anatole France, who had been the Nobel prize winner of 1921, died in the autumn of 1924, there was scarcely a journal of standing in any country that did not summarize his influence upon letters and life in France and other nations. Distinctly Parisian in traits and expression, this writer was broadly international in his analysis of humanity, in his genial mockery of life, in his dreamy idealism which coexisted with a ruthless realism. He had lived the full span of life--and _lived_ it to the end of his eighty years. He had written in moods of biting satire and emotional intensity; he had found themes in history, current topics, and the future. As he neared the close of his life, the emphasis was more upon the genial, kindly aspects of humanity; his later literary expressions were memories of his boyhood and youth, the completion of that cycle of intuitive memories that began with _My Friend’s Book_ (1885) and _Pierre Nozière_, and ended with _Little Pierre_ and _The Bloom of Life_ (1922).

[Illustration:

_Copyright, 1925, by J. B. Lippincott Company._ _Photograph by Choumoff, Paris_

ANATOLE FRANCE]

Between these volumes of imaginative and reminiscent delights, which form a better biography of his mind and spirit than has otherwise been written, Anatole France produced such diverse literary types, such books of ironic and cynical flavor as _The Red Lily_, _Thaïs_, _The Revolt of the Angels_, _The Amethyst Ring_, _At the Sign of the Reine Pédauque_, _Crainquebille_, _The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife_, _The Elm Tree on the Mall_, _Penguin Island_, _The Gods Are Athirst_, _The Life of Jeanne d’Arc_, _The Human Comedy_, and volumes of critical essays and poems. To the books of more reminiscent flavor, with wistful idealism, he was indebted, especially, for the honor of the Nobel prize. These had already won the tributes--and critical estimates--of readers of European countries, of Canada, United States and South America. Few writers have had such diverse judgments passed upon them; in many cases, the temperamental traits of the critic influence his reactions to this author; in other instances, most effusive tributes, like those by James Lewis May and Paul Gsell, of recent years (1924), have brought natural reactions in more unvarnished truth, tinged with wit and naturalism, like the biography by Jean-Jacques Brousson: _Anatole France Himself_ which has been called facetiously _Anatole France in Bed-Slippers_ (the French title reads _Anatole France en pantouffles_, 1925). Mr. May has written as a friend and warm admirer; Paul Gsell, as a disciple; M. Brousson, as private secretary and fearless narrator.

It might be said that Anatole France was _born_ into the inheritance of books in 1844, for his father, François Noël Thibault, was a bookseller of repute throughout Paris and its environs. Son of a shoemaker in Anjou, this elder Thibault had taught himself to read and write while he had been in military service as a young man. At his bookshops in the Quai Malaquais and Quai Voltaire gathered scholars and authors, iconoclasts in politics and letters and religion; the shopkeeper was a Royalist and a fervent Catholic. In the character of Dr. Nozière, in _Pierre Nozière_, his son “has taken away the bookshop,” as he confesses, but he has revealed many traits of his father’s character. In the Epilogue to _The Bloom of Life_ are other memories that may be “capricious,” as he admits, but are none the less true “records” of his childhood. Here his father’s lack of business instincts is suggested as elsewhere--he would often prefer to _read_ his books rather than to _sell_ them. The influence of these boyhood days in this bookshop, with contact directly with thinkers and writers, with wits and critics, must have been vital and permeating in the later development of Anatole France as psychologist and stylist.

In his last hours, we are told, this famous writer who had been “a genial mocker at life,” an epicurean and scoffer, a scholar of wide culture, called upon the name of his mother. She had been the first, and one of the most significant factors in his life-development. There are passages of less deferential tone about her in _Anatole France Himself: a Boswellian Record_, by Jean-Jacques Brousson (Philadelphia, 1925). She was of good Flemish family, with unfailing _esprit_ and optimism, practical and able to “attend to the gears of household management that got loose sometimes,” with an absent-minded father. She was, however, a rare story-teller and devoted to her boy with the unusual gifts which she alone, in his boyhood, could foresee and encourage. How happy he was at home is revealed in many chapters of his books--not alone those of acknowledged reminiscence but others like _The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard_ and an occasional essay _On Life and Letters_. By contrast with the joys of home--the delicate table linen and decanters, the “tranquil faces,” the easy talk--he disliked the classrooms and the restrictions of school life, declaring, “Ah, Home is a famous school.” A sense of humor and a keen interest in humanity made the life at the Collège Stanislas endurable but he loved solitude; he resented the gibes of instructors and students, and he stole away to the quays along the Seine at the hour of noon recess to eat his luncheon--or to forget to eat it--and returned too late for the afternoon session and his chance to recite.

It was his mother’s faith and intuition that refused to be severe with him, even when the professor’s report of his school work was “progress nil--conduct bad,” even when his father accepted the verdict of M. Dubois, the professor, that the boy would never accomplish anything in arts or sciences. Then his mother whispered words that he never forgot: “Be a writer, my son; you have brains and you will make the envious hold their tongues.” If his mother was the first vital influence in making her son a world-famous writer, the second was the city of Paris that he loved, studied and photographed on his memory from boyhood to old age. The parks and avenues, the Louvre and the Trocadéro, the sidewalk cafés and the bookshops beyond beautiful Notre-Dame, the vivacious men and women, the workers on the streets and the children in the playgrounds, the stately palaces and the tiny rooms above a publishing shop--all these aspects of Paris form a panoramic picture in his books.

In 1868, when Anatole France was an unknown, dreamy, book-browsing young man of twenty-four, there appeared an _Etude_ of Alfred de Vigny which was _his_ tribute to the poet who was “the exemplar of a beautiful life, which gave beautiful work to the world.” The author was known as one of a group of young men who gathered in the rue de Condé to discuss poetry and other forms of writing. Two years later he was serving in the army, trying to forget the shells that dropped in front of him by reading Vergil or playing his flute.[137] In the years that followed he wrote political satires, prefaces, read manuscripts for the publisher Lemerre, collaborated in Larousse’s dictionary and did other “odds and ends” of an editorial kind.

After the Franco-Prussian War, Lemerre published the small book of verse to which Anatole France had devoted his leisure and zest, _Poèmes après_. In spite of some stanzas of lyrical beauty they attracted little attention. Better known is _The Bride of Corinth_ that appeared three years later and revealed the author’s keen analysis of paganism and early Christianity. It is translated with other plays and poems by Wilfrid Jackson and Emilia Jackson, 1920. For a time he was assistant to Leconte de Lisle in the Senate Library.[138] As a witty conversationalist and brilliant companion, he was a favorite in the salons of Catulle Mendes and Mme. Nina de Callias, the would-be poet. At the home of M. de Bonnières, where gathered actors, writers, and musicians, Anatole France was always welcomed. In 1881 appeared the book which registered the beginning of his popular acclaim, _The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard_; one may say that it is _the book_ by which, during the last forty years, the author has been familiar to international readers, old and young. It is a simple tale, sentimental, without much plot but with two marked qualities of lasting appeal--sincerity and charm. Ten years later he laughed at its continued popularity, especially the claim that it was “a masterpiece,” saying “it was a masterpiece of platitudinousness,” adding that he wrote it for a prize and won it.[139]

Predictions of future fame were expressed in reviews of this book and, four years later, the public responded to _My Friend’s Book_, the first of the cycle of youthful memories, vignettes of life which reveal the author’s poetic reveries and friendly humanity. They differ from _The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard_ as the author gives here photographic pictures of his boyhood, adolescence, and young manhood while in Sylvestre Bonnard, the aged, lovable book-collector and Academician, he gives an imaginative picture of what the author _may be_. He is lonely and dominated by his cat, Hamilcar, and his housekeeper, cherishing the romantic memories of Clementine, and is urged by these sentiments to his sacrifice for her daughter. A few of his boyhood memories, however, are incorporated into the early chapters of this book--the craving for a doll, the silhouette of the uncle, Captain Victor, and other pages of wistfulness and humor. Lafcadio Hearn, in his Introduction to the translation of this classic _roman_, says words that may be applied to the cycle of memories (for they all have hall-marks of the author’s superb paradoxical genius). “If by Realism we mean Truth, which alone gives value to any study of human nature, we have in Anatole France a very dainty realist;--if by Romanticism we understand that unconscious tendency of the artist to elevate truth itself beyond the range of the familiar, and into the emotional realm of aspiration, then Anatole France is at times a romantic.... It is because of his far rarer power to deal with what is older than any art, and withal more young, and incomparably more precious: the beauty of what is beautiful in human emotion, that this story will live.”[140]

After 1886 the weekly “Causerie,” which Anatole France contributed _On Life and Letters_ to the Paris _Temps_, increased his literary fame and established his rank as critic. Here appeared such diverse, stimulating judgments upon writers of the day, as Maupassant and Dumas, Balzac and Marie Bashkirtseff, François Coppée (compared with Sully-Prudhomme and Frédéric Plessis), Renan and George Sand; among topics of more general interest were “Prince Bismarck,” “The Young Girl of the Past and the Young Girl of the Present,” and “Virtue in France.” Four volumes of these essays, _On Life and Letters_, have been translated into English. It was nine years after _The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard_ that another book appeared to rivet attention upon this industrious, progressive author. He once declared that he wrote the earlier book “to please the public” but that he wrote the later, _Thaïs_, to please himself. In development of skill in fiction it is superior; it has been well described as “an epic of eternal struggle between the spirit and the senses.”[141] The author had passed through some emotional crises since he wrote his earlier books of reminiscence, notably _My Friend’s Book_, with its reflections of his happy home life and the whimsical domestic discussions between the wife of his youth and himself about their daughter, Susanne. He had traveled and become imbued with sensuous beauty of southern lands; he had been annoyed, to the verge of anger, by reactionists, represented in _Thaïs_ by Palaemon, “who would banish joy and beauty from the world.” He made Nicias, often a skeptic in his surface sentiments, his spokesman. The poet and the realist are commingled in this tale of disillusionment, even as they are found in the later, more vehement books of the novelist-satirist, _The Red Lily_, _At the Sign of the Reine Pédauque_ (considered by many critics his masterwork), _The Amethyst Ring_, _The Gods Are Athirst_, _The Wicker-Work Woman_, _Penguin Island_, _The Revolt of the Angels_, and shorter stories like _Crainquebille_, _The White Stone_, _The Seven Wives of Bluebeard_, and _Tales from a Mother of Pearl Casket._

Fresh memories of the Dreyfus Case were awakened by his poignant satire in _Penguin Island_ with its elements of burlesque. The author’s historical research, which bore ripe fruits in _The Life of Jeanne d’Arc_, is revealed in _The Gods Are Athirst_, with sardonic wit and dramatic passages between Evariste, his mother, and his mistress. Julie, his beautiful sister, appeals to the reader’s sympathy. The ex-farmer of taxes, whose livelihood is now made by cutting out cardboard dancing dolls, is a haunting character. He voices, perhaps, the author’s attitude to life at this period--that is was full of disillusionment and defeats but was not worth the cost of one’s anxiety to the point of despair. In some of these satiric tales of life, notably _The Revolt of the Angels_ when they come to Paris and behold certain social conditions, there are passages so naturalistic that they offend tastes of less “sophisticated” readers. Some of the books by Anatole France were tabooed in libraries before the award of the Nobel prize; the year after that was given, all of his works, without due discrimination, were “placed on the Index” by the Roman Curia because of excess of utterances that were communistic and anti-clerical in tone. When he went to Stockholm to receive this prize in person he was reported to have said, regarding the Treaty of Versailles, “the most horrible of wars was followed by a treaty which was not a treaty of peace but a prolongation of the war. The downfall of Europe is inevitable unless at long last the spirit of reason is imported into its councils.”[142]

In contrast to these fearless words that brought him the condemnation of French journals, he made more urbane response to the literary honor conferred upon him, adding to his personal gratitude, tribute to the Swedish Academy: “Its decisions possess an international value, and I rejoice in it, for it is a confirmation of what is, for me, the principal lesson of the war, the beneficent influence exerted by intellectual intercourse with other countries.” There had been rumors, well attested, that the young men of France had repudiated Anatole France as a leader, seeking other exponents of philosophy and echoing the adverse comments upon him by Maurice Barrès and Henri Massis, editor of _La Revue Universelle_. They contended that he failed to give them a constructive philosophy in the hour of need. He never claimed to be a philosopher; he was an observer of life, a commentator, a poet-dreamer, a lover of justice, an ironist, a stylist rather than a thinker. He was not widely read in other languages and philosophies as were Georg Brandes or Sainte-Beuve. He bore some relationship to Brotteaux of his story, _The Gods Are Athirst_, who was condemned to death because of his lack of reverence for great political revolutionists. Anatole France saw the world as a subject for keen wit that is often sardonic but seldom bitter. He found life sadly in contrast with some of his visions as a youth but he did not despair of a future of more equality of conditions, more tolerance in creeds. Paul Gsell, one of his hero-worshipers, in his records of conferences at the Villa Saïd, the Paris home of “the Master,” has recalled significant thoughts uttered by him upon “The Credo of a Skeptic,” “Politics in the Academy,” and other themes.[143]

In his _Boswellian Record_ by Jean-Jacques Brousson (Lippincott, 1925) there are frank confessions of his “show conversations” and his “contradictory ideas” which caused shyness and lack of clarity of mind. He recalls “the almond icing” which he put on his first version of _The Life of Jeanne d’Arc_, to be “picturesque” and to please “the sanctimonious.” These “snap-shots” of Anatole France “en pantouffles,” in moods of relaxation, are even less interesting than some of the quotations of serious sort from the words of this master of style. Two significant sentences will be often quoted; “You become a good writer just as you become a good joiner; by planing down your sentences.”... “People take me for a juggler, a sophist, a droll fellow. In reality I have passed my life twisting dynamite into curl-papers.”[144]

Without question the return of Anatole France to the spirit and mode of his earlier books, to the idealism, combined with photographic vividness in _The Bloom of Life_, influenced the decision of the Swedish Academy in his favor, in 1921. He was, in his old age, living again the scenes of his youth--discussing with his schoolmate, Fontanet, “People Who Do Not Give Enough”; playing truant from the ferule of Monsieur Crottu whose rule “was a tissue of injustices”; recalling “Days of Enchantment” when he went to his first play; photographing “Monsieur Dubois, the Quiz,” and plucky Phillipine Gobelin; and yielding again to the spell of Vergil and the Sixth Eclogue, with its wonder and beauty. The stinging irony disappeared from these later pages--irony which motivated such books (or portions of them) as _Histoire contemporaine_ and _The Revolt of the Angels_ or “A Mummer’s Tale” in _Histoire comique_.

Dual personality which resides in all persons was most marked in this writer of charm and force, this exponent of his race, and of his age among _all_ races. “Compassionate idealism” is the phrase chosen by James Lewis May to explain the polemical essays and radical criticisms of governments and religions, that are expressed or implied in many of his writings. James Huneker calls him “a true humanist”; he thinks he loved humanity and learning; he loved words, also, but he was “a modern thinker, who has shed the despotism of the positivist dogma and boasts the soul of a chameleon.”[145] He stresses his irony which is “Pagan” and his pity which is “Christian.” Sisley Huddlestone, in _Those Europeans_, devotes a chapter to Anatole France as “Ironist and Dreamer.” The phrases are well chosen; the interpretation of his salient traits is condensed but convincing: “In his irony one constantly catches glimpses of beauty. By showing us life as it is, though without bitterness, he indicates life as it should be. He teaches tolerance and placidity in an age in which even the reformers add to the confusion by their reckless energy.”[146]

FOOTNOTES:

[136] Inscription with the Nobel Prize Award in Literature, 1921.

[137] _Anatole France: the Man and His Work_ by James Lewis May, London and New York, 1923, p. 72.

[138] _Studies from Ten Literatures_ by Ernest Boyd, New York, 1925.

[139] _Anatole France Himself_ by Jean-Jacques Brousson, Philadelphia, 1925.

[140] London, Bodley Head, Crown Edition, 1924, pp. v and ix. By permission of Dodd, Mead & Co.

[141] _Anatole France: the Man and His Work_ by James Lewis May, London, 1924, p. 120. By permission of Dodd, Mead & Co.

[142] _Ibid._, p. 108. By permission of Dodd, Mead & Co.

[143] _The Opinions of Anatole France_, recorded by Paul Gsell; in American edition, _The Conversations_, etc., New York, 1924.

[144] _Anatole France Himself: a Boswellian Record_, by Jean-Jacques Brousson, pp. 95, 347, Philadelphia, 1925. By permission of J. B. Lippincott Co.

[145] _Egoists_ by James Huneker, New York, 1909, p. 143. By permission of Charles Scribner’s Sons.

[146] _Those Europeans_ by Sisley Huddlestone, New York, 1924. By permission of G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

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