“As a guide to modern French fiction and its authors, this book is useful, especially in its bibliographies.”—Daily Mail.
“... Miss Winifred Stephens puts her hand to a most welcome and timely undertaking in this book, which will supply English readers with an intelligent introduction to the study of leading French novelists. What she says about the writers she selects is excellent.”—Daily Graphic.
“Miss Stephens' primary object was to indicate what contemporary French novels are likely to interest English readers, and on the whole she has succeeded: her book will serve a very useful purpose.”
Manchester Guardian.
JOHN LANE: The Bodley Head, London and New York.
AN APPRECIATION OF
ANATOLE FRANCE
By WILLIAM J. LOCKE
The personal note in Anatole France’s novels is never more surely felt than when he himself, in some disguise, is either the protagonist or the raisonneur of the drama. It is the personality of Monsieur Bergeret that sheds its sunset kindness over the sordid phases of French political and social life presented in the famous series. It is the charm of Sylvestre Bonnard that makes an idyll of the story of his crime. It is Doctor Trublet in Histoire Comique who gives humanity to the fantastic adventure. It is Maître Jérôme Coignard whom we love unreservedly in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque. No writer is more personal. No writer views human affairs from a more impersonal standpoint. He hovers over the world like a disembodied spirit, wise with the learning of all times and with the knowledge of all hearts that have beaten, yet not so serene and unfleshly as not to have preserved a certain tricksiness, a capacity for puckish laughter which echoes through his pages and haunts the ear when the covers of the book are closed. At the same time he appears unmistakably before you, in human guise, speaking to you face to face in human tones. He will present tragic happenings consequent on the little follies, meannesses and passions of mankind with an emotionlessness which would be called delicate cruelty were the view point that of one of the sons of earth, but ceases to be so when the presenting hands are calm and immortal; and yet shining through all is the man himself, loving and merciful, tender and warm.... In most men similarly endowed there has been a conflict between the twin souls which has generally ended in the strangling of the artist; but in the case of Anatole France they have worked together in bewildering harmony. The philosopher has been mild, the artist unresentful. In amity therefore they have proclaimed their faith and their unfaith, their aspirations and their negations, their earnestness and their mockery. And since they must proclaim them in one single voice, the natural consequence, the resultant as it were of the two forces, has been a style in which beauty and irony are so subtly interfused as to make it perhaps the most alluring mode of expression in contemporary fiction.