The Furies wait beyond.”
Never man found this truer than Keats.
There is but one letter more,—dated a month later, and addressed to the same friend. This time the dying man knows that he is taking leave, though he still quotes a doctor’s soothing diagnosis. He is bringing his philosophy to bear, he says; if he recovers, he will do thus and so; but if not, all his faults will be forgiven. And then: “Write to George [his brother] as soon as you receive this, and tell him how I am, as far as you can guess; and also a note to my sister, who walks about my imagination like a ghost, she is so like Tom. I can scarcely bid you good-bye, even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow. God bless you!”
How wasteful is Nature! Once or twice in an age, one man out of millions, she brings forth a poet; and then, while his powers are still budding, she sends on them a sudden blight, and anon cuts him down. Wasteful, we say. But who can tell? Perhaps she also, like the rest of us, is doing what she can, and, like the rest of us, is disappointed when she fails.
ANATOLE FRANCE
ANATOLE FRANCE
M. Anatole France is a writer who is continually saying something. His thought is always breaking into bloom. He is not one of those who, on the ground of weightiness of matter, or other supposed excellence, have taken out a license to be dull. All his pages have light in them. His readers not only know in which direction they are going,—a great comfort, not always vouchsafed to such travelers,—but are made to enjoy the journey, having a thousand sights to look at by the way. It is an author’s business, he considers, to make his truth beautiful; and nothing is beautiful but what is easy. An artist who knows his trade will “not so much exact attention as surprise it.”
It sounds like a good creed; and the style of his writing answers to it. Its qualities are the classical French qualities,—neatness, precision, ease, moderation, lightness of touch, lucidity. In sum, it is such a style as comes of good breeding. He is clever without being smart, and pointed without emphasis. As for that dreadful something which goes by the name of rhetoric, you may search his twenty-odd volumes through without finding trace of it. His method is old-fashioned, his masters are the old masters. Brilliancy, surprise, felicities, originalities,—yes, indeed, he has all these and more, but he knows how to wear them. They are all natural to him. “Elegant, facile, rapid,” he says; “there you have the perfect politeness of a writer.” Obscurity, difficulty, is to his way of thinking but a kind of bad manners.
He was born to enjoy beautiful things, one would say; elected before the cradle to a life of scholastic quietness and leisure: a dilettante and a saunterer, loving old streets, old shops, old books, the old literatures, fond of out-of-the-way and useless learning, the very type and pattern of an aimless reader and dreamer. And so, to take his word for it, he appears to have begun. Those were his best days. Then he was most himself. So, in certain moods, at least, it seems to him now. Of that time he is thinking when he says, “I lived happy years without writing. I led a contemplative and solitary life, the memory of which is still infinitely sweet to me. Then, as I studied nothing, I learned much. In fact, it is in strolling that one makes beautiful intellectual and moral discoveries.”
The old book-stalls on the Paris quays,—one wonders how many scores of times he has an affectionate word to say for them in his various books. Even in one of the earlier essays of “La Vie Littéraire” he apologizes for what is already becoming a frequent reference. “Let me tell you,” he breaks out, “that I can never pass over these quays without experiencing a trouble full of joy and sadness, because I was born here, because I spent my childhood here, and because the familiar faces that I saw here formerly are now forever vanished. I say this in spite of myself, from a habit of saying simply what I think, about that of which I think. One is never quite sincere without being a little wearisome. But I have a hope that, if I speak of myself, those who listen to me will think only of themselves; so that I shall please them while pleasing myself. I was brought up on this quay in the midst of books, by humble and simple people, of whose memory I am the only guardian. When I am gone they will be as if they had never been. My soul is all full of their relics.”