He runs a risk of being wearisome, he says. But that is merely a grace-note of French politeness, to be taken as it is meant, and answered after its kind. Indeed, he knows better. It was he who said of Renan that his most charming book was his little volume of youthful reminiscence, because he had put most of himself into it. And of M. Anatole France it is equally true that although he has an abundance of ideas, and loves not only his own past but the past of the world,—especially of all mystics, heretics, skeptics, enthusiasts, and saints,—yet he never comes quite so close to his reader as when his talk grows most intimate. It is what we who read are always after, the man behind the pen. If he will really tell us about himself, about his inner, true self, which we blindly feel must be somehow very like another self, more interesting still, with which we seldom succeed in coming face to face, although, according to the accepted theory of things, it is, or ought to be, our nearest neighbor,—if he will really tell us something, little matter what, that is actually true about himself, we will sit up till morning to listen to him. It seems an easy way to be interesting, does it not? And so indeed it is, for the right man; for the really fine things are always easy,—if one can do them at all.
There intrudes the doubt; for if success in personal reminiscence is easy, failure is ten times easier. Of course a man must have taste, an innate or well-bred sense of the fitness of things; and so a brook must have banks, to save it from degeneration and loss. But what if the stream itself be muddy, if it have no movement, no sparkle, no variety, if it do not by turns ripple over sunny shallows, loiter in comfortable eddies, and deepen and darken in dream-inviting pools? Or what if the banks be straight-cut and formal, till what should have been a brook is little better than a ditch? What if taste has become propriety, and propriety has hardened into primness, and the writing or the talk is without the breath of life? Yes, success is easy, and it is also impossible. As the art of man never made a mountain brook, so instruction never by itself made a writer. The rain must fall from heaven, and readability (and hearability likewise, since writing and talking are but two forms of the one thing) must come from the same source, or, as Emerson said, by nature.
If a man is to disclose himself, he must first have known something about himself, a pitch of intelligence by no means to be taken for granted; he must be one of the relatively few who are affectionately cognizant of their own feelings, who delight in their own view of things, who have felt, loved, suffered, and enjoyed, to whom life and the world have been inwardly real and interesting, for whom their own past especially is like a fair landscape, here in full sunshine, there flecked with shadows, but all a picture of loveliness and a thing to dream over.
In reminiscence, as in painting, the subject must be somewhat removed, loss of detail yielding a gain in beauty, since, in the one case, as in the other, what we seek is not an inventory, but a picture. This, or something like this, is what Renan had in mind when in beginning his “Souvenirs” he remarked that what a man says of himself is always poetry. For his own part, he declares, he has no thought of furnishing matter for post-mortem biographical sketches. He is going to tell the truth (mostly), but not the kind of truth of which biography is made. Biography and personal reminiscence are two things, and can never be written in the same tone. Many things, he tells us, have been put into his book on purpose to provoke a smile. If custom had permitted, he would more than once have written on the margin of the page: cum grano salis.
One thinks of Charles Lamb, though in general the two men had wonderfully little in common. How dearly he loved to talk of himself, hiding the while behind some modestly transparent veil of mystification! And how dearly we love to play the innocent game with him, seeing perfectly what is going on, but, as children do, making pretense of being deceived. Better than almost any one else he had the winsome gift of half-serious, tenderly humorous self-disclosure. As Renan said, it is all poetry, and always with something to smile at.
All this because of one of M. Anatole France’s many stray bits of gossipy reminiscence concerning the old quays of Paris and his boyish adventures among them! Such trifles are characteristic; they connote other qualities, and of themselves show us one side of the man and the writer. He loves his own life, especially his real life, the happy years that lie behind him. The power to see them is to him a matter of wonderment, a kind of miracle, a true fairy’s gift. If he could see the future with the same distinctness, the fact would be hardly more astonishing, and probably it would be much less beneficent. So he tells himself in one of those rare and precious moods when the soul seems preternaturally awake, and the commonest every-day objects wear a look of newness and mystery till we are taken with a kind of inward shivering as if we had been seeing ghosts.
For the more connected story of his youthful memories one must turn, of course, to the two volumes expressly devoted to them, “Le Livre de Mon Ami” and “Pierre Nozière.” That he should have written two such books is significant of the hold that his childhood still has upon him. But the two are none too many. How delicious they are!—full of tenderness and humor, every sentence true to the pitch, and the writing perfect. And how many pictures they leave with us! The woman in white and her lover with the black whiskers. The ragged street urchin, Alphonse, whom the well-fed, well-dressed house boy envied and pitied by turns, till one day he (the good boy) pilfered a bunch of grapes from the sideboard, lowered them out of the window by a string, and called upon little Alphonse to take them; which the suspicious Alphonse proceeded to do with a sudden twitch at the cord (such rudeness!), after which, turning up his face to the window, he thrust out his tongue, put his thumb to his nose, and ran off with the dainty. “My little friends had not accustomed me to such fashions,” the good boy confides to us. And then, to heighten his sense of disappointment (how commonly grown-up human benevolence is similarly disrewarded!), he bethought himself that he must tell his mother of his pious theft. She would chide him, he feared. And like a good mother she did, but with laughter in her eyes.
“‘We ought to give away our own good things, not those of another,’ she said; ‘and we must know how to give.’
“‘That is the secret of happiness,’ added my father, ‘and few know it.’
“He knew it, my father.”