The books are full of such pictures, seen first by the child, and now seen again, losing nothing of their color, through the eyes of the man of forty; full, too, of a boy’s dreams and ambitions. Now he will be a famous saint (like every boy, he is bound to be famous somehow), and instantly he sets about it with fastings, an improvised hair shirt, and even an attempt, ingloriously brought to nought by the strong arms of the housemaid, to play the rôle of Simeon Stylites in the kitchen. What with this muscular, unsympathetic maid,—who also tore his hair shirt from him,—and his father, equally unsympathetic, who pronounced him “stupid,” the boy had a bad day of it, and by night-fall, as he says, “recognized that it is very difficult to be a saint while living with one’s family. I understood why St. Anthony and St. Jerome went into the desert to dwell among lions and satyrs; and I resolved to retire the next day to a hermitage.” And so he did, choosing a labyrinth in the neighboring Jardin des Plantes.
A few years later, wiser now and more worldly-minded, he is determined to set up catalogues like his old friend Father Le Beau; and soon (joy on the top of joy, and audacity almost past confession) he determines that he will some day print them, and read the proofs! Beyond that he can conceive of no higher felicity (though he has since learned, through the confidences of a blasé literary acquaintance, that “one wearies of everything in this world, even of correcting proofs!”).
Needless to say, he did not become a cataloguer, more than he had become a saint; but good Father Le Beau, for all that, determined his boyish admirer’s vocation, inspiring him with “a love for the things of the mind and with a weakness for writing;” inspiring him, also, with a passion for the past and with “ingenious curiosities,” and, by the example of intellectual labor regularly performed without fatigue and without worry, filling him from childhood with a desire to work and instruct himself. “It is thanks to him,” he concludes, “that I have become in my own way a great reader, a zealous annotator of ancient texts, and a scribbler of memoirs that will never see the light.”
Good Father Le Beau! How plainly we can see him at his pleasant task, and the small boy beside him taking his lesson! And if any be ready to smile at the childish story, as if it were nothing but a childish story,—well, there is difference in readers. To some, let us hope, the simple adventures of a boy’s mind, dreaming on things to come, will seem quite as entertaining, and even quite as instructive and morally profitable, as some more highly seasoned adventures of a man who covets his neighbor’s wife, or a woman who covets her neighbor’s husband.
Of books recounting the pleasures and miseries of illicit passion modern literature surely suffers no lack; and truth to tell, M. Anatole France himself (the more’s the pity) has contributed to an already full stock two or three examples not easily to be outdone in piquancy of situation or freedom of speech. Concerning these no account is to be taken here. Enough to say that they are unspeakable,—in English,—though, not to do them injustice, it should be added that neither “Le Lys Rouge,” nor even “Histoire Comique,” for all its misleading, pleasant-sounding title, makes the path to the everlasting bonfire look in the remotest degree alluring. The old truth, old as man, that “to be carnally minded is death,” is nowhere more convincingly set forth than in the modern French novel, whether it be Balzac’s, Flaubert’s, Maupassant’s, Bourget’s, or Anatole France’s.
It is unfortunate, we must think, for our author’s reputation and vogue outside of his own country, that not only the two of his books just now named, but at least three others, though in a less degree, are unfitted for full translation into English, or even to be left in their original tongue upon the open shelves of public libraries or on the family table. But what then? They were not written virginibus puerisque, their author would say, and even their freest parts treat of nothing worse than every newspaper is obliged somehow to chronicle, however it may veil its language, and nothing worse, perhaps, than is readily allowed in the English classics, especially in the books of the Bible and the writings of Shakespeare. Wonderful is the effect of time and distance! We gaze upon nude statues of the old Greeks and Romans without a shiver, but the representation of an American President bare only to the waist—as one may see, in all kinds of weather, poor unhappy-looking George Washington sitting in front of the national capitol—affects us with a painful sense of discomfort, not to say of positive indecency.
M. Anatole France, as has been said, seems by birth and early predilection to have been devoted to a career of studious leisure. He would always be contented, one would have thought, to be a looker-on at the game of life, sitting by the wayside, book in hand, and watching the world go past; taking it all as a show; never so much as considering the possibility of entering for any of the prizes that more ambitious men run for, nor concerned very much as to who should win or who lose; hardly so much as an observer; a spectator rather, as he said himself; “in love,” as he said again, “with the eternal illusion that wraps us round,” but only as an illusion; cultivating his own garden,—like M. Bergeret, who delighted to cut the leaves of books, esteeming it wise to make for one’s self pleasures appropriate to one’s profession; at the most a collector of old books, and a teller of old tales; a lover of Virgil, a disciple of Epicurus, a friend of quietness, and a worshiper of the Graces.
Such we imagine M. Anatole France to have been when he wrote his earlier volumes, including the one which the majority of readers would probably name as the most beautiful of them all, “Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard.” The dear old savant tells his own story, talking now to his cat, now to his friendly despot of a housekeeper, now to good Madame de Gabry, now, best of all, to himself. The whole story is, as it were, overheard by the reader, and surely there never was, nor ever will be, a prettier revelation of an old man’s soul.
Like Renan, and like M. Anatole France, Sylvestre Bonnard, Member of the Institute, has a natural sense of humor, and if he does not put into his narrative things on purpose to make us smile, it is only because he is in no way thinking of us. He smiles often enough himself, his own oddities and blunders as an absent-minded scholar—since, like Cowper’s Mr. Bull, he “has too much genius to have a good memory”—providing him with abundant occasion; and we smile with him. We love him for his goodness, and we listen delighted to all his philosophy. If he is not a saint, he is something better,—or if not better, more interesting and lovable,—a man so humanly sweet, so simple-hearted, so pure-minded, so bright in his talk, so admirable in his kindness, so adorable a confesser of his own foibles, that there is no resisting him. Dear old celibate!—who had loved a pair of blue eyes in his youth, and had been true to their memory ever since! Verily, he had his reward. Never man awaited the sunset with a better grace.
The man who drew this character was surely at peace with the world and with himself. Life had so far been to him mostly a fair-weather stroll in a pleasant country. And the same may be said, with some grains of qualification, of the man who wrote the weekly articles that went to the making of the four volumes of “La Vie Littéraire.” These are not things to last, it may be, like “Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard,” which, if one may be so simple as to prophesy, can hardly fail to become a classic; but for the present they must afford to many readers, if not a keener, yet a more various, delight. They are books of extraordinary interest, in whatever light one may view them. As we turn them over, remarking here and there the pages that at different times have especially pleased us, we find ourselves saying again and again, Oh, that we had such books in English, and on English subjects! If there were in Great Britain or in the United States a writer who could, week by week, furnish one of our newspapers with pieces of literary criticism or bookish causerie of this enchanting quality; so light, so graceful, so original, so suggestive, so full of happy surprises, so bright with humor and philosophy, so perfect in form and temper, and so satisfying in substance! Yes, if there were! How quickly we would all subscribe for that newspaper! The articles might deal, as M. Anatole France’s often do, with books that we have never read and have no thought of reading; it would not greatly matter. If the subject in hand were nothing but a text-book or an encyclopædia, a letter from an inquisitive correspondent, or a play of marionettes, the talk about it would be literature. And real literature, served to us fresh every Sunday morning! The very thought is an exhilaration. We are not to be understood as implying that excellent literary criticism is not more or less often written in English, and on both sides of the water. The question is not of moderately sound, reasonably instructive, workmanlike articles, proper enough to be read and forgotten, but of essays full of charm, full of genius, full of poetry,—essays in which, to adapt a saying of Thoreau, we do not miss the hue of the mind, essays that of themselves are in the truest sense little masterpieces of the literary art.