He had never thought of doing such things. His old publisher, Calmann Lévy, “rather friend than publisher,” who had welcomed him in his obscurity, and smiled at his first humble successes, had for years been chiding his indolence and dunning him for another book. But he was in love with his idle ways and distrustful of his capacity. He was then living those “happy years without writing,” of which we have seen him cherishing so fond a remembrance. But now came the manager of “Le Temps,” a man accustomed to have his way, and behold, the dreamer’s pen is again covering paper. “I believe you have a talisman,” the new critic says to the editor, in dedicating to him the first of the four resulting volumes. “You do whatever you will. You have made of me a periodical and regular writer. You have triumphed over my indolence. You have utilized my reveries and coined my wits into gold. I hold you for an incomparable economist.”
Such are the services of journalism to literature! A man never writes better, or more easily, than when regular work—not too pressing—keeps his hand in play. So Sir Walter Scott, hag-ridden by debt, if he finished a novel in the morning began another in the afternoon, because, as he explained, it was less difficult to keep the machine running than to start it again after a rest.
In this same dedicatory epistle to M. Hébrard are to be found some of the brightest and most characteristic things that M. Anatole France has ever written about his own nature and habits, as well as about his ideas of critics and criticism. For talking about himself, as we have before said, and as the reader must have discovered even from our few quotations, he has the prettiest kind of talent. “You are very easy to live with,” he tells M. Hébrard. “You never find fault with me. But I do not flatter myself. You saw at once that nothing great was to be expected, and that it was best not to torment me. For that reason you left me to say what I pleased. One day you remarked of me to a common friend,—
“‘He is a mocking Benedictine.’
“We understand ourselves very imperfectly, but I think your definition is a good one. I seem to myself to be a philosophical monk. At heart I belong to an abbaye de Thélème, where the rule is comfortable and obedience easy, where one has no great degree of faith, perhaps, but is sure to be very pious.”
There is nobody like a skeptic, he continues (he is echoing Montaigne), for always observing the moralities and being a good citizen. “A skeptic never rebels against existing laws, because he has no expectation that any power will be able to make good ones. He knows that much must be pardoned to the Republic;” that rulers at the best count for little; that, as Montaigne said, most things in this world do themselves, the Fates finding the way. Still he advises his manager never to confide his political columns to any Thelemite. The gentle spirit of melancholy that he would spread over everything would be a discouragement to honest readers. Ministers are not to be sustained by philosophy. “As for myself,” he adds, “I maintain a suitable modesty and restrict myself to criticism.”
And then, in two sentences, one of which has attained almost to the rank of a familiar quotation, he defines criticism and the critic.
“As I understand it, and as you allow me to practice it, criticism, like philosophy and history, is a sort of romance, and all romance, rightly taken, is an autobiography. The good critic is he who narrates the adventures of his own mind in its intercourse with masterpieces.”
To be quite frank, he declares, the critic should begin his discourse by saying: “Gentlemen, I am going to speak about myself apropos of Shakespeare, apropos of Racine, or of Pascal, or of Goethe. It is a fine occasion.”
And here, of course, the battle is joined between the two schools of critics: the subjective, or impressionistic, so called, on one side, and the objective, or scientific, so called, on the other.