Of all books, as we know already, M. Anatole France believes in personal memoirs. In his opinion writers are seldom so likely to be well inspired as when they speak of themselves. La Fontaine’s pigeon had good reason to say:—
“Mon voyage dépeint
Vous sera d’un plaisir extrême.
Je dirai: ‘J’étais là; telle chose m’avint:’
Vous y croirez être vous-même.”
Even a cold writer like Marmontel gets a hold upon us “as soon as he begins to tell about a little Limousin who read the Georgics in a garden where the bees were murmuring,”—because he was the boy, and the bees were those whose honey he ate, the same which he saw his aunt warming in the hollow of her hand, and refreshing with a drop of wine, when the cold had benumbed them. As for St. Augustine’s “Confessions,” so called, our essayist has no very exalted opinion of them. The great doctor, he thinks, hardly confesses enough. Worse yet, he hates his sins; and, in the way of literature, “nothing spoils a confession like repentance.”
But Rousseau, “poor great Jean-Jacques,” “whose soul held so many miseries and grandeurs,”—he surely made no half-hearted confession. “He acknowledged his own faults and those of other people with marvelous facility. It cost him nothing to tell the truth. However vile and ignoble it might be, he knew that he could render it touching and beautiful. He had secrets for that, the secrets of genius, which, like fire, purifies everything.”
But we must be done with quotation, though the matter that offers itself is fairly without end. Especially one would be glad to cite some of the essayist’s reminiscences of the men he has known: some of them famous, like Flaubert, “a pessimist full of enthusiasm,” who “had the good part of the things of this world, in that he could admire;” Jules Sandeau, whom the critic, when a child, used to meet on the quays of Paris, which are “the adopted country of all men of thought and taste;” and dear old Barbey d’Aurévilly, so queerly dressed, so profane a believer, “so frightfully Satanic and so adorably childish;” and others,—and these among the best,—two or three priests, in particular,—never heard of except in our author’s pages.
One would like, also, to speak of his favorite heterodox theory touching the fallible nature of posterity as a judge of works of art; of the fun that he pokes so effectively at the new school of symbolists and decadents (small wonder they do not love him); of his ideas upon language, upon history, upon the grossness of Zola,—with which he as an artist has no patience,—upon the exalted rank of the critical essay, upon the educational value of the humanities. These and many other things have their place in the four volumes, and every one is touched with grace and something of originality. Everywhere the personal note makes itself heard. It is a voice, not the scratching of a pen, that we listen to, the voice of a man who never forgets that he was once a child. He has lived in Eden. We all begin, he tells himself, where Adam began. “In those blessed hours,” he says, “I have seen thistles springing up amid heaps of stones in little sunny streets where birds were singing; and I tell you the truth, it was Paradise.”
The two or three years during which he was contributing weekly articles to “Le Temps” were not quite of this heavenly quality, we may safely presume; in the inevitable course of things the gates of Eden must for some time have been already closed against him; but if one is to judge by his books of the period, meaning to include among them “La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque,” “Les Opinions de M. Jérôme Coignard,” and “Le Jardin d’Épicure,”—three of the best and most characteristic, though the two first named are not for readers afflicted with what a French critic calls pudeur livresque,—they were still years of quietness and a reasonably full content. He was writing and studying more than formerly, to be sure, and of course, by his own showing, was learning so much the less; but, taking everything into account, he and the world, for all its badness, were pulling pretty well together.