He has made himself specially familiar with the age of ferment when Christianity was struggling with paganism in the ancient mind, with the Christian legends, which he retails with naïveté and well-concealed irony, and with Italian and even more particularly French history, from the days of Cæsar to the eighteenth century, the beginning of which lives in his Reine Pédauque.
His art occupies itself very frequently with religious feelings and situations. And here the contrast with Renan is strongest. For whereas Renan's mind was always religiously disposed and his language often unctuous, France, in treating of religious subjects, in spite of apparent reverence, is as callous in his inmost soul as Voltaire.
To his pictures of the past have been added in the last stage of his development pictures drawn from the France of to-day, and portraits of personages who have as lately formed the subjects of conversation as Verlaine and Esterhazy.
It is not modern life, however, which he favours as author or man. One day, when a visitor to whom he was showing his books expressed surprise that there were so few, and apparently no modern works among them, France said: "I have no new books. I do not keep those which are sent me; I send them on to a friend in the country." (The "friend in the country" was very probably a French euphemism for one of those booksellers on the Seine quays whom France knows so well.) "But do you not care to make acquaintance with them?" "My contemporaries No! What they can tell me I know quite as well myself. I learn more from Petronius than from Mendès." It was, therefore, doubtless half unwillingly that France for several years undertook to discourse critically, in the feuilleton of the Temps, on the productions of his contemporaries. The four volumes in which he has collected his articles are, nevertheless, extremely interesting. In them, from beginning to end, he maintains that such a thing as pure, impersonal criticism is impossible, that the critic can never do anything but represent himself—that, consequently, when he speaks of Horace or Shakespeare it simply means that he is speaking, in connection with Horace or Shakespeare, of himself.
France, then, spoke always of himself. "I hope that when I speak of myself every one will think of himself." As critic he communicated his personal impressions, and often related anecdotes, chiefly of occurrences during his own childhood and early youth, which elucidated and explained these impressions. A critic in the strict sense of the word he was not, and when his books began to sell better he gave up criticism. His utterances in the four volumes referred to are most characteristic of his personality, revealing, as they do, its spirit, its limitations, and its prejudices—prejudices which he has gradually outgrown.
The friend to whom France replied, "I have no modern books in my house," asked, smiling: "Not even your own?" "No," answered France; "what a man has built himself—even supposing it to be a palace—he knows so well that he cannot endure the sight of it. I could not bear to have my own books in my hands. Why should I look at them?"
"To avoid repetition."
"I certainly do perpetually repeat myself."
This is unfortunately true—it is one of the besetting sins of the author. Too often does the same thought recur in his pages, expressed almost in the same words. At times he repeats in one book, page for page, what he has written in another.
We can see what a faithful portrait of himself France has given us in the person of the sculptor in Le Lys Rouge by comparing the above answer with the following passage.