Anatole France has a fluent and correct French diction, but whilst admiring him, I cannot forget that there have been other great thinkers, writers, and philosophers, not only in France but also in Europe. And this is what his worshippers won’t admit. St. Simon will always provide enjoyment for the people who wade through his pages; Renan’s works will always remain a model of fine language, and of noble thoughts nobly expressed; Thiers’s history of the Consulate and the Empire will always be consulted by those who care for the past and all it has seen and witnessed. I doubt very much whether the life of Jeanne d’Arc will ever become a classic work.
Apart from this liking for the congenial atmosphere of praise, Anatole France is a charming man, full of humour, amusing in the extreme, his conversation sparkling with witty anecdotes and bons mots, which he utters now and then when one least expects them. He has a wonderful memory, and when all is said and done possesses a great deal of kindness in his judgments, with a considerable indulgence towards his neighbours. He has none of the sharpness of language of Mirbeau, and is more a gentleman. His manner with women is a model of its kind; he treats them with a chivalry which savours of the days of old, when men still died for the ladies of their heart. M. Anatole France, taken on the whole, is certainly a person worth knowing, and is one of the most charming men in Paris at the present day.
I don’t think that I met Flaubert more than a couple of times, but he left on my mind an impression that probably nothing will ever efface. There was real genius in his face, and, in spite of a certain tendency to grumble at everything and at everybody, he could be a charming companion. He was the inventor of the Naturalistic school, and unfortunately others tried to copy him, with the appalling result which we who live in France have seen. But nothing could be more amusing than to witness his rage when shown the distasteful manuscript of some talentless young man, and being told that it was supposed to be an imitation of his style. He used to burst into real fury, and declare that if this was going to be the result of his arduous work, he would rather throw in the fire all that he had ever written. Flaubert was not devoid of ideals, and though he believed that novels ought to describe life, he did not think that they must depict every phase of the material side of it. He was a great genius, and what was allowed to him would not be tolerated in others.
Pierre Loti is another genius in his way. In his charming, lovely books each line breathes with a deep, real talent. Some of his descriptions show us certain spots and places with such vividness that it is almost possible to think one has seen them too. There are passages in “Mon Frère Yves,” in “Désanchantées,” in “Le Pélerin d’Angkok,” and especially in that delightful and profound work, “Le Livre de la Pitié et de la Mort,” the like of which have perhaps never been written before in the French language. But the man himself is anything but sympathetic. He thinks far too much of his own genius, and his affectation jars on the nerves. I have never been able to understand why the people who write clever books should consider themselves as made of superior clay to other mortals, and I feel inclined to laugh always whenever I see an author affect habits, language, and general demeanour different from those of common humanity simply on account of the tales which he has composed, thanks to the intelligence and cleverness that Providence has given to him, and which it might just as well have given to someone else.
A man who did not think himself something extraordinary, and who, perhaps, had more genius in his little finger than others in their whole body, was Guy de Maupassant, that cruel observer of the human heart who understood so well the feelings of his generation, and who was to die so miserably, first losing that intellect which had made him such a strong man and such a remarkable writer. There was a time when I often saw him, and his death grieved me very much more than I could even have supposed.
Emile Augier and Jules Claretie belonged still to a generation where self-praise was absent. The last-mentioned writer was perhaps one of the greatest workers of his time. I often wondered at the activity which allowed him to fulfil his duties as director of the Comédie Française, to write the charming feuilletons which the Temps publish every week, and to do all this apart from innumerable other things, among which the composition of novels holds a place.
There have been many who grumbled in public at the manner in which Claretie administered the Comédie Française, perhaps they would have grumbled just as much if someone else had been in his place. The post was not an easy one, for it required an amount of tact such as is not to be found everywhere. But what cannot be denied is that he filled it like the gentleman he was, and that he insisted on his staff behaving like gentlemen and ladies so long as they remained under his control. He gave to his theatre an air of dignity and of correctness which put it high above any other in Paris.
Another man who could be classed in the same category as Jules Claretie was the Vicomte de Vogué, also a member of the Academy, and a writer imbued with the grand traditions of the seventeenth century when La Rochefoucauld wrote his maxims and La Bruyère his philosophical meditations on the foibles of mankind. M. de Vogué can be classed among the best authors of the latter part of the nineteenth century, and his books will always be read with pleasure when those of other authors will be entirely forgotten.
There are just a few writers of the same style left among the ranks of the French Academy, such as the Marquis de Ségur, whom I have already mentioned, but unfortunately that learned assembly has deteriorated, and has welcomed to its bosom literary men of a very inferior rank.
I will not put among them M. Paul Bourget, who, though his books have sadly gone out of fashion, is an active, charming writer full of the spirit of observation. I find myself thinking of him, however, as an author who wanted to imitate Balzac, and who imagined that he had written a sequel to the “Comédie Humaine,” whilst in reality he had only described the comedy of a certain small circle of Parisian smart society, which has already changed so much that one cannot recognise a single known person among those he tried to describe so faithfully.