[1] An East-Indian dancing girl.
ANATOLE FRANCE, FORMER MAN AND NEW
The biographies of some great men of letters are little different from their bibliographies. For many years this would seem to have been true in the case of Anatole France, for the man of public import—apart from his literary productions—came not into being until fifty-three years after his physical birth.
Every book-lover who goes to Paris must visit the banks of the Seine and revel among the riches of that vast exhibition of old books, art objects, rare prints, and fascinating what-not, which for generations have been the despair and the admiration of collectors. Over an old-book mart on the Quai Malaquis, Jacques Anatole Thibault—now everywhere known as Anatole France—was born April 16, 1844. From that day to this he has never left as a residence that Paris whose every paving-block he knows, as he himself says, and whose every stone he loves. Year by year he has increasingly stood as a type of Parisian literary life and thought.
His father was one of the prosperous booksellers of the Seine banks—meditative, thoughtful, and even a maker of verses. He brought with him from Anjou in western France all of the Vendéean’s passion for monarchism and clericalism. Just how this harmonizes with the assertion of one of our author’s biographers that the elder Thibault was of Jewish blood, I do not pretend to say, but the statement may pass on its face value. Certain it is that the father was concerned that Anatole should be educated under the auspices of clerical teachers, the priests of the old Collège Stanislas, and his son’s early mastery of the classics and attainments in literary style amply justified the choice. Indeed, the clerical schools of the period did more to establish French letters than has since proven to be the case under the public schools of present-day France.
Growing up in this bookish atmosphere, rich tokens of the past all about him, inheriting his father’s scholarly tastes, trained under the rigid system of classicists, and in the school that developed Paul Bourget and François Coppée, Anatole France needed only one more element to bring out in him the varied temperament his life and works exhibit—the inspiration of the refined and tender mother whose love for romantic fairy-tales charmed into being the first fancy-creations of her gifted boy.
In 1868 M. France produced his first book—a study of Alfred de Vigny. This made no great sensation, but his first volume of poems—many French literary men, like Daudet, Maupassant, and Bourget, have opened their literary careers with essays at verse—was published in 1873, Les Poèmes dorés.
About this time M. France became reader for the publisher Lemerre, and under his auspices brought out various of the thirty-some volumes which stand to his credit. In 1876 he became an attaché of the Senate library. Later, he was known as a regular contributor to Le Temps and other Parisian journals, much of this review material being now accessible in book-form.
That part of M. France’s work which covers the first twenty years of his writing, ending with 1896, has largely fixed his place in the average opinion, for two reasons: those years witnessed his largest and most popular production, including nearly all of his novels and stories; and, in consequence, the preponderance of published critical estimates cover only those two decades.
The “first” Anatole France, then, must be considered almost as a separate being, so far as we regard his spirit; his literary style, however, changed scarcely at all with time. Classical training was reflected in a passion for the Greek magic of words, Latin harmony of phrasing, and the hedonistic philosophy; there was not even the suggestion of his later direct appeal to reason and “the rights of man.” His personal tone—for much of his writing is personal and even autobiographical—was pessimistic, though untinged with bitterness; and here again there was little to forecast his vigorous appeal for a social better day. No thought of social uplift, no ray of hope, appeared in his treatment of Thaïs, a study of the Egypt of the Ptolemies; The Red Lily, a picture of present-day Florence; The Opinions of M. Jérome Coignard, the modernization of sentiments exploited in Rabelais, “Wilhelm Meister,” “Gil Blas,” and Montaigne; The Garden of Epicurus, wherein the shades of great thinkers, from Plato to Schopenhauer, hold converse, “while an Esquimaux refutes Bossuet, a Polynesian develops his theory of the soul, and Cicero and Cousin agree in their estimate of a future life.” In a word, the M. France of those days viewed life as a spectacle, with dispassionate yet pitying irony. Convinced, with the Preacher, that all is vanity, this dilettante proposed no remedies for its ills, and was even frankly skeptical that any such saving medicine existed. This is Anatole France as most readers know him—the Anatole France who “died” fifteen years ago, leaving only the stylist and the keen observer to identify him with the decidedly living man of to-day.