THE STORIES OF ANATOLE FRANCE.*
AMONG the contemporary French critics Anatole France holds a high place. He is no dictator, no system-monger, but a free spirit. bound to no formulas, a candid admirer of what- ever bears the stamp of beauty. A Renanist, to put it briefly, a devotee of the "nuance." he seeks the personality of the man beneath the work, and, giving free play to his own indi- viduality when occasion offers, his criticisms become true " causeries." Amiably subjective, however tolerant of other men's views of life, and convinced at least that no one man or school has a monopoly of truth, it is no wonder that he desires, and is able to accomplish, the passage from criticism to creation which is the problem of modern writers. It would be hard, indeed, to say whether he has revealed himself more in his criticism than in these volumes of stories, of which L'Atui de Nacre is the sixth ; for many passages of his criticisms might be transferred to his stories, and chapters of his stories to the volumes of criticism. To say this is not to disparage nor imply an imperfect faculty of creation, for he has given life to his favourite type of character; and fairly set forth the multiplicity of his own personality. " In all arts," he says, " the artist only paints his own soul ; his work, what. ever be its costume, in spirit is of his own time." And accordingly, it is the personality of Anatole France which attracts and interests us in his works.
" We need stories for children great and small, fairy-tales in prose and verse, narratives which inspire laughter or tears, and transport us to the world of enchantment." This world of fact and its grim machinery is best forgotten ; the recovery of the child's mind is, as it were, the quest for the Golden Fleece or the Fountain of Youth ; reverie is the fairest gift of indulgent Nature. Thus Anatole France is a lover of folk- lore, and writes, as Andrew Lang might write, the story of " Abeille " and Georges, child and ward of the Duchess of Clarides, who furtively visit the lake of the Undines, Babes in-the-Wood-wise, and dwell henceforth separately in the sub- terranean halls of Loc, King of the Gnomes, and in the realm of the Undines, till reunited and restored as grown lovers to the land beneath the sun. It is no far cry from Folk-Lore to Hagiology, and the Acta c anctorunt may L'Erui de Nacre. Par Ana•ole France. Paris : Caiman Lbry.
also be regarded as a treasury of fairy-stories. In their re- production. naiveté is essential, and Anatole France's tendency to irony has to be overcome. He tells the story of " Bal- thasar," one of the three wise Kings from the East, scorned lover and in tern scornful of a Ralkis. Queen of Sheba ; of the simple-minded " Jongleur de Notre Dame," who, in his monastic retreat, finds a way to honour our Lady and win her approbation, by the secret exercise of his whilom profession before her altar ; and of Saint Bertauld, son of Theodule, King of Scotland, who turns hermit in the Ardennes and con- verts the sister-saints. Oliverie and Libretto. But Oliverie is a type of doubt, and her lack of faith implies a loss of miracle- power and a longer sojourn in the vale of tears than her single-hearted sister. In " The Procurator of Judaea," Pontius Pilatns, gout-ridden, in search of health at the baths of Bain, justifies to his friend Lamia his administration in Judea, and exposes the machinations of his enemy Vitellius. Lamia is at last incidentally led to inquire if Pilate remembers a certain Jesus of Nazareth. " Jesus ? " murmured he, " Jesus of Naza- reth ? I don't remember." Mary Magdalen, leader of a band of exiles to Marseilles, wins the protection of Laeta Acilia ; but the erudition of Anatole France brings about a note, by way of epilogue, to justify his amalgamation of Mary Magdalen and her of Bethany. Then again, the twin rose- trees that interlace on the tombs of Scolastica and Injuriosus, which convince pilgrims of their chaste wedded life, like that of our Edward the Confessor, teach, on the contrary, the Horatian lesson of " Gather ye roses while ye may" to the aged pagan, Silvanns.
Nor is Anatole France averse to seeking the supernatural in present times. His " Daughter of Lilith," in the manner of Gautier, but without the latter's luxuriant splendour of detail, is a modern Circe, exempt from death, and also from human pl.-asure. " M. Pigonnean," the grave Egyptologist, another Gautier figure, who fears imagination as a savant should, breaks out into flowery improvisation in full lecture, hypnotised by Miss Anna Morgan, who wishes details for an Egyptian costume she is to wear at a masked ball. Still more, he is con- strained to write a tale under the " suggestion " of an Oriental cat sent by aloud, Miss Morgan's henchman. "Suggestion," also, may result from a chance-read passage of a book; in "L'CEuf Rouge." the young mathematician, son of an eccentric family, is driven to madness by the casual reading of a few lines about the purple egg which presaged the imperial purple of Alex- ander Severna. Such an egg bad been found by his own father on his birthday, and the mathematician is henceforth an emperor in fancy. In " Jocaste," the weak wife of an eccentric Englishman, who had witnessed the poisoning of her husband by his avaricious valet, and had not dared to tell, is driven to suicide on the eve of new happiness by the chance recital of a child, translating aloud for a school task, the hanging of Jocasta, wife of King CEdipus. Modern mysticism is symb dised in " Leslie Ward," evidently sug- gested by the case of Laurence Oliphant. In the " Manuscript of a Village Doctor," the sight of a youthful portrait of Ampere recalls to the doctor the memory of the strange child of peasant parents that had died under his eyes; had he beheld in little gloi a reincarnation of the spirit of Ampere ? Again, Anatole France has his French Revolution at his fingers'-ends, and the series of dramatic anecdotes at the end of L'.Ltai de Nacre, and scattered elsewhere, are the result.
The legends in the volumes of Balthasar and L'Etui de Nacre are as missal miniatures to the gorgeous tapestry and stained glass of Flaubert's Herodias and St. I alien l' H Opitalier ? and Theis, where the eclectic curiosity of Anatole France reaches its culmination, recalls the epical phantasmagoria of Flaubert's LOgende de St. Antoine. But in Thais the kaleido- scope of creeds and passions assumes a dramatic form, as in Kingsley's Hypatia. Yet the irony and epigrammatic clearness of his exposition of the etats d'ate of the Alexandrians, more especially in the opening pages, plays him an ill turn, for it is only by sympathy that a novelist can " enter into the skin "of his pupp-ts, and we are not allowed to lose sight of the fact that Anatole France is standing sceptically apart from nis subject. Wholly different is Kingsley's method, and Thais lacks the so idity of Hypatia. Anatole France's young saint of the Theb,id, Paphnuce, inspired like Philanamon with desire to convert a lovely siren, actress, and courtesan, darling of Alexandr a, -ayes Thai- indeed, wbo is weary of her wonted happiness, dimly remembers her baptism in childhood by the slave-martyr, Abmes, whose grotesque theology is impregnated with Oriental voluptuousness, and longs for the contrasting life of the poor and sanctified. Thais dies in the odour of sanctity, thus enjoying the rare doable felicity of having experienced two contrary happinesses, as the calm. sad Nicias, ex-lover of Thais, tells Paphn ace. But the victorious prose- lytiser almost regrets his victory, and falls victim to the love- god, to the demons of Pride, Concupiscence, and Doubt; though he is the -while honoured as an incomparable saint and a God-favoured Stylites by his unwitting brethren, save by the simple seer Paul, and the hermit Anthony, who read his despairing reprobation. Zozimus, the repentant profligate, is of the number of the elect ; but Paphnuce, who has observed all the commandments, is in outer darkness.
From the orgy of dialectic in the banquet scene of Thais, and the vivid lyrical delineation of the parti-coloured mosaic of Alexandrian civilisation, with its Romans, stoics, epi- cureans, gnostics, sceptics, synthetic Platonists, and Oriental Christians, Anatole France seems to revert with gladness to the quiet charms of domestic life. Bonte, kindliness, is the quality he most appreciates ; kindliness, tolerance, united with the power of unselfish reverie. His beloved type is that of the savant whose life is uneventful, gilded by the love of a pure, tender. wife, and guileless child. Happy is the man, in Anatole France's eyes, who can dwell, as in Le Livre de neon Ami, on the recollections of his own childhood, and be a sympathetic spectator of the flowering of his children's minds. Happy even if, as in Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard, love has been thwarted, or overcome by the passion of erudition, so long as his old age is illumined by the smile of an adopted daughter. His Bogus, in the London of Elizabeth, absorbed in the compilation of a huge folio on Human Error, has taken care not to fall into Nature's trap and commit the error of matri- mony ; but the orphan girl he admits to his cheerless house- hold causes him to discern the error of erudition, and his folio is gradually transformed into a herbarium of the flowers they gather together. Anatole France's favourite bookworm: knowing fully what joy it is to bouquiner on the Quays, even
as the late Academician, M. Xavier Marmier, is yet constrained at length to accept the moral of " Candide," and cultivate hii garden. Sylvestre Bonnard, Membre de l'Institut, bachelor and eccentric philologist and student of medievalism, hesitates not to sell his library to furnish a dowry for his adopted daughter, and turns with delight to the study of the relations of plants and insects.
Some one or other has said that the faculty of recalling the impressions of childhood is one of the chief marks of genius ; but however much the child may be the father of the man, one cannot quite rid oneself of the notion that there is more of " Dichtung " than of " Wahrheit " in all " Souvenirs de Jeunesse," whether of Lamartine, or Pierre Loti, or Anatole France, much, indeed, of idealism, voluntary or involuntary, in them. But Anatole France will have it that "there is nothing that equals the first dreams of man ; " and we are delighted to take him at his word and read his reveries. More- over, the heroes of Anatole France, when their store of gentle childhood's memories is exhausted, have only to transfer their reveries to the observation of the childhood of others. Sylvestre Bonnard, and the writer of Le Livre de snort Ami, have their notions of education ; content, for the most part, with measures of a large liberty, with watching the development of Nature's new creatures, desiring only that the will-power rather than the intellect shall be educated, that the imagination shall be nourished by fairy-stories rather than by scientific text. books and aids to useful knowledge. And the calm humanist, who, like Anatole France, is inclined from youth to be a spectator of life without any system, though he has acquired his tolerance" with the loss of some moral and political convictions," has not pur- chased his kindly scepticism at too great a price. His admiring devotion is for the tenderness of honest women and innocent girls, with their innate love of good and fair things; but he is tolerant also to all the " rates " and " declasses " of his " Le Chat Maigre." the undisciplined Creoles, the contempo- rary bohemians of art and literature, who vapour and found deliquescent reviews, loud rhetoricians and small performere He is only intolerant of the malicious, whose ugliness is the' outward sign of their distorted, stunted minds ; and, if his scepticism allows him to be sure of anything, he is sure tbat the pleasures of the learned recluse are to be preferred to the empty restlessness of society folk. Melancholy is sweet,
if gentleness and pity accompany it ; and however deep may be his sense of the transitoriness and nothingness of all things, and his feeling that " human beings are but changeful images in the universal illusion," he who has sought refuge in the Contemplative Life has, in Anatole France's opinion, chosen the better part. Only, with his usual scepticism, he would fully allow others to differ from him.
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