Critical Woodcuts/Anatole France
A FIRST-RATE book of its class is Brousson's account of Anatole France "in slippers"—acceptable as a basket of choice assorted nuts and fruits. Whether for consecutive reading—I profess myself a consecutive reader—or for random sticking in of thumbs, the repast is excellent. To the plum hunter one may exhibit, for instance, this comforting prescription for the overworked man of letters harassed by a heavy correspondence: Let letters, books, papers, pamphlets, telegrams accumulate in a spare bathtub till the tub is full. So advises the great French master of letters. Then sell them to the second-hand dealer at fifty francs the tub; or to the fireplace with them—without regret, without malice, opening none, with equal justice to all! Nearly four hundred pages of that quality, and better, constitute a precious contribution to what we, journalistically, call the "human" side of Anatole France's life.
I find only the title of M. Brousson's book in the translation slightly irritating. "Anatole France Himself!" We live in the age of Einstein. A quarter of a century ago we had an outburst of "true" biographies: "The True Benjamin Franklin," "The True George Washington," "The True Ananias," etc. But that arrogance of affirmation in the title is quaint to-day and outmoded. What does M. Brousson's translator mean by "Himself"? Am I a whit more myself in dressing gown and slippers than in khaki and leggins or in the most formal apparel that I can master for the most public of performances? More comfortable, more happy, in one than in the other, but not a whit more myself. Indirectly this title perhaps protests against James Lewis May's "Anatole France," published in the autumn of 1924. Mr. May, coming to the master with Anglo-Saxon reverence for the "greatest living man of letters," saw in him a gracious old gentleman, with a strain of Virgilian sadness in him, who approached his disciple with a flower. Mr. May placed the flower opposite a tender passage in his Virgil, called into his mind all the expressions in the works of Anatole France which reveal his gentle and sad lucidity of soul, and declared that, for him, poetry was the master's precious and immortal part.
Now, this M. Brousson formed his impressions, took his pictures, at altogether different points of view. Moreover, M. Brousson is a different sort of artist. His Anatole France is not in the least respect a Virgilian personality. He is not, in any careful sense of the phrase, a "gracious old gentleman." He is an elderly Gallic antiquarian and voluptuary, tart, malicious, salty, a studious flatterer, an egotist, a cynic, a libertine, with a senile vanity concerning his prowess with "God's creatures."
M. Brousson has a sharp eye for the traits which attract him. He has a sharp pencil. He has a clear coherent conception of his subject as a most interesting and distinguished literary animal. His scores of brilliant distinct little pictures of him all "hang together." They produce a unified effect, which is not
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entirely pleasant; there is a kind of willful insistence upon the hardness and selfishness and the cold-blooded sensuality of the sitter. But the work has "the note of authenticity." It is, so far as it goes, "Boswellian"; that is to say, it is objective, intelligently and picturesquely concrete, shameless, significant. But it is not, like Boswell's work on Johnson, comprehensive and exhaustive. Boswell, the sad dog, painted his Johnson and everyman's Johnson—the eccentric fellow who saved orange peel and the pious soul humbled before his God. M. Brousson hardly suggests the existence of Mr. May's Virgilian "poet," who indubitably was a part of Anatole France "himself." Therefore a more modest and honest title for this book would be "My Anatole France," or "Anatole France in Slippers," as in the original.
Within his limits, M. Brousson is delicious. He presents himself as a young man from the country, newly come yp to Paris with a bundle of diplomas from a provincial university, with a classical education, but with slight knowledge of contemporary letters—eager, erudite and unsophisticated, researching in the libraries for archeologists, to earn his keep, and shyly aspiring to literary distinction. Anatole France, fitfully working over his bags full of Joan of Arc manuscript, sends for him to assist in the reduction of that chaos, accumulated through twenty years. The church is talking of making a saint of the Virgin of Domrémy; and it behooves the great iconoclast to get to the public before the canonization. "Imagine," says M. Brousson, "the emotions of the young man from the country." To save money he walks six kilometers to the Villa Said for his first interview. He is in such awe of the master that he stops at all the cheap cafés on the way and heats up his courage with cups of coffee and thimblefuls of cognac. In vain!
Introduced into the reception room, stuffed with books, pictures, reliquaries, saints and cases of curios, he finds it already filled with callers, attending the Master's leisure. The Great Man sits at his desk, formidable in dressing gown, felt slippers and silk skull cap.
In his hand are a drawing and a reading glass. He makes a little collective bow to the newcomers, who arrange themselves around the room. . . . "You come at the right moment, gentlemen," Anatole France goes on, "you shall decide the question. We are in need of your judgment. Should a painter of religious subjects have faith? The other day I bought this lovely face from my friend Proute: it is a Virgin by Boucher. This Virgin, it is clear, is not a model of virtue. Perhaps the artist painted it from his own wife and baby."
The young man from the country, aghast at the discussion of matters so much beyond the depth of provincial scholarship, takes refuge behind the library ladder and at the first opportunity retreats, without presenting his letter of introduction or making himself known. One sees at a glance that the young man understands the artistic value of innocence!
A private meeting is arranged. Anatole France explains to his new secretary that his business is to hunt up learned references for "Joan," in order to shut the mouths of critics who contend that he is only a novelist. Then he examines a little the innocence of M. Brousson. He wishes to know first whether the young man has been religiously emancipated. His own notion is that religion is a kind of congenital infirmity. He pulls down a fine edition of La Bruyère and reads classical authority for his position: "He who is in perfect health doubts the existence of God, but, when he gets a dropsy, leaves his mistress and sends for the priest." On another occasion when Huysmans sends by the secretary some pious exhortations to the disciple of Renan, France replies that Huysmans had better have an inquiry made into the condition of his kidneys. When the downward turn in a man's physical state comes, "he gives himself to drugs and the Deity."
It is refreshing to hear that Père Anatole did not wish for himself the reverence which he himself denied to the Deity. When his secretary addressed him as "Master" he was gently reproved:
I, too, in my youth, said "Master" to academicians. I know what it means. It does not really signify "My good sir, you are worth thrice what I or any simple man is worth." It means: "You poor, old pedant, your chatter is sheer drivel! Mere head-wagging! Tedious redundancy! You think you're the equal of the gods. Then don't delay in this low world. You have lasted long enough. It's high time to make place for the young." Yes, that is what little rascals think while they are busy incensing old idols. Don't protest! I was the same as you.
He seems to have felt about being called "Master" as Matthew Arnold used to feel about being called "Professor."
The real solid advantagd in being famous and a member of the Academy, he assures his disciple, is that he can wear his old gray felt hat and snap his fingers at statutes and magistrates. There follows an illustrative incident. A gendarme takes him to task for unconventional behavior with a "tender soul" in the Bois de Boulogne. He presents a visiting card which shows him to be a member of the Académie Française. Result: profuse apologies.
As a young man he had entertained grand and austere notions of the scholar's calling, derived from seeing members of the Academy of Inscriptions on dress parade or, after a meeting, turning over some edition of the classics in his father's bookshop by the Seine. His youthful ideal was something like this: "To live with a hobby apart from one's own century in another age, to know hardly anything about one's contemporaries, but to be intimate and familiar with Cicero, Corneille or Mme de Sévigné. That was what fame seemed to me."
"And to-day, Master?" That discreet young man repeats the offensive title. You see that he knows the old man is a bit insincere—really enjoys well enough what he pretends to despise.
"To-day, my son, fame lies in being able to do what I like. I receive ministers and publishers in my dressing gown and slippers. I give audience, and often I refuse it, to them. It's my turn to make them wait, as they often did me."
This is but negative counsel for a young man from the country bent on a career. What advice has our modern sage equivalent to that painstaking and conscientious thought which the great lexicographer gave to young Boswell's reading? Well, Père Anatole appears to believe that the young man may follow his own instincts, so far as his reading goes. "I know," he declares, "the vanity of all human learning. What useless reading, what crushing knowledge, for a life so brief and passed in the midst of dunces! Why take all this tiresome luggage for so short a journey? People praise my learning. I no longer want other learning than in the realm of love. Love is now my unique, my particular study. It is to that I devote the flickering remains of passion. If only I could write all that the little god inspires in me! Dismal prudery reigns in literature, prudery more silly, cruel and criminal than the Holy Inquisition."
Day after day the indulgent and salacious "old dog"—this is Mr. Pollock's word for "the greatest man of letters" in his time—recounts to his disciple his amorous adventures, usually with a humorous twist—adventures with all sorts of heroines, concerning whom the master seems not to have been more fastidious than Sainte-Beuve, the grossness of whose tastes was offensive, it may be remembered, to George Sand, whose own tastes were, from some points of view, catholic. Again and again, the "old dog" gives to the young one the advice which Robert Herrick addressed to the Virgins. He tempers this, however, with a theory that the men who have done great things in the world have not been happy in love. He discourses at length on Napoleon Bonaparte, and is quite sure that the Little Corporal's conquests in the tented field were a kind of noisy demonstration to draw the attention of the world away from his thorny defeats under love's banner. "If Lætitia Ramolino's son overturned the world and made blood run like rain water, it was because he was impotent."
The only branch of morality to which the master gives much careful thought is the morality of writing well. His method of composition he had from Renan. The author of the "Vie de Jésus" scribbled whatever it might be and sent it to the printer. The proofs came back. He corrected them—once, twice, thrice. At the fifth time it began to be like Renan. In my case it is the sixth and often the seventh time. I insist on as many as eight proofs. What can I do? I have no imagination, but I am not without patience. My most valuable working tools are the paste pot and the scissors. . . . My pen has no lyric powers. It does not leap, but goes plodding along its way. Nor have I ever felt the intoxication of work. I write with difficulty.
In the course of correction he cuts out the "too finely spacious and melodious phrases." He cuts out the "dog grass," which has sprung up; the "which's," "who's" and "whose's" and "whereof's." He shortens sentences wherever possible. But, above all—this, I think, is the great secret of his limpidity—he cuts out the "dog grass," declaring that it gives the best style "a crick in the neck."
Plagiarism, asserts this liberal counselor, is nothing, provided only that you steal to advantage. What stealing to advantage means is prettily illustrated. From a biographical dictionary he copies, without changing a word, this sentence: "The lady Théroulde was rich and of good fame."
He remarks: "It's as flat and insipid as a pancake."
"But," exclaims the young man from the country, "you will see; we shall trim the good lady to the taste of the day." Anatole France, revising, writes:
"Since the lady Théroulde was rich, men said she was of good fame." It now has some character, though the lady has none. That is stealing to advantage. And Anatole France, his best friends will admit, became "a man of great possessions," largely by such forms of theft.
M. Brousson points out that his habit of defamation was rather a consequence of his humor than of his spleen. He deprived people of their reputations, quite without bitterness or malice. Normal and conventional people did not interest him.
When he feels drawn to any one, be it man or woman, he hastens to discover vices in him. He seeks for defects, failings and eccentricities and even monstrosities. . . . The oldest of his friends is announced, and he shouts to Josephine in presence of a dozen people: "Don't leave him downstairs for a moment! Keep a sharp eye on my precious objects!" The oldest friend appears and, to the stupefaction of the visitors, Anatole France falls on his neck. He embraces him with frantic delight. He kisses him on both cheeks and sharpens his long nose on them by way of compliment. He seems unable to unlock his arms. Then in a suave voice and with a sweet smile he will say: "My dearest So-and-So, I was just talking about you to these gentlemen. I can't say how charmed I am to see you."
There is much of this enthusiastic show of affection in the record, coupled with calling downstairs, after the guest has closed the door, "Never let that man into the house again!" M. Brousson's most gorgeous anecdote is of that sort. It describes a formal call paid to Anatole France by a provincial bishop "candidating," according to the French custom, for a vacancy in the Academy. As the season was Lenten, Monsignor appeared in black. "In his poor cassock and shiny cope with worn velvet collar you would take him for a humble country priest. He waits in the hall, emotional and shivering, fingering the tarnished gilt tassels of his hat and looking with a suspicious eye on his strange surroundings of medieval virgins and reliquaries cheek by jowl with pagan goddesses."
Anatole France, on the other hand, play-acting for the moment, is unusually conscious of his dignity as a prince of the realm of letters. "His fullest, most sumptuous dressing gown envelops him, girt at the loins with an antique tasseled cord of gold and yellow. On his head is the most brilliant of his skull caps; for out of all the collection of caps—moiré, silk, velvet, Persian cloth, Jouy cloth—he has chosen one of cardinal red. . . . He descends some steps and takes the bishop's hands in his.
"'Monsignor,' he says in a devout voice that seems to issue from his nose, 'I am deeply conscious, as indeed I ought to be, of the great honor that you do me.' And he makes a low bow."
The bishop returns the compliment, while Anatole France plays with a heavy gold ring, and then explains that, to be entirely frank, he is acquainted with the works of his host only by hearsay, having refrained from reading them out of regard for his mother, Holy Church. To which France elaborately responds that he knows the bishop's religious zeal and purity; that he himself has never read any of the bishop's episcopal charges; but that he is deeply grateful to him for making clear "that it is not possible to be at once a good Catholic and a good republican." They fall then into a discussion of great writers who were also good Catholics; and France contends that the bishop's favorite, Chateaubriand, was in reality but the inventor of a new literary poison—"he was a Rousseau turned choirboy and drunk with sacramental wine."
Anatole France does not relish the rhetoric of Chateaubriand. His father had loved it, and sickened him with it, in his youth, by an overdose. He continues:
"It is thanks to the viscount (Chateaubriand) that reliquaries fill bric-à-brac shops where Christs and Buddhas jostle one another and that ladies of light virtue cover their pianos and drape their alcoves with ecclesiastical vestments impregnated with incense and holy oil. It was a singularly ill turn that Chateaubriand did you!"
Silence falls again, still heavier. The logs burn red. There is a touch of feverish anxiety in the library. France rises:
"I trust that you will be elected, Monsignor."
Well done, M. Brousson!
This scene, one perceives, is central. In it Anatole France figures in the most serious rôle that he played—champion of this world against the next. For the most part he seems to have impressed his secretary as a very doughty, undaunted, unshaken champion, full of gusto and gaiety to the end, immensely enjoying his life, on intimate and congenial terms with the world, the flesh, and the devil.
There were one or two things, however, which shook the Master a little, and one or two things which bored him. He didn't much relish formal society, and his servant Josephine had to be instructed to keep a sharp eye upon him to see that he changed his shirt when he set out for a drawing-room where cabinet ministers were to be entertained. On these occasions he was made to perform, he was expected to show off, and he much preferred to get off in a dark corner and talk with a nonentity about a piece of Majolica, or with a pretty woman about something else. He had his public conversation by heart—all his good stories about Hugo and Renan and Maupassant—even to the tone of his voice, even to the exact point at which he pulled out his handkerchief and wiped a histrionic tear from his eye. His public conversation he performed as a matter of duty, and he performed a little as one plays old records for new friends. He was bored, too, by nature, by landscape—except when it was framed and hung inside four walls.
The things which frightened and dismayed him were illness and death. On one occasion M. Brousson was so indiscreet as to swoon in the Master's presence. He took that up seriously and sharply. He wished to know at once whether the young man did that sort of thing often. He explained that he should not like him so well—not nearly so well—if he did. He really did not care for sick people in his neighborhood. Then, again, on another occasion, the young man from the country, thinking to gratify the Master's love of glory, spoiled a visit to the Pantheon by intimating that Anatole France would be the next great man of letters to repose there.
This joyous paganism of Anatole France is, of course, an attractive religion for people who are well and happy and prosperous. If one is poor or wretched or ill, it is less consolatory. But, as M. Brousson exhibits him, this great gambler who staked all he had on the turns of this world enjoyed an almost uninterrupted run of good luck. He was one of those thoroughly prosperous worldlings who almost persuaded the author of Ecclesiastes that righteousness is "vanity and vexation of spirit," and that all that profiteth a man is to enjoy the work of his hands and the delight of his eyes and the pride of life, for the wicked get on in this life just as well as the pious, and all go together into the dust and rest in one common grave. So we see him to the end, the gay old graybeard, enjoying his meals, with a grand appetite for his dinner; eating, like a god or a drayman at a humble wine shop, a full repast of boiled beef with coarse salt and gherkins, sheep's feet in a white sauce, beans, Brie and custard tart; sniffing out a fine old Quintilian from the booths by the Seine, or chaffering with an old woman in an antique shop or chattering with a demi-mondaine in the park; then turning homeward, creeping into his canopied four-poster, and reading Casanova by tall church candles till he falls asleep.