Chapter V: Part 5

“I had an idea,” he says, “that a man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner. Let him on a certain day read a certain page of full poesy or distilled prose, and let him wander with it, and muse upon it, and reflect from it, and bring home to it, and prophesy upon it, and dream upon it: until it becomes stale. But when will it do so? Never. When man has arrived at a certain ripeness in intellect, any one grand and spiritual passage serves him as a starting-post towards all ‘the two-and-thirty palaces.’ How happy is such a voyage of conception, what delicious diligent indolence! A doze upon a sofa does not hinder it, and a nap upon clover engenders ethereal finger-pointings; the prattle of a child gives it wings, and the converse of middle-age a strength to beat them; a strain of music conducts to ‘an odd angle of the Isle,’ and when the leaves whisper, it puts a girdle round the earth.”

This he calls a “sparing touch of noble books.” It is too much to be expected, of course, that readers in general, whose idea of intellectual delights is of a new novel every other day, should be contented with a method so parsimonious. If this is what you call epicureanism, they might say, pray count us among the Stoics. And for all that, as applied to Keats’s own practice, “epicurean” was the right word.

What he would have been at forty or fifty, there is no telling. For the present he was not much concerned with whole poems as works of great constructive art. He was of an age to be (what Edward FitzGerald is said to have always been) “more of a connoisseur than a critic, a taster of fragrant essences, an inhaler of subtle aromas.” He loved beauty as at that stage he mostly found it (as the bee finds sweetness), in the individual flower, thinking far more of that than of the plant’s symmetrical structure, or the composition of the landscape. In this particular he resembled Lamb, who, if he called himself “an author by fits,” was no less truly a reader by fits. “I can vehemently applaud,” he said with characteristic, half-true self-depreciation, “or perversely stickle, at _parts_; but I cannot grasp at a whole.”

It was an admission of defect--he meant it so; but it is no slander to say that lovers of poetry are in general of substantially the same mind. Their taste is selective. They love short poems, or the beauties of long ones. Many of them have confessed as much, and many others could do no less were they called into the box. Lowell, whose standing as a critic nobody questions, though some may be bold enough, or “perverse” enough, now the man is dead, to rule him out of the class of poets, bids us remember how few long poems will bear consecutive reading. “For my part,” he says, “I know of but one,--the ‘Odyssey.’” And Samuel Johnson, who, great critic or not, had “a good deal of literature,” told Boswell, “that from his earliest years he loved to read poetry, but hardly ever read any poem to an end.”

The boy Keats, then, was not so utterly out of the way, at all events he was not without the support of good company, in taking for his own the motto of Ariel,--

“Where the bee sucks, there suck I.”

And a good time he had of it; reading and idling, reading and writing, not too much in a hurry, no busier than a bee, following his bent, finding Shakespeare and the “Paradise Lost” every day greater wonders to him; looking upon fine phrases like a lover; more and more convinced that “fine writing, next to fine doing, is the top thing in the world.”

“Next to fine doing,” he said,--and meant it; for his life and his own doings chimed with the word. Nor does the word, even as a verbal confession of faith, stand alone. On the testimony of his friends, and on the testimony of his letters, Keats was no selfish weakling, no puny luxuriator in his own emotions, no mere hectic taster and maker of phrases. He worshiped beauty; he was born a poet, and rightly enough he followed his genius; but he was born also affectionate and generous; in his nature there was much of that glorious something which we call chivalry; and he knew as well as all the preachers could tell him that in any true assize high conduct must always bear away the palm. No more than the apostle of old had he any “poor vanity that works of genius were the first things. No! for that sort of probity and disinterestedness which such men as Bailey possess does hold and grasp the tiptop of any spiritual honors that can be paid to anything in this world.” Truly said, of this world or any other; for many things may be great, but the greatest of all is charity.

It might almost have been expected that genius so sudden in its flowering, so amazingly exceptional, as Keats’s, one of the wonders of human history, would be attended by some strain of disease, some taint, more or less pronounced, of mental or moral unsoundness. It is the more to be rejoiced in, therefore, that his nature, mental, moral, and physical (except for the tuberculosis which he doubtless contracted from his mother, over whom, in her last illness, he, a boy of fifteen, watched with all a son’s and daughter’s faithfulness), was to all appearance eminently sane and normal. As a boy, undersized though he was, he would always be fighting (which is normal, surely), and as a man he showed habitually, with one distressing exception, a manly, self-respecting spirit.

The single exception has to do with his passion for Fanny Brawne, concerning which it may be enough to say that when a man is head over ears in love with a pretty girl, or a girl whom he thinks pretty, and is by her, or by some perversity of Fate, put off, he is _never_ sane. The letters that Keats wrote to his inamorata may have been, as his friendly critic says, “the letters of a surgeon’s apprentice.” For ourselves we will take the critic’s word for it. We have never read them (in our opinion it was indecent or worse to print them), nor should we feel sure of our ability to tell in what respect the love letters of a young doctor might be expected to differ from those of a young schoolmaster or a young duke of the realm. To be crazy is to be crazy. Enough to say that they were not the letters of the poet Keats. Alas, alas! What a tragedy is human life! What a weak and silly thing is the human heart! A man sees a girl’s face, and behold, he is no longer a reasonable being; his peace of mind is gone, his work hindered, his day shortened, his fame tarnished, his name a laughing-stock. It is that which hath been, and it is that which shall be. As was said of old, so one may feel like saying still, “A man hath no preëminence above a beast; for all is vanity.”

And for all that, considering Keats’s genius, its early development and its miraculous quality, and comparing him with men of his own kind, we must account him on the whole a man surprisingly well-balanced and sane. Call the roll of his famous poetic contemporaries, and few of them will be found saner. Good Archdeacon Bailey, who had abundant opportunity to know, said that common sense was “a conspicuous part of his character.” Of how many of the others would it ever have occurred to any one to say the like?

He seems not to have been either crotchety or boastful, though he believed in aiming high, and made no scruple of professing, in so many words, that he “would rather fail than not be among the greatest.” Born fighter that he was, born, too, of the _genus irritabile vatum_ (“when I have any little vexation,” he once wrote, with Lamb-like exaggeration, “it grows in five minutes into a theme for Sophocles”), he loved peace, and in the Biblical phrase pursued it, for which Mr. Arnold, it is pleasant to see, awards him full credit; but he was not to be trodden upon, he held the popular judgment of poetry in something like contempt (as all poets do, it is to be presumed), and he would not be crowded too hard even by the chiefest of his brethren. The most thoroughgoing Wordsworthian must read with amusement, if not with temptations to applause, the few clever sentences in which the youthful aspirant for poetic honors, in one of his letters, hits off some of that great man’s foibles. He has no thought of denying Wordsworth’s grandeur, he declares; but not for the sake of a few fine imaginative or domestic passages will he “be bullied into a certain philosophy engendered in the whims of an egoist.” “Every man,” he goes on, “has his speculations, but every man does not brood and peacock over them till he makes a false coinage and deceives himself.... We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us, and, if we do not agree, seems to put its hand into its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself--but with its subject. How beautiful are the retired flowers!--how would they lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway, crying out, ‘Admire me, I am a violet! Dote upon me, I am a primrose!’”

To another correspondent he expresses a fear that Wordsworth has gone away from town “rather huffed” about something or other, the nature of which does not precisely appear; but adds that he ought not to expect but that every man of worth should be “as proud as himself;” a remark concerning which we are bound to acknowledge, loyal Wordsworthians as within reason we esteem ourselves, that we rather like the sound of it.

An artist cannot well be without some of the defects--or what more steady-going, lower-flying people are wont to account the defects--that go naturally, if not of necessity, with the artistic temperament. For one thing, he must work more or less by fits and starts. Poems are not to be made--unless it be by a Southey--as a shoemaker makes shoes, so many strokes to the minute. It is a wonder how much Keats accomplished in his few years, and this even if we take no reckoning of his experiments and failures; but there were times, of course, when he could do nothing, and then, equally of course, he could invent the prettiest kind of excuses for himself, excuses that were themselves hardly less than works of genius. At such a minute he would say, for instance, “Neither Poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me; they seem rather like figures on a Greek vase.” Or, if the beauty of the morning operated upon a sense of idleness, he would declare it “more noble to sit like Jove than to fly like Mercury.” “Let us open our leaves like a flower,” he would say, “and be passive and receptive; budding patiently under the eye of Apollo and taking hints from every noble insect that favors us with a visit.... I have not read any books--the Morning said I was right--I had no idea but of the Morning, and the Thrush said I was right--seeming to say,--

“‘O fret not after knowledge--I have none,
And yet my song comes native with the warmth,
O fret not after knowledge--I have none,
And yet the Evening listens.’”

Not that he was ever foolish enough to despise knowledge, or trust overmuch to impulses “from a vernal wood,” as if a poet could subsist on inspiration. A few weeks after the date of the letter just quoted, a letter which he himself qualified before he was done as “a mere sophistication,” we find him renouncing a proposed pleasure trip. There is but one thing to prevent his going, he tells his correspondent. “I know nothing,” he says, “I have read nothing, and I mean to follow Solomon’s directions, ‘Get learning, get understanding.’ I find earlier days are gone by--I find that I can have no enjoyment in the world but continual drinking of knowledge.... There is but one way for me. The road lies through application, study, and thought. I will pursue it.”

But as we counted it fortunate that he had already had the courage to forsake everything else for the pursuit of poetry, so we must be thankful that now, feeling his educational deficiencies, he did not do what nine professors out of ten, had he had the ill-fortune to consult them, would--very properly, no doubt--have advised him to do; that is to say, cease production for the time being and devote himself to study. That would have been a loss irreparable. His sun was so soon to go down! A mercy it was that he made hay while it shone.

For much of the hay that he made was as good as the sun ever shone on. That it was a short season’s crop may pass unsaid. It is not within the possibilities of human nature, however miraculously endowed, to be mature at twenty-five. Enough, surely, if at that age a man has done a good bit of work of the rarest, divinest quality, work that, within its range and scope, the greatest and ripest genius could never dream of bettering. That is Keats’s glory. So much as that one need not be either a poet or a critic to affirm; the critics and poets have agreed to affirm it for us. If Tennyson said, as reported, that “Keats, with his high spiritual vision, would have been, if he had lived, the greatest of us all; there is something magical and of the innermost soul of poetry in almost everything which he wrote;” and if Arnold put him, in two words, “with Shakespeare,” why, then, for the present, at least, the case is judged, and we who are neither poets nor critics, but only tasters and relishers, can have no call to argue it.

So much being admitted, however, it is not to be assumed that here is an end of things. One may still like to talk a little. Hearing him praised, one may still say,--

“‘’Tis so, ’tis true,’
And to the most of praise add something more.”

Life would be a dull affair for the smaller men if comment and side remark were forever debarred as soon as the bigwigs had settled the main contention.

Leaving on one side, then, the odes and other pieces which by universal consent are perfect, or as nearly so as consists with human frailty,[10] let us content ourselves with intimating the profit which readers of a proper youthfulness and other needful, not over-critical, qualifications may derive from some of the other and longer poems, which by the same common consent, as well as by the acknowledgment of the man who wrote them, are in every sense imperfect.

Indeed, there are few things in Keats’s letters more interesting in themselves, or more characteristic of their author, than his apologies for these same longer pieces, especially for “Endymion.”

“Why endeavor after a long poem?” he has heard some one ask. And this is his answer:--

“Do not the lovers of poetry like to have a little region to wander in, where they may pick and choose, and in which the images are so numerous that many are forgotten and found new in a second reading; which may be food for a week’s stroll in the summer? Do not they like this better than what they can read through before Mrs. Williams comes downstairs? a morning work at most.”

Evidently his “lovers of poetry” are of the tribe of those whose practice we have heard him describing as “a sparing touch of noble books;” lovers rather than critics or students; browsers and ruminators; not determined upon devouring whole forests, or even entire trees, but content with getting here and there the goodness of a leaf or the sweetness of a blossom. He foresees that “Endymion” is doomed to be in one way a failure; he knows that his mind at present, in its nonage, is “like a pack of scattered cards.” The words are his own. Yet he confides that there will be poetry in his long poem, and that the right spirits will find it. And so they do. He has touched their disposition to a nicety. They love to “wander in it.” They may never have tried very hard to follow the story; they may not care to read any special student’s supposed discoveries as to just how this part of the action is related to that or the other. But they like the poetry. They never read the poem, or read _in_ it, without finding some. They do not wish it shorter, nor are they conscious of any very sharp regret that it is not better. Wisely or unwisely, they accept it as it is, and are thankful that the young man wrote it, and, having written it, took nobody’s advice against printing it. If they read _in_ it, as we say, why, that is mostly what they do with the “Fairy Queen” and “Paradise Lost.” It may be the fault of the poem, or it may be the fault of the reader; or it may be nobody’s fault.

In the case of “Endymion,” indeed, it requires no exceptional acumen to perceive that the work hangs feebly together, that its construction, its architectonic, if that be the word, is defective past all mending. “Utterly incoherent,” is Mr. Arnold’s dictum, and for ourselves we have no inclination to dispute him. Our fault or the poet’s, we have always found it so. But like Mr. Arnold, we feel the breath of genius blowing through it, and therefore, as we say, we find in it not infrequently an hour of good reading.

Such reading, it has sometimes seemed to us (and the poet’s apology, now we think of it, comes to much the same thing), is like walking in a forest, where we cannot see the wood for the trees. All about us they stand, dwindling away and away as we look, till, whichever way we turn, there is no looking farther. Above our heads is a canopy of interlacing branches,--

“overwove
By many a summer’s silent fingering,”--

through which, densely as it is woven, steals here and there a sunbeam to play upon the carpet underneath. In such a place we know little and care less whither we may be going. Standing still is a good progress. Not a step but something offers itself,--a flower, a bed of moss, a trailing, berry-covered vine, a tuft of ferns. A brook talks to us, a bird sings to us, a vista invites us, a leafy spray, as we brush against it, whispers of beauty and the summer. These, and trifles like these, are what we could specify. All of them together do not make the forest, yet the least of them is not only part of the forest, but is what it is because of the forest. The soul of the forest speaks through it. How incomparably significant becomes of a sudden every common sound. If two branches but rub together, we must stop and listen. If a thrush whistles, we could stand forever to hear it. Not a sight or sound of them all would mean the same, or anything like the same, if it were encountered in the open and by itself. It is the old lesson. The sparrow’s note must come from the alder bough, the shell must be seen on the beach with the tide rippling over it.

And the magical verse, if it is to exercise its full charm, must be found, not in a book of extracts, nor as a fragment, but at home in its native surroundings. It must have been born in the poem, and we must discover it there! The poem which has made the verse must also have put us into the mood to receive it. How often have all readers found this true by its opposite. How often a line quoted is a line from which the glory seems to have departed, a line _dépaysé!_--as the tree, the bird, the leaf, if we see them in the open country and in the mood of the open country, can never be the same as if we saw them in the forest and in the mood which the forest induces.

We think, then, that the poet’s plea is sound; that his long poem, whatever its shortcomings, is abundantly justified as a good place to wander about in; that there is poetry (one of the rare things of the world) in it which never would have been produced elsewhere, and which, now that it has been produced, can only be appreciated when read, as scientific men say, _in situ_. To transfer its beauties to a commonplace book would be like putting roses into a herbarium, or, more justly, perhaps, like setting a seashell on a parlor mantel.

In the long poem, too, as in the forest, though we were near forgetting to speak of it, there is always the chance of finding something unexpected; a line, an epithet, an image, that seems to have come into being since we were last here. Every perusal is thus a kind of voyage of discovery. It is as if the season had changed. New flowers have blossomed, new birds have come from the South, and the wood is a new place.

In all the work of genius, as we began by saying, there is no small part that seems to come from almost anywhere rather than from the mind and intention of the writer. And the more genius, we must believe, the more of this appearance of what is known (or unknown) as inspiration. Yet, in the case of Keats, a man of genius all compact, one has only to read his letters to see (and glad we must be to see it) that, for all his youthfulness and comparatively slight acquaintance with books, he was pretty well aware of himself, having withal a kind of philosophy of life and many shrewd ideas concerning the poetic art. His gift was no external, detachable thing, an influence of which he could give no account, and over which he had no control, like, shall we say, the inscrutable, uncanny, unrelated mathematical faculty of a Zerah Colburn, a thing by itself, significant of no general capacity on the part of its possessor. The man _himself_ was a genius.

And being such, he was safest when he followed his own leadings. When he humbled himself to write what he hoped men would pay for, as, under pressure of his brother’s and sister’s need, he persuaded himself he might do (“the very corn which is now so beautiful, as if it had only took to ripening yesterday, is for the market; so, why should I be delicate?”), he was mostly wasting his time. “I have great hope of success,” he writes, “because I make use of my judgment more deliberately than I have yet done.” It was a vain dependence. “Live and learn,” says the proverb. And, prose men or poets, the brightest must mind the lesson. But Keats, alas! could not live. He was “born for death,” and was already marked. His work, the best of it, was already finished. Racked and broken, devoured by the very madness of passion and wasting away with incurable disease, his tale henceforth is pure tragedy. If his passion was a weakness,--and no doubt it was,--to colder-blooded men a state of mind incredible, and to Pharisees and fools a thing to mock at,--so let us call it, and there be done. It was past cure, so much is certain. Here and there in his letters there are still gleams of brightness, sad touches of pleasantry. To his sister, about whose health he is continually in a fever, lest she should be going as his mother and his brother Tom have gone (and he himself far on the road), he is always a little improved, always making the most of the doctor’s words of encouragement; but between times, to some other correspondent, he shows for a moment the plague that is consuming his life. It is heart-breaking to hear him. “If I had any chance of recovery, this passion would kill me.” He cannot name the one of whom he is night and day thinking. “I am afraid to write to her--to receive a letter from her--to see her handwriting would break my heart.” Even to see her name written would be more than he could bear. “Oh, Brown, I have coals of fire in my breast. It surprises me that the human heart is capable of containing and bearing so much misery.”

And strange it is how cruel a price a man can be made to pay for what, at the worst, is only a piece of natural foolishness.

“Well and wisely said the Greek,
Be thou faithful, but not fond;
To the altar’s foot thy fellow seek,
The Furies wait beyond.”

Never man found this truer than Keats.

There is but one letter more,--dated a month later, and addressed to the same friend. This time the dying man knows that he is taking leave, though he still quotes a doctor’s soothing diagnosis. He is bringing his philosophy to bear, he says; if he recovers, he will do thus and so; but if not, all his faults will be forgiven. And then: “Write to George [his brother] as soon as you receive this, and tell him how I am, as far as you can guess; and also a note to my sister, who walks about my imagination like a ghost, she is so like Tom. I can scarcely bid you good-bye, even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow. God bless you!”

How wasteful is Nature! Once or twice in an age, one man out of millions, she brings forth a poet; and then, while his powers are still budding, she sends on them a sudden blight, and anon cuts him down. Wasteful, we say. But who can tell? Perhaps she also, like the rest of us, is doing what she can, and, like the rest of us, is disappointed when she fails.

ANATOLE FRANCE

ANATOLE FRANCE

M. Anatole France is a writer who is continually saying something. His thought is always breaking into bloom. He is not one of those who, on the ground of weightiness of matter, or other supposed excellence, have taken out a license to be dull. All his pages have light in them. His readers not only know in which direction they are going,--a great comfort, not always vouchsafed to such travelers,--but are made to enjoy the journey, having a thousand sights to look at by the way. It is an author’s business, he considers, to make his truth beautiful; and nothing is beautiful but what is easy. An artist who knows his trade will “not so much exact attention as surprise it.”

It sounds like a good creed; and the style of his writing answers to it. Its qualities are the classical French qualities,--neatness, precision, ease, moderation, lightness of touch, lucidity. In sum, it is such a style as comes of good breeding. He is clever without being smart, and pointed without emphasis. As for that dreadful something which goes by the name of rhetoric, you may search his twenty-odd volumes through without finding trace of it. His method is old-fashioned, his masters are the old masters. Brilliancy, surprise, felicities, originalities,--yes, indeed, he has all these and more, but he knows how to wear them. They are all natural to him. “Elegant, facile, rapid,” he says; “there you have the perfect politeness of a writer.” Obscurity, difficulty, is to his way of thinking but a kind of bad manners.

He was born to enjoy beautiful things, one would say; elected before the cradle to a life of scholastic quietness and leisure: a dilettante and a saunterer, loving old streets, old shops, old books, the old literatures, fond of out-of-the-way and useless learning, the very type and pattern of an aimless reader and dreamer. And so, to take his word for it, he appears to have begun. Those were his best days. Then he was most himself. So, in certain moods, at least, it seems to him now. Of that time he is thinking when he says, “I lived happy years without writing. I led a contemplative and solitary life, the memory of which is still infinitely sweet to me. Then, as I studied nothing, I learned much. In fact, it is in strolling that one makes beautiful intellectual and moral discoveries.”

The old book-stalls on the Paris quays,--one wonders how many scores of times he has an affectionate word to say for them in his various books. Even in one of the earlier essays of “La Vie Littéraire” he apologizes for what is already becoming a frequent reference. “Let me tell you,” he breaks out, “that I can never pass over these quays without experiencing a trouble full of joy and sadness, because I was born here, because I spent my childhood here, and because the familiar faces that I saw here formerly are now forever vanished. I say this in spite of myself, from a habit of saying simply what I think, about that of which I think. One is never quite sincere without being a little wearisome. But I have a hope that, if I speak of myself, those who listen to me will think only of themselves; so that I shall please them while pleasing myself. I was brought up on this quay in the midst of books, by humble and simple people, of whose memory I am the only guardian. When I am gone they will be as if they had never been. My soul is all full of their relics.”

He runs a risk of being wearisome, he says. But that is merely a grace-note of French politeness, to be taken as it is meant, and answered after its kind. Indeed, he knows better. It was he who said of Renan that his most charming book was his little volume of youthful reminiscence, because he had put most of himself into it. And of M. Anatole France it is equally true that although he has an abundance of ideas, and loves not only his own past but the past of the world,--especially of all mystics, heretics, skeptics, enthusiasts, and saints,--yet he never comes quite so close to his reader as when his talk grows most intimate. It is what we who read are always after, the man behind the pen. If he will really tell us about himself, about his inner, true self, which we blindly feel must be somehow very like another self, more interesting still, with which we seldom succeed in coming face to face, although, according to the accepted theory of things, it is, or ought to be, our nearest neighbor,--if he will really tell us something, little matter what, that is actually true about himself, we will sit up till morning to listen to him. It seems an easy way to be interesting, does it not? And so indeed it is, for the right man; for the really fine things are always easy,--if one can do them at all.

There intrudes the doubt; for if success in personal reminiscence is easy, failure is ten times easier. Of course a man must have taste, an innate or well-bred sense of the fitness of things; and so a brook must have banks, to save it from degeneration and loss. But what if the stream itself be muddy, if it have no movement, no sparkle, no variety, if it do not by turns ripple over sunny shallows, loiter in comfortable eddies, and deepen and darken in dream-inviting pools? Or what if the banks be straight-cut and formal, till what should have been a brook is little better than a ditch? What if taste has become propriety, and propriety has hardened into primness, and the writing or the talk is without the breath of life? Yes, success is easy, and it is also impossible. As the art of man never made a mountain brook, so instruction never by itself made a writer. The rain must fall from heaven, and readability (and _hearability_ likewise, since writing and talking are but two forms of the one thing) must come from the same source, or, as Emerson said, by nature.

If a man is to disclose himself, he must first have known something about himself, a pitch of intelligence by no means to be taken for granted; he must be one of the relatively few who are affectionately cognizant of their own feelings, who delight in their own view of things, who have felt, loved, suffered, and enjoyed, to whom life and the world have been inwardly real and interesting, for whom their own past especially is like a fair landscape, here in full sunshine, there flecked with shadows, but all a picture of loveliness and a thing to dream over.

In reminiscence, as in painting, the subject must be somewhat removed, loss of detail yielding a gain in beauty, since, in the one case, as in the other, what we seek is not an inventory, but a picture. This, or something like this, is what Renan had in mind when in beginning his “Souvenirs” he remarked that what a man says of himself is always poetry. For his own part, he declares, he has no thought of furnishing matter for _post-mortem_ biographical sketches. He is going to tell the truth (mostly), but not the kind of truth of which biography is made. Biography and personal reminiscence are two things, and can never be written in the same tone. Many things, he tells us, have been put into his book on purpose to provoke a smile. If custom had permitted, he would more than once have written on the margin of the page: _cum grano salis_.

One thinks of Charles Lamb, though in general the two men had wonderfully little in common. How dearly he loved to talk of himself, hiding the while behind some modestly transparent veil of mystification! And how dearly we love to play the innocent game with him, seeing perfectly what is going on, but, as children do, making pretense of being deceived. Better than almost any one else he had the winsome gift of half-serious, tenderly humorous self-disclosure. As Renan said, it is all poetry, and always with something to smile at.

All this because of one of M. Anatole France’s many stray bits of gossipy reminiscence concerning the old quays of Paris and his boyish adventures among them! Such trifles are characteristic; they connote other qualities, and of themselves show us one side of the man and the writer. He loves his own life, especially his real life, the happy years that lie behind him. The power to see them is to him a matter of wonderment, a kind of miracle, a true fairy’s gift. If he could see the future with the same distinctness, the fact would be hardly more astonishing, and probably it would be much less beneficent. So he tells himself in one of those rare and precious moods when the soul seems preternaturally awake, and the commonest every-day objects wear a look of newness and mystery till we are taken with a kind of inward shivering as if we had been seeing ghosts.

For the more connected story of his youthful memories one must turn, of course, to the two volumes expressly devoted to them, “Le Livre de Mon Ami” and “Pierre Nozière.” That he should have written _two_ such books is significant of the hold that his childhood still has upon him. But the two are none too many. How delicious they are!--full of tenderness and humor, every sentence true to the pitch, and the writing perfect. And how many pictures they leave with us! The woman in white and her lover with the black whiskers. The ragged street urchin, Alphonse, whom the well-fed, well-dressed house boy envied and pitied by turns, till one day he (the good boy) pilfered a bunch of grapes from the sideboard, lowered them out of the window by a string, and called upon little Alphonse to take them; which the suspicious Alphonse proceeded to do with a sudden twitch at the cord (such rudeness!), after which, turning up his face to the window, he thrust out his tongue, put his thumb to his nose, and ran off with the dainty. “My little friends had not accustomed me to such fashions,” the good boy confides to us. And then, to heighten his sense of disappointment (how commonly grown-up human benevolence is similarly disrewarded!), he bethought himself that he must tell his mother of his pious theft. She would chide him, he feared. And like a good mother she did, but with laughter in her eyes.

“‘We ought to give away our own good things, not those of another,’ she said; ‘and we must know how to give.’

“‘That is the secret of happiness,’ added my father, ‘and few know it.’

“He knew it, my father.”

The books are full of such pictures, seen first by the child, and now seen again, losing nothing of their color, through the eyes of the man of forty; full, too, of a boy’s dreams and ambitions. Now he will be a famous saint (like every boy, he is bound to be famous somehow), and instantly he sets about it with fastings, an improvised hair shirt, and even an attempt, ingloriously brought to nought by the strong arms of the housemaid, to play the rôle of Simeon Stylites in the kitchen. What with this muscular, unsympathetic maid,--who also tore his hair shirt from him,--and his father, equally unsympathetic, who pronounced him “stupid,” the boy had a bad day of it, and by night-fall, as he says, “recognized that it is very difficult to be a saint while living with one’s family. I understood why St. Anthony and St. Jerome went into the desert to dwell among lions and satyrs; and I resolved to retire the next day to a hermitage.” And so he did, choosing a labyrinth in the neighboring Jardin des Plantes.

A few years later, wiser now and more worldly-minded, he is determined to set up catalogues like his old friend Father Le Beau; and soon (joy on the top of joy, and audacity almost past confession) he determines that he will some day print them, and _read the proofs_! Beyond that he can conceive of no higher felicity (though he has since learned, through the confidences of a blasé literary acquaintance, that “one wearies of everything in this world, even of correcting proofs!”).

Needless to say, he did not become a cataloguer, more than he had become a saint; but good Father Le Beau, for all that, determined his boyish admirer’s vocation, inspiring him with “a love for the things of the mind and with a weakness for writing;” inspiring him, also, with a passion for the past and with “ingenious curiosities,” and, by the example of intellectual labor regularly performed without fatigue and without worry, filling him from childhood with a desire to work and instruct himself. “It is thanks to him,” he concludes, “that I have become in my own way a great reader, a zealous annotator of ancient texts, and a scribbler of memoirs that will never see the light.”

Good Father Le Beau! How plainly we can see him at his pleasant task, and the small boy beside him taking his lesson! And if any be ready to smile at the childish story, as if it were nothing _but_ a childish story,--well, there is difference in readers. To some, let us hope, the simple adventures of a boy’s mind, dreaming on things to come, will seem quite as entertaining, and even quite as instructive and morally profitable, as some more highly seasoned adventures of a man who covets his neighbor’s wife, or a woman who covets her neighbor’s husband.

Of books recounting the pleasures and miseries of illicit passion modern literature surely suffers no lack; and truth to tell, M. Anatole France himself (the more’s the pity) has contributed to an already full stock two or three examples not easily to be outdone in piquancy of situation or freedom of speech. Concerning these no account is to be taken here. Enough to say that they are unspeakable,--in English,--though, not to do them injustice, it should be added that neither “Le Lys Rouge,” nor even “Histoire Comique,” for all its misleading, pleasant-sounding title, makes the path to the everlasting bonfire look in the remotest degree alluring. The old truth, old as man, that “to be carnally minded is death,” is nowhere more convincingly set forth than in the modern French novel, whether it be Balzac’s, Flaubert’s, Maupassant’s, Bourget’s, or Anatole France’s.

It is unfortunate, we must think, for our author’s reputation and vogue outside of his own country, that not only the two of his books just now named, but at least three others, though in a less degree, are unfitted for full translation into English, or even to be left in their original tongue upon the open shelves of public libraries or on the family table. But what then? They were not written _virginibus puerisque_, their author would say, and even their freest parts treat of nothing worse than every newspaper is obliged somehow to chronicle, however it may veil its language, and nothing worse, perhaps, than is readily allowed in the English classics, especially in the books of the Bible and the writings of Shakespeare. Wonderful is the effect of time and distance! We gaze upon nude statues of the old Greeks and Romans without a shiver, but the representation of an American President bare only to the waist--as one may see, in all kinds of weather, poor unhappy-looking George Washington sitting in front of the national capitol--affects us with a painful sense of discomfort, not to say of positive indecency.

M. Anatole France, as has been said, seems by birth and early predilection to have been devoted to a career of studious leisure. He would always be contented, one would have thought, to be a looker-on at the game of life, sitting by the wayside, book in hand, and watching the world go past; taking it all as a show; never so much as considering the possibility of entering for any of the prizes that more ambitious men run for, nor concerned very much as to who should win or who lose; hardly so much as an observer; a spectator rather, as he said himself; “in love,” as he said again, “with the eternal illusion that wraps us round,” but only as an illusion; cultivating his own garden,--like M. Bergeret, who delighted to cut the leaves of books, esteeming it wise to make for one’s self pleasures appropriate to one’s profession; at the most a collector of old books, and a teller of old tales; a lover of Virgil, a disciple of Epicurus, a friend of quietness, and a worshiper of the Graces.

Such we imagine M. Anatole France to have been when he wrote his earlier volumes, including the one which the majority of readers would probably name as the most beautiful of them all, “Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard.” The dear old savant tells his own story, talking now to his cat, now to his friendly despot of a housekeeper, now to good Madame de Gabry, now, best of all, to himself. The whole story is, as it were, overheard by the reader, and surely there never was, nor ever will be, a prettier revelation of an old man’s soul.

Like Renan, and like M. Anatole France, Sylvestre Bonnard, Member of the Institute, has a natural sense of humor, and if he does not put into his narrative things on purpose to make us smile, it is only because he is in no way thinking of us. He smiles often enough himself, his own oddities and blunders as an absent-minded scholar--since, like Cowper’s Mr. Bull, he “has too much genius to have a good memory”--providing him with abundant occasion; and we smile with him. We love him for his goodness, and we listen delighted to all his philosophy. If he is not a saint, he is something better,--or if not better, more interesting and lovable,--a man so humanly sweet, so simple-hearted, so pure-minded, so bright in his talk, so admirable in his kindness, so adorable a confesser of his own foibles, that there is no resisting him. Dear old celibate!--who had loved a pair of blue eyes in his youth, and had been true to their memory ever since! Verily, he had his reward. Never man awaited the sunset with a better grace.

The man who drew this character was surely at peace with the world and with himself. Life had so far been to him mostly a fair-weather stroll in a pleasant country. And the same may be said, with some grains of qualification, of the man who wrote the weekly articles that went to the making of the four volumes of “La Vie Littéraire.” These are not things to last, it may be, like “Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard,” which, if one may be so simple as to prophesy, can hardly fail to become a classic; but for the present they must afford to many readers, if not a keener, yet a more various, delight. They are books of extraordinary interest, in whatever light one may view them. As we turn them over, remarking here and there the pages that at different times have especially pleased us, we find ourselves saying again and again, Oh, that we had such books in English, and on English subjects! If there were in Great Britain or in the United States a writer who could, week by week, furnish one of our newspapers with pieces of literary criticism or bookish causerie of this enchanting quality; so light, so graceful, so original, so suggestive, so full of happy surprises, so bright with humor and philosophy, so perfect in form and temper, and so satisfying in substance! Yes, if there were! How quickly we would all subscribe for that newspaper! The articles might deal, as M. Anatole France’s often do, with books that we have never read and have no thought of reading; it would not greatly matter. If the subject in hand were nothing but a text-book or an encyclopædia, a letter from an inquisitive correspondent, or a play of marionettes, the talk about it would be literature. And real literature, served to us fresh every Sunday morning! The very thought is an exhilaration. We are not to be understood as implying that excellent literary criticism is not more or less often written in English, and on both sides of the water. The question is not of moderately sound, reasonably instructive, workmanlike articles, proper enough to be read and forgotten, but of essays full of charm, full of genius, full of poetry,--essays in which, to adapt a saying of Thoreau, we do _not_ miss the hue of the mind, essays that of themselves are in the truest sense little masterpieces of the literary art.

He had never thought of doing such things. His old publisher, Calmann Lévy, “rather friend than publisher,” who had welcomed him in his obscurity, and smiled at his first humble successes, had for years been chiding his indolence and dunning him for another book. But he was in love with his idle ways and distrustful of his capacity. He was then living those “happy years without writing,” of which we have seen him cherishing so fond a remembrance. But now came the manager of “Le Temps,” a man accustomed to have his way, and behold, the dreamer’s pen is again covering paper. “I believe you have a talisman,” the new critic says to the editor, in dedicating to him the first of the four resulting volumes. “You do whatever you will. You have made of me a periodical and regular writer. You have triumphed over my indolence. You have utilized my reveries and coined my wits into gold. I hold you for an incomparable economist.”

Such are the services of journalism to literature! A man never writes better, or more easily, than when regular work--not too pressing--keeps his hand in play. So Sir Walter Scott, hag-ridden by debt, if he finished a novel in the morning began another in the afternoon, because, as he explained, it was less difficult to keep the machine running than to start it again after a rest.

In this same dedicatory epistle to M. Hébrard are to be found some of the brightest and most characteristic things that M. Anatole France has ever written about his own nature and habits, as well as about his ideas of critics and criticism. For talking about himself, as we have before said, and as the reader must have discovered even from our few quotations, he has the prettiest kind of talent. “You are very easy to live with,” he tells M. Hébrard. “You never find fault with me. But I do not flatter myself. You saw at once that nothing great was to be expected, and that it was best not to torment me. For that reason you left me to say what I pleased. One day you remarked of me to a common friend,--

“‘He is a mocking Benedictine.’

“We understand ourselves very imperfectly, but I think your definition is a good one. I seem to myself to be a philosophical monk. At heart I belong to an _abbaye de Thélème_, where the rule is comfortable and obedience easy, where one has no great degree of faith, perhaps, but is sure to be very pious.”

There is nobody like a skeptic, he continues (he is echoing Montaigne), for always observing the moralities and being a good citizen. “A skeptic never rebels against existing laws, because he has no expectation that any power will be able to make good ones. He knows that much must be pardoned to the Republic;” that rulers at the best count for little; that, as Montaigne said, most things in this world do themselves, the Fates finding the way. Still he advises his manager never to confide his political columns to any Thelemite. The gentle spirit of melancholy that he would spread over everything would be a discouragement to honest readers. Ministers are not to be sustained by philosophy. “As for myself,” he adds, “I maintain a suitable modesty and restrict myself to criticism.”

And then, in two sentences, one of which has attained almost to the rank of a familiar quotation, he defines criticism and the critic.

“As I understand it, and as you allow me to practice it, criticism, like philosophy and history, is a sort of romance, and all romance, rightly taken, is an autobiography. The good critic is he who narrates the adventures of his own mind in its intercourse with masterpieces.”

To be quite frank, he declares, the critic should begin his discourse by saying: “Gentlemen, I am going to speak about myself apropos of Shakespeare, apropos of Racine, or of Pascal, or of Goethe. It is a fine occasion.”

And here, of course, the battle is joined between the two schools of critics: the subjective, or impressionistic, so called, on one side, and the objective, or scientific, so called, on the other.

Into this controversy (which, like many another, may yet turn out to be concerned with words rather than with things) we feel no call to enter. Like our author himself, we desire to maintain the modesty that is fitting to us. We content ourselves, therefore, with some random comments upon “La Vie Littéraire,” which to our taste is one of the most delightfully readable books of recent times. Having read it and reread it, we are (somewhat ignorantly, to be sure, having nothing like an exhaustive acquaintance with universal current literature) very much of Mr. Edmund Gosse’s opinion when he says of M. Anatole France that he is perhaps “the most interesting intelligence at this moment working in the field of letters.” The word “perhaps,” it will be noticed, is outside the double commas. A genuinely modest man likes to make a show of his modesty even in his use of quotations.