E-Book, Englisch, Band 55, 208 Seiten
Reihe: Essential Novelists
a true gallic temperament
E-Book, Englisch, Band 55, 208 Seiten
Reihe: Essential Novelists
ISBN: 978-3-96858-762-2
Verlag: Tacet Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Anatole France (16 April 1844 12 October 1924) was a French poet, journalist, and successful novelist with several best-sellers. Ironic and skeptical, he was considered in his day the ideal French man of letters.
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Introduction.
“LET US LOVE THE BOOKS which please us,” observes that excellent French critic, Jules Lemaitre “and cease to trouble ourselves about classifications and schools of literature.” This generous exhortation seems especially appropriate in the case of Anatole France. The author of “Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard” is not classifiable, though it would be difficult to name any other modern French writer by whom the finer emotions have been touched with equal delicacy and sympathetic exquisiteness. If by Realism we mean Truth, which alone gives value to any study of human nature, we have in Anatole France a very dainty realist; if by Romanticism we understand that unconscious tendency of the artist to elevate truth itself beyond the range of the familiar, and into the emotional realm of aspiration, then Anatole France is betimes a romantic. And, nevertheless, as a literary figure he stands alone: neither by his distinctly Parisian refinement of method, nor yet by any definite characteristic of style, can he be successfully attached to any special group of writers. He is essentially of Paris, indeed; his literary training could have been acquired in no other atmosphere: his light grace of emotional analysis, his artistic epicureanism, the vividness and quickness of his sensations, are French as his name. But he has followed no school traditions; and the charm of his art, at once so impersonal and sympathetic, is wholly his own. How marvellously well the author has succeeded in disguising himself! It is extremely difficult to believe that the diary of Sylvestre Bonnard could have been written by a younger man; yet the delightful octogenarian is certainly a young man’s dream. M. Anatole France belongs to a period of change, a period in which a new science and a new philosophy have transfigured the world of ideas with unprecedented suddenness. All the arts have been more or less influenced by new modes of thought, reflecting the exaggerated materialism of an era of transition. The reaction is now setting in; the creative work of fine minds already reveals that the Art of the Future must be that which appeals to the higher emotions alone. Material Nature has already begun to lure less, and human nature to gladden more; the knowledge of Spiritual Evolution follows luminously upon our recognition of Physical Evolution; and the horizon of human fellowship expands for us with each fresh acquisition of knowledge, as the sky-circle expands to those who climb a height. The works of fiction that will live are not the creations of men who have blasphemed the human heart, but of men who, like Anatoie France, have risen above the literary tendencies of their generation, never doubting humanity, and keeping their pages irreproachably pure. In the art of Anatoie France there is no sensuousness: his study is altogether of the nobler emotions. “What the pessimistic coarseness of self — called “Naturalism” has proven itself totally unable to feel, he paints for us truthfully, simply, and touchingly, the charm of age, in all its gentleness, lovableness, and indulgent wisdom. The dear old man who talks about his books to his cat, who has remained for fifty years true to the memory of the girl he could not win, and who, in spite of his world-wide reputation for scholarship, finds himself so totally helpless in all business matters, and so completely at the mercy of his own generous impulses, may be, indeed, as the most detestable Mademoiselle Prefere observes, “ a child “; but his childishness is only the delightful freshness of a pure and simple heart which could never become aged. His artless surprise at the malevolence of evil minds, his tolerations of juvenile impertinence, his beautiful comprehension of the value of life and the sweetness of youth, his self-disparagements and delightful compunctions of conscience, his absolute unselfishness and incapacity to nourish a resentment, his fine gentle irony which never wounds and always amuses: these, and many other traits, combine to make him one of the most intensely living figures created in modern French literature. It is quite impossible to imagine him as unreal; and, indeed, we feel to him as to some old friend unexpectedly met with after years of absence, whose face and voice are perfectly familiar, but whose name will not be remembered until he repeats it himself. “We might even imagine ourselves justified in doubting the statement of M. Lemaitre that Anatole France was not an old bachelor, but a comparatively young man, and a married man, when he imagined Sylvestre Bonnard; we might, in short, refuse to believe the book not strictly autobiographical, but for the reflection that its other personages live with the same vividness for us as does the Member of the Institute. Therese, the grim old housekeeper, so simple and faithful; Madame and Monsieur de Gabry, those delightful friends; the glorious, brutal, heroic Uncle Victor; the perfectly lovable Jeanne: these figures are not less sympathetic in their several roles. But it is not because M. Anatole France has rare power to create original characters, or to reflect for us something of the more recondite literary life of Paris, that his charming story will live. It is because of his far rarer power to deal with what is older than any art, and withal more young, and incomparably more precious: the beauty of what is beautiful in human emotion. And that writer who touches the spring of generous tears by some simple story of gratitude, of natural kindness, of gentle self-sacrifice, is surely more entitled to our love than the sculptor who shapes for us a dream of merely animal grace, or the painter who images for us, however richly, the young bloom of that form which is only the husk of Being! L. H. Part I— The Log
DECEMBER 24, 1849. I had put on my slippers and my dressing-gown. I wiped away a tear with which the north wind blowing over the quay had obscured my vision. A bright fire was leaping in the chimney of my study. Ice-crystals, shaped like fern-leaves, were sprouting over the windowpanes and concealed from me the Seine with its bridges and the Louvre of the Valois. I drew up my easy-chair to the hearth, and my table-volante, and took up so much of my place by the fire as Hamilcar deigned to allow me. Hamilcar was lying in front of the andirons, curled up on a cushion, with his nose between his paws. His thick fine fur rose and fell with his regular breathing. At my coming, he slowly slipped a glance of his agate eyes at me from between his half-opened lids, which he closed again almost at once, thinking to himself, “It is nothing; it is only my friend.” “Hamilcar,” I said to him, as I stretched my legs —“Hamilcar, somnolent Prince of the City of Books — thou guardian nocturnal! Like that Divine Cat who combated the impious in Heliopolis — in the night of the great combat — thou dost defend from vile nibblers those books which the old savant acquired at the cost of his slender savings and indefatigable zeal. Sleep, Hamilcar, softly as a sultana, in this library, that shelters thy military virtues; for verily in thy person are united the formidable aspect of a Tatar warrior and the slumbrous grace of a woman of the Orient. Sleep, thou heroic and voluptuous Hamilcar, while awaiting the moonlight hour in which the mice will come forth to dance before the Acta Sanctorum of the learned Bolandists!” The beginning of this discourse pleased Hamilcar, who accompanied it with a throat-sound like the song of a kettle on the fire. But as my voice waxed louder, Hamilcar notified me by lowering his ears and by wrinkling the striped skin of his brow that it was bad taste on my part so to declaim. “This old-book man,” evidently thought Hamilcar, “talks to no purpose at all while our housekeeper never utters a word which is not full of good sense, full of significance — containing either the announcement of a meal or the promise of a whipping. One knows what she says. But this old man puts together a lot of sounds signifying nothing.” So thought Hamilcar to himself. Leaving him to his reflections, I opened a book, which I began to read with interest; for it was a catalogue of manuscripts. I do not know any reading more easy, more fascinating, more delightful than that of a catalogue. The one which I was reading — edited in 1824 by Mr. Thompson, librarian to Sir Thomas Raleigh — sins, it is true, by excess of brevity, and does not offer that character of exactitude which the archivists of my own generation were the first to introduce into works upon diplomatics and paleography. It leaves a good deal to be desired and to be divined. This is perhaps why I find myself aware, while reading it, of a state of mind which in nature more imaginative than mine might be called reverie. I had allowed myself to drift away this gently upon the current of my thoughts, when my housekeeper announced, in a tone of ill-humor, that Monsieur Coccoz desired to speak with me. In fact, some one had slipped into the library after her. He was a little man — a poor little man of puny appearance, wearing a thin jacket. He approached me with a number of little bows and smiles. But he was very pale, and, although still young and alert, he looked ill. I thought as I looked at him, of a wounded squirrel. He carried under his arm a green toilette, which he put upon a chair; then unfastening the four corners of the toilette, he uncovered a heap of little yellow books. “Monsieur,” he then said to me, “I have not the honour to be known to you. I am a book-agent, Monsieur. I represent the leading houses of the...
