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their reason for existing in the battles of others." But to Fleur, half-English, half-French, the child of a loveless marriage and a worshipping father, this was not enough. She could no longer, like her ancestors, take things for granted; the new generation in being had something of Hamlet's questing and questioning spirit. It revolted against the old values; it would no longer worship the golden calf. But one feels at heart that it rebelled, not against the calf, but against the gold; it rejected the old god, but had not strength enough to fashion the new.

In the long run then one knows that Fleur will fall back on the love of her child; the other values will be relative, and will indeed only take on value in comparison with her achieved absolute of life and the succession of life. She will not utterly reject the things her father Soames worshipped, but she will realise that property was made for man, not man for property. That may not be the ultimate truth, but at least it will be true for Fleur.

A. WYATT TILBY

1.

ANATOLE FRANCE.

1885.

La

1895.

Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard. 1881. Le Livre de Mon Ami. La Vie Littéraire. Four Vols. 1888-92. Thais. 1890. Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque. 1893. Le Jardin d'Epicure. Pierre Nozière. 1899. L'Ile des Pingouins. 1908. Le Génie Latin. 1913. La Révolte des Anges. 1914. Le Petit Pierre. 1918. La Vie en Fleur. 1922. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. La Nouvelle Revue Française. 1st June and 1st November, 1924. 3. La Revue Universelle. 1st and 15th November, 1924.

2.

4.

Anatole France, the Man and his Work. An Essay in Critical Biography.
By J. LEWIS MAY. The Bodley Head. 1924.

THERE

HERE is a story extant that Anatole France in his young days had signed a contract with a publisher, presumably Alphonse Lemerre, to write an introduction to an édition de luxe of Molière. The contract remained for a long time unfulfilled. Other work intervened, and in the meantime Anatole France had achieved some measure of fame. He was beginning to be talked about; his name was becoming, so to speak, an asset, and Lemerre suddenly made up his mind to hold him to his contract. He sent him a peremptory summons to fulfil his engagement and gave him forty-eight hours in which to comply. Anatole France, in some perturbation, betook himself to his legal adviser, who was none other than M. Raymond Poincaré, to ask him what he should do in the circumstances. "But why not let him have his Introduction?" replied M. Poincaré. Anatole France protested, "He wants five thousand words, and only gives me forty-eight hours in which to write them." Well, what of that? was the retort. "You're a writer of genius. Come! Plant yourself in that chair and take a pen. Good! Now write what I dictate. 'Molière was a Parisian . . .' There is your beginning. Now go on yourself." Anatole France went on to such good purpose that he finished his essay within the stipulated period; and, as anyone who reads it may see-it is reprinted in the volume entitled “ Le Génie Latin ”—it did not suffer in the least from the pressure under which it was written.

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"Molière was a Parisian." If that be true of Molière, it is assuredly no less so of Anatole France. He did, in fact, foster

and cultivate that attitude towards life, those qualities of taste, those habits of thought to which the French themselves are wont to give the name Parisianisme. "It does not seem possible to me (he writes on a familiar page) that a man should have an altogether common cast of mind whose young days were passed round about the quays of Paris, hard by the Palais Mazarin, where the eye looks across to the Louvre and the Tuileries, and where the glorious river Seine flows on amid the towers and turrets and spires of old Paris." Neither Dickens nor Lamb himself, who longed to be buried where he might hear the roar of the traffic in the Strand, was more of a Londoner than was Anatole France a son of Paris. The visible elegance and symmetry of Paris were mirrored in the grace and charm of his mind, and find expression in the clarté, the balance, the mesure and the harmony of his literary style. M. Paul Painlevé rightly calls him :

L'écrivain le plus purement français, impeccable et incorruptible gardien de notre langue, dont mainte phrase fluide est comme un sortilège et un enchantement; lui, un fils, s'il en fut, des civilisations méditerranéennes ; lui, dont l'œuvre a comme un reflet de ces mers ensoleillées, de ces paysages aux nobles lignes où la pensée latine a pris naissance, réalise ce miracle d'être, en même temps, l'écrivain du siècle qui, malgré les différences de langue et de culture, a exercé une influence dominatrice sur la pensée et la sensibilité de toutes les nations.

How then does it come about that this consummate efflorescence of the Gallic spirit, this Parisian of Parisians, to whom the very stones of his beloved city whispered "a musical but melancholy chime," has so swiftly traversed the frontiers of his own country and become a household word among people as divergent as can well be imagined from his own? How comes it that, steeped in the traditions of that culture which flourished along the shores of the sunlit Mediterranean, he should so have captivated the hearts and minds, not only of the peoples of the Latin race, for that indeed is not unnatural, but of England and America and Russia; so have permeated and taken a hold of them that when they read him they exclaim, " He might be one of our own countrymen "?

Nor is that the whole of the question, for Anatole France was not only a Parisian but a very learned Parisian, an érudit. He was moulded in the classical tradition; his mind was informed by the

study of those literae humaniores which seem in these hurrying days to be going somewhat out of fashion. Even as a little boy he "could feel and appreciate the strength and majesty of old Rome, the splendours of the poetry of antiquity"; the cadences of Virgil haunted him like a passion. Yet, scholar as he was, his appeal is not only to the learned. He possesses that strange gift, that prerogative of genius, which makes a man say to himself as he reads him: "If I had been a writer I should have written that." One of Newman's biographers (Canon William Berry) speaking of the " Apologia," says that as it was given to the world Thursday after Thursday it appeared in all hands, was read in clubs, in drawing rooms, by clerks on the tops of omnibuses, in railway trains. The appeal of Anatole France is at least as wide.

How then can this be accounted for? How is it that people so diverse as, for example, Professor George Saintsbury and a Bermondsey factory hand find him so welcome, so rich a companion? How is it that this most national of writers is at the same time the most universal? How is it that of all recent French writers of high rank he has secured a wider and probably a more enduring popularity than any other? I said of all French writers; perhaps I might have said of all foreign writers, not excepting even Tolstoy. During the last half-century, France has been especially prolific in writers of acknowledged eminence. But none of these writers, though gifted in divers ways, and deservedly enjoying a great reputation among their own countrymen, and among such readers outside France who specialise in French literature, none of these writers can be said to have installed himself in the heart of the great English reading public with anything like the same completeness as Anatole France. Not Balzac, nor Flaubert, nor Maupassant, can boast of making so universal a conquest as Anatole France, or lay claim to the note of catholicity which distinguishes his work.

"The time may come (says M. Albert Thibaudet) when Anatole France, sharing the fate of Boileau, will lose his European influence and be understood only in France. One day perhaps the lovers of Anatole France, making common cause with the friends of Boileau, may be like the last surviving Catholics mentioned in 'Sur la Pierre Blanche.' Reduced to a few hundred, they acknowledged as their Pope, Pius XLV, dyer and cleaner in the Via del Orso." "But (continues M. Thibaudet) if

such a day is in store, it has certainly not yet come, and to-day, of all our writers Anatole France is the most European, the most universal, the most generally admired in every latitude by the freemasonry of culture." He goes on to explain the reason of this far-flung dominion exercised by Anatole France over the cultured of all nations. The reason, he says, is quite simple. Culture, au sens ample et solide du mot," culture means the humaner letters, Greek and Latin; and Greek and Latin, he says, have composed down to the nineteenth century the spiritual subsistence of the Western world. Pour aimer Anatole France, il est besoin moins d'une éducation française particulière, que d'une éducation classique générale. Ce sont les maîtres de grec et de latin qui, en Europe et Amérique, lui forment indirectement des lecteurs."

But I am afraid this hardly accounts for the whole of the matter. It explains no doubt, the admiration of Professor Saintsbury for the "Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque," or "La Révolte des Anges," but scarcely the enthusiasm of a tea-shop waitress who, seeing M. Nicolas Ségur's book, "Conversations avec Anatole France," beside me on the table, blushingly avowed that she, too, was a great admirer of Anatole France and that her favourite reading was "The Garden of Epicurus. This reader, at any rate, who had made acquaintance with the works of Anatole France at a Socialist Summer School, was innocent of any tincture of classical culture. We must therefore look elsewhere for the explanation of his popularity than in the tradition" of the good old fortifying classical curriculum."

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As it happens, there is another writer of whom one might say, a priori, that an understanding of the classics, at all events of Latin, would be a necessary antecedent to the appreciation of his work, but who, in fact, is as popular with the learned as with the unlearned, and that is Charles Lamb. There are, indeed, few writers whose work is more deeply impregnated with the flavour of the classics than the author of the gentle Elia; none of whom one would be more tempted to say: "It's no good reading him unless you know, or have known, some Latin "know or have known, for even if your stock of Latin has so shrunk as to be scarcely visible to the naked eye, the study of it leaves a bouquet, an aroma behind it, like that which haunts whiskey that has been matured in a sherry cask; it is the faint suggestion of

VOL. 241. NO. 492.

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