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SONG FROM MINSTREL LOVE'

H WELCOME, Sir Bolt, to me!

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And a welcome, Sir Arrow, to thee! But wherefore such pride

In your swift airy ride?

You're but splints of the ashen tree.
When once on earth lying,
There's an end of your flying!

Lullaby! lullaby! lullaby!
But we freshly will wing you
And back again swing you,
And teach you to wend

To your Moorish friend.

Sir Bolt, you have oft been here;
And Sir Arrow, you've often flown near;
But still from pure haste

All your courage would waste
On the earth and the streamlet clear.
What! over all leaping,

In shame are you sleeping?

Lullaby! lullaby! lullaby!

Or if you smote one,
'Twas but darklingly done,
As the grain that winds fling

To the bird on the wing.

ANATOLE FRANCE

(1844-) 1925

BY CURTIS HIDDEN PAGE

NATOLE FRANCE stands in the front rank of contemporary French writers. He probably excels in more different fields than

any other writer of to-day: in the essay and the novel, the short story and the nouvelle, in history, biography, autobiography of various kinds, reflective writing, satire, and criticism; he has also done notable work in poetry and in the lighter and briefer forms of the drama.

He is complex and full of contradictions, yet direct, simple, and sincere. He combines cynicism and human sympathy, irony and pity, intellect and sensuality, mordant satire and generosity of judgment. He is a dilettante, yet a scholar; a skeptic, yet always ready to do battle for causes that he passionately believes in.

As a writer, he is of the direct lineage of Rabelais and Montaigne, of Molière and Pascal, of Voltaire and Musset; yet he is more modern than any adherent of the passing «schools,» and nearer to to-morrow than any futurist. His style is finished, artistic, almost self-conscious; but it is one of the most clear and natural styles ever written, even in France. His ideas and personality, never for a moment absent or even subordinated in his work, are always interesting, and almost always admirable.

He was born at Paris, April 16th, 1844. His father, Noël-France Thibault, had him christened Jacques-Anatole. The pen name, Anatole France, is therefore not, as has often been supposed, a somewhat pretentious attempt to identify himself with the character and spirit of the French nation (though his disciples may take it as accidentally symbolizing this identity), but a simple combination of part of his own given name with part of his father's. He got his early education in his father's book-shop on the Quai Voltaire, near the Institute of France; on the sidewalks along the Scine, lined with their boxes of second-hand books; and on the bridges, where he could loaf and watch those laziest things in life, the river and the fishermen. Like Stevenson, he has expressed the spirit of leisure through more than fifty industrious volumes, without being, like Stevenson, urged on by sentence of early death. His schooling was completed in the streets and cafés of the Latin Quarter; and in the Collège Stanislas, where a thorough general training of the mind, chiefly through the

medium of Latin, was still imposed upon all students, even the less industrious, to their lasting gratitude (see his essay (Pour le Latin,) in (La Vie littéraire,› Vol. i.). Later, he was employed in the Library of the Senate for a good many years, until his success as a writer made him independent. In 1895 he was made an Officer of the Legion of

Honor, and in 1896 elected to the French Academy.

His first literary work of any importance was a study of Alfred de Vigny, published in 1868. Vigny's noble pessimism, his artistic conscientiousness, his strength and reserve, naturally appealed to the young man who was just learning his art as a poet under the influence of Leconte de Lisle and the Parnassians, and who was to spend fully ten years of his life in devotion to poetry of the school of art for art's sake. He published (Les Poèmes dorés) in 1873, and (Les Noces corinthiennes) (a poem in dramatic form, later played at the Odéon) in 1876. The preface of the second work gives a characteristic expression of some of his ideas:

"In this book," he says, "I touch on great and delicate matters — matters of religion. I have dreamed over again the dream of faith; I have indulged in the illusion of a living belief. . . . I know there is no certitude except in science. . . . But it would be an unscientific idea to think that science can ever replace religion. So long as man shall suck the milk of his mother's breast, he will be consecrated in the temple and initiated into some divine mystery. He will dream dreams. And what matter though the dream be a lie, if only it is beautiful?»

The Poèmes dorés) is dedicated to Leconte de Lisle. It gives us charming pictures, especially from classical antiquity, in finished verse; but has little substance or imaginative force. A characteristic line is the last one of La Sagesse des Griffons,>

«Eternal vows of lips that live a day.»

His first important attempt in fiction was not published until he was thirty-five years old and was a small volume containing two nouvelles: (Jocasta,) and (The Famished Cat.> His first marked success, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard) (crowned by the French Academy), came in 1881. This was soon followed by The Desires of Jean Servien, 1882; and he was now fairly launched on his career as a writer of fiction. Important later works among those which most closely approach the novel as a type, were (Thaïs, 1890, and (The Red Lily,› 1894. He also began during these years the series of half-autobiographical works of fiction, with one of the best of them, full of pictures from his own youth, My Friend's Book, 1885; and the series of sketches and stories, of which (Balthasar, Pearl, 1892, are important examples.

1889, and Mother of

Meanwhile he had devoted himself even more assiduously to criticism, in which, probably without intending to do so, he founded a new school. The most important of his articles were collected into four volumes called Life and Letters) (La Vie littéraire), published in 1888, 1890, 1891, and 1892. His theory, so far as he has one, is best expressed in the Prefaces of the first two volumes. He is against the old-fashioned types of criticism: the dogmatic, that would judge and classify; the technical - he avows by this time, in spite of his early verse, that he is not interested in technique; the historical, that studies a work of art as the expression of an epoch and a race; the biographical, that studies chiefly the individual behind the work; and every other type that could be called in any sense objective. Anatole France maintains, or rather suggests, that the critic should give only his own impressions and reactions in the presence of a work of art; and that, strive as he will, he can do nothing else but this, more or less frankly and vividly:

"There is no such thing as objective criticism, any more than there is objective art; those who flatter themselves that they can put anything but themselves into their work are dupes of the most false illusion. In truth, we can never get out of ourselves that is our human fate. ... We are all shut up in ourselves, as in an everlasting prison. The best thing for us to do, methinks, is to accept this frightful fact with the best grace possible, and admit that we are talking of ourselves whenever we have not the strength to keep silence.

«To be honest, the critic should say: (Gentlemen, I am going to talk to you about myself, à propos of Shakespeare, Racine, Pascal, or Goethe. They offer an excellent occasion for doing so.)»

And again:

«Criticism, as I understand it, is a kind of novel written for the delight of wideawake and inquisitive minds; and every novel, if you understand it rightly, is an autobiography. The real critic is he who recounts the adventures of his soul among masterpieces,»

This summary of Anatole France's attitude and method in criticism expresses exactly his attitude toward life, and his method of treating his characters, in his later and most characteristic fiction. Apropos of his people and the events of their lives, he recounts his own opinions and the adventures of his soul. The stories are loosely constructed, and they often lack movement; but they have the unity of his own personality and ideas. No matter if they lead by wandering ways to no conclusion. He quotes with enthusiasm:

«Happy the man who, like Ulysses, has gone on wondrous journeys.»

This is what Anatole France himself has done in his later works of fiction. They are an Odyssey of the modern intellect.

Most important among them are the two series of books in which the Abbé Coignard and M. Bergeret, both representing Anatole France himself, play the leading rôles. The scene of the first series is laid in the early eighteenth century; it begins with (At the Sign of the Queen Pédauque) (La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque), and is continued in (The Opinions of M. Jérome Coignard) (Les Opinions de M. Jérome Coignard)), in the preface of which M. France gives a description of the Abbé Coignard, in phrases that are often applicable to himself:

«He despised men with loving kindness . . . It was his benevolence that made him satirize his fellowmen in their feelings, their philosophy, their science, and their institutions; for he wanted to show them that their childish nature has not imagined or built up anything that is worth attacking or defending very passionately. . . . The least developed of his faculties was the sense of veneration. . . . If we only judged each other with a charitable skepticism, quarrels would be less intense in this finest land on earth, and the teachings of Abbé Coignard would have contributed something to the universal good.»

Like the Abbé Coignard, Anatole France believes in virtue, but is tolerant of vice. In this he is the opposite of Rousseau, who was intolerant of vice (except his own) without having any real belief in virtue. The Abbé looks on at life, keen and humorous, cynical and pitying, almost always skeptical about men's motives, but always interested in them.

The second series deals with our own day, and has the general title (Contemporary History.) It consists of four volumes: The Elm Tree on the Mall, 1897; The Wicker Dummy,) 1897; (The Amethyst Ring, 1899; (M. Bergeret in Paris, 1901. In this series are contained many of Anatole France's best satirical and ironical pictures of life, and many of his best sayings, usually put in the mouth of Monsieur Bergeret, the provincial professor, who is transferred to Paris at the middle point of the series. We have the intrigues of a university town, the ecclesiastical intrigues of various candidates for a certain bishopric, the political intrigues of clericals, anti-clericals, freethinking republicans, Catholic Jews, and financiers. In the last two volumes the Dreyfus case plays a large rôle. In connection with it, M. France abandons his characteristic attitude of suspended judgment, and comes out strongly on the side of the Dreyfusards. Political satire occupies a large part of the later works, and is at its best in Penguin Island) (1908). The Penguins having been baptized by an overzealous missionary, God solves the difficult problem as to whether they have souls or not, by changing them into men. The history of this newly created human society contains many incidents suggestively characteristic of medieval and modern Europe. Perhaps no better example of Anatole France's manner in political satire could be found than the following description of Draco the Great, hero of the Middle Ages:

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