Contributors to the October Review LEWIS PIAGET SHANKS is a member of the faculty in the University of Pennsylvania. HARRY T. BAKER is a member of the faculty in the University of Illinois. MABEL L. ROBINSON is connected with the Carnegie Foundation in New York City. NORMAN FOERSTER is Professor of English in the University of North Carolina. HAROLD BRUCE is a member of the faculty in the University of California. JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH lives in New York. THOMAS F. BROCKHURST lives in Boston. EDWARD RAYMOND TURNER is a professor of history in the University of Michigan. Statement of the Ownership, Management, etc., of The Sewanee Review, published Quarterly at Sewanee, Tennessee, required by the Act of Congress of August 24, 1912: Editor, John M. McBryde, Jr., Sewanee, Tenn.; Secretary-Treasurer, James C. Preston, Sewanee, Tenn.; Publisher and Owner, THE SEWANEE REVIEW, Sewanee, Tenn., a corporation not for profit, incorporated under the laws of the State of Tennessee; no stock issued. (Signed) JAS. C. PRESTON, Secretary-Treasurer. Sworn to and subscribed before me this 4th day of Octoder, 1917. (SEAL) My commission expires Oct. 12, 1920. THE TURNING-POINT WITH ANATOLE FRANCE In the early days of the world-war, the dean of French letters offered himself for enlistment. We were surprised, not merely because he was seventy, but because he was a pacifist: for many years he had preached socialism and the brotherhood of man. We were surprised because he was Anatole France. But scarcely twenty-five years before, the present Radical-Socialist had been merely a skeptic, an intellectual hedonist, a dilettante: in 1886 this dreamer of reform had written the nihilistic pages of Thais. So the heroic inconsistency of 1914 is only a part of a greater problem: How did the skeptic become a man of action? Is there any development in the work of his cloister daysanything besides the dilettante in his literary criticism? In any case, these essays, extending over fifteen years, will give us the best early portrait of the man. For with all his subjectivity, Anatole France is essentially a critic. If, like so many masters of French prose, he began as a poet, his slender volume of Parnassian verse is far less a product of feeling than of philosophic thought- far less lyrical than critical. Like his first Naturalistic novels, Les Poèmes dorés (1873) shows us an Anatole France of positive beliefs, real convictions, like those of his age. No man escapes the influence of his environment. Reaching his majority in 1865, with the French version of Darwin but three years old, with Taine's English Literature and the writings of Claude Bernard brand-new in every bookstore, Anatole France was like all his contemporaries foredoomed to believe in Science. "In those days we were Darwinians, evolutionists," says he in the Discours aux Étudiants, "already working to get from Lamarck and Darwin a philosophy, rules of life, sociologic laws, a constitution." And since even before this Leconte de Lisle had shown Science how to be poetic, gilding Determinism with the Hindu doctrine of Eternal Law and Change, so Anatole France espoused the Illusion celebrated in Les Poèmes antiques. Like his master he too turns agnosticism into art, though he looks less toward India than to Greece and the Greek skeptics. Hence the smiling fatalistic pantheism of Les Poèmes dorés, rich in a golden lucent intellectuality. Not here, perhaps, but later, did Anatole France show the poet that is in him. Thaïs and the Italian tales vindicated the promise of Les Poèmes dorés. None but a poet could have dreamed such splendid pictures of antiquity or of the Renaissance, none but a poet could have re-lived the horrors and heroism of the Revolution. But even then he is not merely a poet. To realize for us these visions of a dead past, to make them clear and convincing as a modern novel, took more than mere imagination. Call it clairvoyance if you will: such clairvoyance is really historical insight based on critical scholarship. The story-teller is a poet, but he is also the keenest of critics. Too keen, perhaps, for great lyricism. In any case, he caught too early the trick of rationalizing emotion. If Le Livre de mon Ami is a confession, Anatole France was even as a boy turning his experience into thought. Brought up in a Jesuit school, carefully trained in dialectic, this child of Renan grew up a questioner of things, a thinker, a critic. Naturally the poet must find expression first. But even as he scribbled his first verses, his other talent was leading him to biography. As early as 1868, he published a study of the Parnassian avatar, Alfred de Vigny, and Lemierre admitted his gift by making him editor of a series of French classics. So he wrote the lives of many a favorite French author, now collected and reprinted in Génie latin. In 1874 Lemierre published the first of these, a study of Racine; in '77 studies of Bernardin de St. Pierre, Prévost, and Molière; in '78, Le Sage; in '79, Margaret of Navarre, Sainte-Beuve, and Chateaubriand. From '81 to '90, his growing success as a novelist reduced the list to Scarron, Madame de Lafayette, La Fontaine, and Benjamin Constant. The rest of Génie latin is not anterior to La Vie littéraire. It is good to have these Juvenilia reprinted. They are the beginnings of the critic who, for good or evil, broke the last bonds of criticism. They are not scholarly biographies, rigidly careful and minute. But they are real portraits; and if detail is slurred, it is to give richer color and atmosphere. An artist rather than a scholar, the author finds the date less important than the adjective; and he plans his pictures for his canvas. To know the scholar's labors and to know when to forget them, is the mark of this humanist, and only such may wield a pen at all comparable to the sword. A little tact is not useless in the critic's trade. And Anatole France had more than a little. He knew that he was writing for the larger public, writing for those who usually neglect prefaces, and he hoped that he was writing to be read. He must divine his audience, possible readers of his future novels,- avoid the steeps of pedantry and the shoals of platitude. He must charm, and he had not yet learned the secret of charming by holding up the mirror to his changing moods. Ten years younger than the critic of Le Temps, he feels that he must take his subject seriously, yet he does find the secret of charming in vivid drawing and in a sympathetic touch. It is sympathy So this young First he takes in glimpses of It is sympathy which makes the portrait live. which leads the artist to the heart of his model. critic turns instinctively to types like himself. up his favorite Racine, and the portrait is rich the artist who drew it. With Racine, Anatole France knew "the charms of a pious education for the ardent young souls that it does not stifle." He too had known the malady of the cloister, its "dangerous gift of intermingling life and dreams to lose oneself therein." But when he adds that religion offers to voluptuous souls "la volupté de se perdre," we realize suddenly that this gentle classicist is also an admirer of Baudelaire! The 'prentice critic finds it hard not to read himself into his model. Be the subject well chosen, his own experience serves as a divining rod. So for Anatole France there is no contradiction in the mocking sallies of le tendre Racine: "The same 1 Génie latin, p. 139. |