The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard: A Tale of Guilt (Living Time Nobel Prize Collection)

Excerpt from The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard

That excellent French critic, Jules Lemaitre, observes: "Let us love the books which please us 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 at times 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.

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