I INTRODUCTORY

Irony is for the ironic. He has shown himself military at the last, but I believe Anatole France would have smiled, a little wistfully, if told that a young man had sentenced himself to read every one of his works and to write a book about them while there raged round him a European War. Such an atmosphere may seem unpropitious, but it was not really so; it was an atmosphere of paradox; it was odd to analyse the great pacifist while Europe writhed in conflict; still odder to think of him as throwing aside his pen and at the age of seventy taking up his forsworn sword. But in the case of Anatole France the work is as great as the man and it afforded me a contrast with patriotism. This background of patriotism, so queerly compounded of beer, sweat, fine courage, self-sacrifice, self-interest, of insane prejudices, heavy ignorances and melting heroisms, was so exactly what I needed to bring out the dapper quality of the great Frenchman’s thought. No muddled impulses here, but a clear, cold light which reveals, together with all that is beautiful, all that is ugly; here a brain that is without illusions, and yet without bitterness; that is not taken in by flags, and priests, and frontiers, yet at the same time can love priests for their faith, flags for their symbolism, frontiers for the contrasts they create in man. In On Life and Letters, Anatole France tells us that during the war of 1870 he sat practically under the fire of the German guns, with M. F. Calmette, reading Virgil. I did not write these lines under the fire of the German guns but, in the hectic atmosphere of war-time, to write about Anatole France created in me no doubt much the same kind of feeling as was his that day.

I do not apologise for the egotism which is already invading this monograph, and I suppose I shall remain egotistic as I go on. For the works of Anatole France are too bulky, too many to be appraised one by one; they raise so many issues that a fat quarto volume would hardly suffice to analyse all, and it would be rather dull. Believing that criticism is “the adventures of the soul among masterpieces,” I am much more inclined to give the adventures of my intellect (claiming no soul) among the works of Anatole France. I have read very little about him, indeed but one book, by Mr Georg Brandes, and in the early part of 1914 a number of articles when Anatole France paid us a visit. They are very distressing, those articles, as they appear to have been written mainly by men who do not know what they are talking about, but can talk about it exactly to the extent of a column. I refer to the alleged evolution of Anatole France, of which something must be said a little further on.

The temptation to translate long quotations was very great, for translation is a challenging exercise and an uneasy, but, so far as possible, I have resisted it. I think it only fair to say that, as a rule, I have not translated very closely, but attempted to render selected passages, fitting the style to the matter; that is, for philosophic or descriptive passages I have, as much as possible, used Latinised English; for the more familiar portions I have drawn upon our slender stock of Anglo-Saxon.1 As for the classifications, Anatole France satirist, critic, politician, philosopher, etc., they are necessarily rather rough; they overlap because not one of his books is one thing, and one thing only. In that direction too I must claim the reader’s indulgence.

1I should like to say in this respect that I am greatly indebted to Mr John Lane, who owns the British copyright of most of the works of Anatole France, for leave not only to quote portions of his translations, but also to retranslate and condense the French text. A full list of the English titles of the works will be found at the end of this volume.

Yet another word: I come neither to bury Anatole France nor to praise him; there is in one-man criticism a danger that it should be too favourable, for the critic tends to choose as a subject an author whom he whole-heartedly worships. Now I do not worship Anatole France; I have had to read every one of his works over again in the last few weeks, and if there is anything calculated to make one hate a writer for evermore it is to read all his works one after the other. People are afraid to criticise Anatole France adversely; he seems to have attained the position now accorded to Galileo (who was tortured), to Joan of Arc (who was burned), to Wagner (who was hooted), to everybody, in fact, who ever did anything worth while. In his early years, when de Maupassant, Zola, Daudet, were alive, he was ignored; everything was done to keep him down: the Académie Française went so far as to give him a prize. But times have changed; Anatole France is acclaimed all over the world; everybody quotes him, and those who cannot quote him quote his name; he is above criticism. This would be very bad for him if he were not also above adulation. People dare not say the things which should be obvious: that he repeats himself; that he is sentimental; that his novels are, from the point of view of French technique, incoherent; that, as expressed by his characters, his conception of love is rather disgusting; in fact, they take all the humanity out of him by endowing him with all the graces; they erect to him a statue which represents him just about as much as the sort of statue they occasionally put up to some highly respectable politician whom they depict stark naked, and beautiful as a young discobolus.

The reason probably is that it is not enough to understand Anatole France; one also has to understand the French, the gay, sensual, garrulous French of the Middle Ages, the gay, sensual, courteous French of the seventeenth century, the gay, sensual, cynical French of Voltairian times, and the sensual, cynical French of to-day. Anatole France is all these, a sort of historical congress of French epochs, a retrospective exhibition of French mentalities. That perhaps explains the confusion which reigns in the minds of a great many people as to his alleged evolution from reaction to red socialism, a confusion so great that it seems to have touched even Mr Georg Brandes.

It is not wonderful that Anatole France should be so representative, for he is a provincial by extraction, a Parisian by birth and environment. The whole of his biography is revealed in his books, so it is enough to say that he was born in 1844, in the Quarter (that was inevitable), that he grew up in his father’s old bookshop near the quays of the Seine, listening, as he grew up, sometimes to the talk of republicans, for those were the days of the Second Empire, much more often to that of elegant half-worldling abbés and aristocrats, for his father was a pronounced Royalist and Catholic, as was also his mother.... Old books, good talk, and the Seine lazily flowing under the plane-trees before there were steam trams. It is all very like Anatole France, like the four volumes of Contemporary History where the bookshop is the centre, like Pierre Nozière and My Friend’s Book. Then little France (whose real name is Thibault) went to the Collège Stanislas to be brought up as a good Royalist child. But he did not do particularly well there, thus bearing out the legend of the prize boy. Notably he loafed. Anatole France in life has always loafed, which is natural enough in one who was born near bridges. Who would not loaf who has a flowing river to watch? It might be said that Anatole France has loafed through thirty-five volumes.

As he grew up he accomplished desultory tasks, he taught, he wrote articles for the papers; in 1868 he published his study of Alfred de Vigny; in 1873 and 1876 he gave us two volumes of verse, Poèmes Dorés and Les Noces Corinthiennes. Not very startling or attractive verse; however deep Anatole France’s poetic feeling, he has never approached greatness as a poet, perhaps because he was always too calm, too detached, because so seldom did his eye in fine frenzy roll. Only when at last, in 1879, he published his first work of creative prose, two longish stories, Jocasta and The Famished Cat, followed, two years later, by The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard, and in 1882 by Les Désirs de Jean Servien,2 was born the Anatole France we know to-day.

2The title is given in English if the work has been translated, in French if it has not.

I cannot lay too much stress upon that. Anatole France was potentially in 1881 what he is now. It has continually been suggested that, up to 1898 and the revival of the Dreyfus case, Anatole France was a reactionary, a clerical, an anti-democrat; that, somehow, in an unexplained manner, he underwent a change of heart and suddenly turned into a humanitarian socialist; and a few bold folk hinted, when The Gods are Athirst appeared in 1913, that Anatole France, because he painted a dreadful and therefore not over-kind picture of the French Revolution, had reacted again. Briefly: the genius as weathercock. It has even been suggested that Anatole France wrote this reactionary book to make his peace with the respectable classes and to get into the Académie Française: the answer is that Anatole France was a member of that august body seventeen years before the publication of the book.

An examination of Anatole France’s early works is vital to this question, notably of Jocasta, which has very little to do with the myth, for there is no Œdipus to murder his father and marry his mother; Anatole France is too modern for that. It is a queer, horrible story of the daughter of a shady middleman who, instead of marrying the young doctor she loves, weds a wealthy and sinister old Englishman, whom, to her knowledge, his valet murders. Fearing discovery and haunted by remorse (the Furies), emulating Jocasta, she hangs herself. This story would hardly be worth mentioning save for its fine literary style and its high characterisation of Fellaire, the solemn, kindly, bumptious, sentimental middleman, of Haviland, the dry and methodical collector, if already here Anatole France were not at the age of thirty-five indicating what he would become. For he makes a journalist say in conclusion, after discussing the immortality of the soul and deciding that it is really a very complicated question: “Fortunately the Almighty is not a subject for an up-to-date par.”

In the second story, The Famished Cat, where again we have the quite magical picture of Godet-Laterasse, the seedy revolutionary, and of the absurd people concerned with absurd arts at the Famished Cat tavern, we find another incarnation of the future Anatole France: the sculptor Labanne, lazy, ironic, who moralises on art rather as will Choulette in The Red Lily, fifteen years later. But it is in The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard that Anatole France most clearly indicates his own future. This is just the straggling story of Bonnard, the old professor, who observes the world, interested in women, Benedictine chronicles, the Arc de Triomphe, cats and the love affairs of fourteenth-century queens. The old gentleman watches over the granddaughter of one whom he loved but never married. He behaves quite quixotically, protects her against a schoolmistress who ill treats her; at last he kidnaps her to make her happy, and all ends well in spite of a little tragedy when the girl marries and old Bonnard sells his books to give her a dowry. It is all most incoherent, and one never quite knows what Sylvestre Bonnard’s crime was; it may be the abduction (for old Bonnard, learned in the law of the sixth century, knows nothing of the Code Napoleon), or it may be, which is much more likely, that when he sells his books there are some he cannot bear to part with, even to afford his ward a dowry, and that he goes by night now and then to steal a few of them from the pile. The whole story is full of charm, and Mr Georg Brandes is unjust when he describes it as a simple tale. It is much more than that: it singularly reveals Anatole France himself, for here we have a man aged thirty-six writing as a kindly, rather cynical, faintly ironic old gentleman, fond of the classics and of humanity. Children make him sentimental; he lectures his cat on immortal truth. He says: “I have always preferred the folly of passion to the wisdom of indifference.” And that is true, only one feels that he loves best the folly of passion when it afflicts others. The book ends on a melancholic note, which is perhaps not so melancholic as it seems, for it brings out life passing by, all golden and bloody, as an old, old ship with a sumptuous figurehead, with ragged silken sails, carrying the embalmed corpses of those who first signed on, and their own sons growing up, full of sap, their thick hair streaming in the wind. Already in this book Anatole France is gentle. He is remorseful because “he has made fun of an unhappy man”; he is full of pity for a beggar-boy who will not accept a bit of gingerbread, and says: “He dares not touch it: in virtue of precocious experience he does not believe in happiness.” He states a general theory: the time that God gives each one of us is as a precious fabric which we embroider as well as we may. This man of thirty-six is already old; he has laid his hand on the head of man as if he were a little child, and said: “Creature that thinkest to find eternity in the intensity of thy sufferings, in their permanence, in the impossibility of thy loves, and the greatness of thy charms; oh, little creature on this blind world, I, old man, old God, who have seen so many worlds like this one busily spinning, let me beg thee be not so urgent, so hot, so young. For I am old, old as truth, and I know the shortness of thy pains.”

Who is Sylvestre Bonnard? Sylvestre Bonnard is Bergeret, is Coignard, is Brotteaux, he is the first of all those nice old gentlemen who pass through the pages of Anatole France. He has never changed; he was born like a young rat in a book-case, and so he remained. Those old gentlemen believe in service, resignation; they are tolerant and indulgent, and are always ready to say when the time comes, to any God you prefer, for they don’t mind: “Et nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine.”

The philosophical humanitarian who was to defend Dreyfus existed, then, in 1881; the subsidiary motives existed too in those years. For instance, in My Friend’s Book (1885) the small boy says: “I saw my father, my mother and the maid as very gentle giants who had witnessed the birth of the world, immutable, everlasting, unique of their kind.” That is exactly what the little dog, Riquet, thinks of man in general and what Anatole France perfidiously allows us to conclude man has always thought of God. Already he is cynical, and yet smiling, for he says: “I have faith no longer in my old friend, life: yet I still love it.” But there is in this book a more important indication of the man to come; it is not only the alleged Socialist of 1898 that already exists, but the passionate pagan of 1914. In My Friend’s Book he takes a little girl to a Punch and Judy show. Punch kills the devil, and Pierre Nozière (Anatole France) remarks: “The devil dead, good-bye sin. Maybe beauty, this ally of the devil, will vanish with him. Maybe we shall not again see the flowers that intoxicate and the eyes that slay.” Any student of Anatole France will realise that in 1885 the author was already expressing what he would state more fully in 1914 in The Revolt of the Angels—namely, his fear and hatred of ascetic, beauty-hating, death-desirous Christianity.

And there is more: forgive me if I paint the lily a little, but others have painted it and in colours which displease me. The alleged reactionary of The Gods are Athirst, the man who was supposed to have gone back in 1914 upon the humanitarian and republican sentiments of the Dreyfus period, that man was, in 1882, in Les Désirs de Jean Servien (a thoroughly second-rate novelette), painting an absurd revolutionary. The Commune reigns; he shows the hero the people rioting in the Luxembourg Gardens, and says: “M. Servien, look upon this scene and never forget it: here is a free people. Indeed the citizens were walking upon the grass, plucking flowers in the beds, and breaking off the branches of the trees.” Anatole France had in those days few illusions as to the behaviour of free peoples! And again in the short stories which make up Mother of Pearl (1892) one is oppressed by Anatole France’s hatred of the revolutionaries, their brute ignorance, vanity, stupidity, their mean revengefulness, and their silly imitation of Roman attitudes.

Anatole France is what he was, and if he seems to have changed now and then, or to have been inconsistent, it is because he is a developed human being, a rare bird. He has not cut out his views as with a stencil; they are fluid, they overlap, and he can hold simultaneously two entirely divergent views. I submit that any man of high intellectual development tends to hold two views upon one topic. One view is that of his instinct, the other is that of his reason. In the case of Anatole France the instinct is always hedonistic; he is a pagan; he loves Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, and even the Catholic Church, for their beauty; he is fond of all the good things of the world, beautiful women, flowers, sweetmeats; of all the fine, disdainful aristocratic ideas of the artists and the philosophers.... But there is what may be called his social conscience, which is utilitarian and Socialistic. That conscience tells him that however much beauty he may extract from it, this world, filled with wars, with cruelties, with factories, with ugly houses and ugly clothes, with mean prejudices, is a world for which he is responsible because he is a man. The dream of that ugly world will not let him sleep easily upon his rose-decked couch. There is the conflict which has puzzled so many of his readers; sometimes an Epicurean, at other times a sort of Lloyd Georgeite is apparent. This does not mean that Anatole France is throwing over any ideas; he is merely being more or less influenced by one side of his own self. His love of humanity has always made it difficult for him to enjoy the fruit he raised to his mouth if it occurred to him just then that other mouths might go hungry.