III PHILOSOPHER AND THEOLOGIAN

Like many agnostics, Anatole France is more interested in religion than is many a believer. Like those old encyclopædists of the eighteenth century, he is always crushing the infamous one, which the faithful generally support because assured that the so-called infamous one cannot be crushed. And that infamous one is not only the Catholic religion but religion itself. I do not want to raise an argument as to what is religion: in the sense in which Anatole France attacks it it is a precise faith in some creative and conscious spirit which manifests itself, not only in this world, but in some conceptive other world. Of that Anatole France will hear nothing. He can do without it; he is strong enough to stand alone, and to meet death “as one about to seek a great perhaps.” He needs no prop, and he would smile at a letter I received a little while ago from a devout Catholic who urged me to draw on “the strength and consolation which streamed from that little hill near Jerusalem, two thousand years ago, and now flows from the slope that rises by the side of the yellow waters of the Tiber.” Anatole France sees the poetry of this conception, but though he sees the idea as poetic he does not see the statement as true. For him religion or faith is cowardice; it is the cry of man who dares not die, and in every one of his books he has used the most cunning methods to express his feeling.

One of the most notable ways has been to express the ideas of men through the mouth of Riquet, the dog.3 For the dog, as Anatole France said in another place, is a religious beast, and here are some of the thoughts which pass through its brain:

“My master warms me when I lie behind him in his armchair; that is because he is a god.” (“The Lord will provide.”) “In my master’s voice are many vain sounds. It is difficult and necessary to define the thought of the master.” (Catholic exegesis of the Bible.) “I love my master, Bergeret, because he is terrible and powerful.” (Jewish worship of Jehovah.) And the little black dog prays:

“Oh, my master, Bergeret, God of Slaughter, I worship thee! Hail, oh God of wrath! Hail, oh bountiful God! I lie at thy feet, I lick thy hand. Thou art great and beautiful when at the laden board thou devourest abundant meats. Thou art great and beautiful when, from a thin strip of wood causing flame to spring, thou dost of night make day....”

3In Monsieur Bergeret à Paris, and in the story entitled Riquet.

Here indeed in the old professor who can whip Riquet is the God of Sabaoth, the God of Battles; in the professor with the carving knife is He who multiplied the fishes and the loaves. And I need not labour that when Bergeret strikes a match it is very wonderful: so was Genesis and the making of the sun....

For his aggressive, childish superstitions, for his puerile desire to find an unnatural explanation to what he does not understand, Anatole France might despise man, yet he loves him. He finds charm in hierophantic absurdity; he feels the poetry of the little hill. And he goes further: he feels the poetry even of the Middle Ages, though it was a period of bestial and ungraceful ignorance, raping knights, robber troubadours and fine ladies who never changed their underclothing; he loves historic truth as well as the highfalutin nonsense of Amadis of Gaul. For Amadis has a picaresque air. In his book, The Well of St Clare notably, are several stories supposed to be told by a Siennese priest. There is that of Saint Satyr, out of whose tomb came a multitude of mists, each one of which was a woman. They floated in the darkling air; through their light tunics shone their light bodies. The clerics had hunted them into the tomb of the saint who was accepted of God the Christ, because the goat worshipped in his own fashion. (Anatole France hints that all religions have the same root and that one worshipper is as good as another; he has written another story on these lines, Amycus and Célestin.) The tomb is opened and the heart of the priest who saw the vision is in most mediæval style torn out by the ghosts of hags. In another story, The Security, the Virgin stands bail for a year for a debt, and leads the merchant’s barque back in time to redeem her, because he believed in her; there are other queer stories, such as The Lady of Verona, who so loved her body that she begged Satan to save it; such as The Mystery of the Blood, where a saint cheers a criminal whose blood falls upon her gown. She says: “Take not from me my purple and my perfumes.” In all these stories he shows how charmed he is by this childish mediævalism. And yet he does not espouse it, for in the Opinions of Jérome Coignard he says: “All those stories of Satanic fornication are disgusting dreams, and it is a shame that Jesuits and Dominicans should have made them up into treatises.”

His theology is usually intermingled with his philosophy. In the story called Komm l’Atrébate (in Clio) the warrior believes that the same moon does not shine over Rome and over Gaul, because Rome is so far away; in La Muiron (in Clio) Buonaparte expounds his theory of government by faith: “The right to deny God is granted to a learned man shut up in his study, not to a leader of peoples whose power over the vulgar rests upon his community with their ideas. To govern men one must think like them on all great questions and allow oneself to be carried by public opinion.”

Anatole France wishes to govern no man, and to be governed of no man. He is the most anarchistic of Socialists. And how could he feel otherwise if indeed he be Coignard, who “despised man tenderly,” who thought that “on earth one cannot help sinning”? The Abbé Coignard, in 1893, was full of cynical contempt for democracy, of disbelief in the importance of forms of government, and in the value of change; yet Coignard hated prisons and armies; he thought all war hateful, except civil war; for him glory, nobility, honour were words; glory, notably, was accident; modesty was Calvinism; he thought that there was a pure and an impure, but heaven alone knew which was which.... All that is the Francian philosophy mixed in with the Francian religion: doubts and smiles.

But now and then, when he is annoyed by the externals of Christianity, Anatole France becomes more militant. He has written (in Mother of Pearl) a story entitled The Procurator of Judæa, which ranks with the finest of de Maupassant’s, and is deeper in intention than anything de Maupassant ever wrote. A generation after the Crucifixion, Pilate, then talking the waters for gout in Northern Italy, meets an old friend who was once at Jerusalem. They talk of horses, of the policy of Vitellius, of the waters, of the things that would interest Roman gentlemen, and, little by little, they come to talk of those silly, noisy, obstinate Jews who used to raise such wrangles and such schisms in Jerusalem. And they talk of Mary Magdalene, in her pre-scriptural days: “By the light of a smoky little lamp, on a wretched carpet she danced, raising her arms to strike the cymbals. Her back arched, her head thrown back, as if drawn down by the heavy weight of her ruddy hair, her eyes drowned in lust, ardent and languishing, she would have caused Cleopatra herself to blush for envy....” They sigh, for Magdalene was very beautiful and seductive (in her pre-scriptural days). Then the friend recalls that she followed “a young Galilean thaumaturge who was crucified,” says the friend, “for I don’t know what crime.” Pontius Pilate thinks for a long time; crucifixion was so commonplace in those days. After a while he says: “Jesus? Jesus of Nazareth? No, I don’t remember him.”

I know that many who read this will charge Anatole France with blasphemy. Well, blasphemy has its uses: it parts the sheep from the goats; it impresses the waverers and drives such of them as are weak of faith into agnosticism, while it shocks the faithful and strengthens their militancy. The blasphemer may render a service to the faith. Blasphemy need not be ignorant; indeed, true blasphemy is possible only in the enlightened: the unenlightened find it easier to believe; it is so difficult to believe when one does not know. Now Anatole France does not know, and he is, so far as that goes, in the position of St Francis, but where he differs from St Francis is that he does not believe that which he does not know. (I am assuming that St Francis did believe, that he did more than want to believe.) For Anatole France understands perfectly well the Catholic attitude and its Christian variations; he has a full understanding of it, its simplicity, gaiety, charm, of its tender humanity, of the beautiful Catholic sympathy with the weakness of man, with the feeble hands that cannot seize more than the hem of the seamless garment. He loves this Catholicism which he detests because, after all, while spreading among the people brute ignorance, infamous asceticism, prejudices and an intolerance resulting in a cruelty foreign to the tiger, it somehow, through the Dark Ages, kept burning the flame of the arts. The Catholicism of Anatole France is that of Cimabue, of Raphael, of Marot, of Shakespeare (no Protestant he), the Catholicism of those friars who pored over Greek texts, of those inspired workmen who painted stained glass, of the fine ladies with the pearl-braided hair who, with hands delicate as sprays of fern, embroidered chasubles, and, all of them, interposed a bulwark between the culture of man and the stinking men-at-arms. That Catholicism is the Catholicism of song and dance, the Catholicism of the juggler and the troubadour, not only the Catholicism of the stake but the Catholicism of Merrie England before Calvin came to blow a black breath upon a world not yet made grey by the Galilean.4

4Anatole France would hate our Puritan practices, such as the prohibition of billiards in hotels and of cricket in the parks on Sunday.

It might be concluded that Anatole France is an atheist, but that is not correct; he has said too definitely that though man may not be immortal, he is eternal. He merely does not know whence we came nor whither we go, nor I think does he care much; he is merely a member of the band, Voltaire, Renan, Huxley, Spencer, Darwin, Haeckel (doubtful that one), who were not willing to believe without understanding, and yet agreed that there might be something in which to believe if one could understand it. Briefly, he is an agnostic. He refuses to make the slightly self-conscious effort which certain literary men, in England and in France, successfully make to accept the spiritual origin of miracles and such like matters. What is, is, and what may be, may be: that is enough. But his theology is so intermingled with his human interests that at bottom he is a pagan; he loves beauty so well that he discovers it even in faith, and it is evident that he would have found much pleasure in the rites of the ancient Greeks. In his celebrated novel, Thais, he hails pagan beauty as he holds up for our contemptuous sympathy the sorrow of Paphnutius, the monk of Arsinoe. The monk set forth to redeem Thais, the courtesan; for her beauty and her soul he abandoned his cell and his hair shirt. She was unhappy and superstitious, and she feared the life to come; at his behest she turned to the Christian God. But Paphnutius burned himself with the torch he had lit; Thais assailed him in dream, and though he strove to fight his passion by solitude, by fasting, by becoming a stylite, he failed. In dream he dishonoured his soul, and at last, surrendering, he rushed to Thais, but found her dying and become a saint; doubt, fear and despair had compassed his downfall, and it was too late to love: he could be naught save a vampire.

The story is one of violent pageantry, of Alexandria crimson, purple and gold, of Alexandria dancing on the rosy wharves where great ships with brown sails unloaded silks and spices, Alexandria offering up to the old gods, Hermes of the secret smile and Aphrodite of the cup-like breasts, not the smoking holocausts of Jehovah, but honey and garlands of flowers.... And on the other side, quite near the sceptical, cynical, gay, intellectual Greeks, who for a pastime and as in a Chelsea drawing-room discussed man and God, the horrid state of the Christian anchorites, self-starved, self-flogged, verminous, sour, contemptuous of the beauty of the body, of learning. There is a bitter irony in the efforts of Paphnutius, the stylite, for as he sits upon his column as far as he can from man and as near as possible to God, his reputation as a saint waxes; round him there grows a town, Stylopolis, an ancestor of Lourdes; first of all come shrines and convents, then traders, then a government, then banks, theatres ... the rich, the sons of the rich ... courtesans. He does not hate Paphnutius nor love him, for the monk was unfortunate, not guilty; gladly would he have torn out his heart and burnt it as an offering to God the Christ. His was a white, burning soul, but he had beyond a soul a body needing lightness, satisfaction. His flesh was weak, and it is pitiful rather than rejoicing that Anatole France sorrows for his error, when the monk sees Lucifer as “the serpent with golden wings which twisted round the tree of knowledge its azure coils formed of light and love,” when he sees Jehovah, the brutish tyrant, the power of ignorance and superstition, the power of darkness, Jehovah, understanding nothing, a mere dream. It is a terrible day for Paphnutius when he understands that “the Serpent began to speak to Adam and Eve and to teach them the highest truths, those which do not demonstrate themselves.”

All this feeling is in The Revolt of the Angels, the most remarkable of Anatole France’s theological books, as Penguin Island is his principal political book. It is an amusing story, this idea that the angels, as knowledge and thought spread among them, should one by one desert the heavenly choir, come to earth to live among men, to love them, and attempt to overthrow Him who has stood in the way of every science and of every art. The book is brilliant because it so casually intermingles the actual with the fantastic. The angels who descend to earth and turn into men become music masters (obviously), conspirators, commercial travellers, and here below prepare the spiritual revolution. The career of the principal angel, Arcade, is exceedingly amusing, for he ravages by night the theological libraries, being bent on gaining an education which was not given him in Paradise. And there is a fair amount of the most incongruous, but almost engaging, indecency. It would be too much to describe the incident exactly here, but I think I may say that Arcade, who is the guardian angel of a young man called Maurice, appears in the latter’s bedroom at a moment ... well, at an inopportune moment. And when at last he has convinced Maurice that he really is an angel, Maurice says something which could be said only by a Parisian: “You may be an angel, but you are not a man of the world.” He is wrong, for a little later Arcade, in the very same room, demonstrates to the lady whose reputation he compromised by his sudden materialisation, that angels are close relatives of men.

But apart from scenes where angels button up the boots of ladies, which is very clever of them, considering how little practice they can have had, there is in the book to a much greater extent than in Thais a passionate plea for the intellectual side of paganism, the one embodying all that is young and all that is enlightened, embodying the joys which the god of the Jews endeavoured to drive out of the domain of man. And there is more than one picture of Satan as the god of grace (presumably precipitated into hell on account of his advanced ideas), of Satan loving man. There is picture after picture of the Son of the Morning who once was Pan. In the end the angels do not revolt, for Satan in his dream realises that if he overthrows God and establishes himself as another god, he will only become as his predecessor, harsh, dogmatic, intolerant, greedy of praise, hostile to anything which might rear up in the mind of the people the idea of a new god. Satan will not reign, and he sums up: “What matters if man is no longer subject to Ialdabaoth, if the spirit of Ialdabaoth is still in them? if like him they are jealous, violent, quarrelsome, greedy, inimical to the arts and to beauty? what matters if they have rejected the ferocious demon if they listen not to the friendly demons who teach all truths, to Dionysus, Apollo and the muses? As for us, celestial spirits, sublime demons, we have destroyed Ialdabaoth, our tyrant, if we have destroyed in ourselves ignorance and fear.”