V THE CRAFTSMAN AND THE MAN

This may seem énorme and yet somehow it is not: Anatole France is not exactly a literary man. He is not a literary man in the sense of Flaubert or Turgenev, for he is not content with being the god in the machine, he is always allowing you to see him guiding it; indeed in most of his work he is the god in the car. That is probably why Anatole France has never adopted classical form. He appreciates it, and in the many critical articles he has written he has praised just those people whose form was perfect ... but it is the sick man, not the robust man admires health. There is not one of his novels properly holds together. I mean that there is not one that develops harmoniously the story of certain human beings in a given atmosphere. At times, for instance in the four volumes of Contemporary History, you have the sense of developing lives, and then Anatole France puts on somebody else’s coat, like Maître Jacques, transforms himself from coachman into cook, calls himself Bergeret or Bonnard, or, more audaciously, takes on the shape of Vence, the genial worldling, or of Dechartre, the passionate sculptor, and talks. As soon as that happens the novel is forgotten; Anatole France takes the reader by the hand and draws him away to pick intellectual primroses. A delightful exercise; only when hundreds of these primroses are picked you have forgotten the novel you deserted. I have mentioned already the incoherence of The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard. Then there is the famous Red Lily, which is supposed to be a love story; it is a love story of the most passionate kind, only it is so inextricably mixed up with mystical excursions by a vagabond, ragged poet, evidently modelled on Verlaine, with views on pictorial art by Vence and Dechartre, that, interested as one is all the time, one loses one’s sense of proportion. When the lovers meet in the beautiful Florentine pavilion one is never sure that theirs is a love feast: at any moment it may turn into an essay on the glazes of Botticelli. Anatole France must at one time have been conscious of this, for in one of his books, Histoire Comique, he made a great effort to tell the story of a little actress who threw over her actor lover for a young diplomat, and found after the suicide of the actor that never more could she come together with her new lover because in their tenderest moments she was haunted by the bloody spectre of the dead man. Histoire Comique is finely written, and in the best French literary style; it eloquently evokes the life of the French actress, so much on the edge of the demi-monde and now and then over the edge. It is almost as good as Les Petites Cardinal ... and then Anatole France spoils it. In comes Doctor Trublet, in other words Anatole France himself, talking about medicine, about morality, about faith, talking, everlastingly talking. Trublet talks delightfully, but while he talks one thinks of the pretty little actress in whom one had grown interested, and thinks: “Oh, dear old doctor, do stop talking; kisses, not words, shall win the prize.” But then Anatole France has never cared whether his ideas were relevant to the story; it has always been enough for him that they should be relevant to the temperament he sketches.

Perhaps for this reason, and it is an important observation if one is to judge Anatole France fairly, his characters are unusually living. People like Captain Victor, Tudesco, bombastic, ebullient, Falstaffian people, move in our midst. Their creator is always poking fun at them; persistently he erects Aunt Sallies and then throws bouquets at them. He teases them because he loves them. It should be observed, however, and I do not want to be ill-natured about it, that Anatole France never pokes fun at the characters that embody his own personality. Bergeret, the other nice old gentlemen, Vence, Dechartre, are never absurd; they are amiable, scholarly, tender, generous, and have a strong sense of humour. I do not say that Anatole France ought to see his ridiculous side; I do not see it myself, but it must be there. Only, and you must take my word for this without asking for evidence, it is not in the nature of any human being, save the Englishman, to “take himself off.” I have known a good many Frenchmen, Germans, Austrians, Spaniards, and have never found in any one of them a glimmer of self-deprecation: they were all supermen, and I expect were much the same before the birth of Nietzsche. Still, and I repeat that I do not want to be ill-natured about it, in spite of that little failing, it must be owned that this little band of incarnations of Anatole France is very human; after all, Anatole France is probably human himself, so far as a man can be human when he is sane. Their humanity resides in their passion for life. Every one of them holds the creed which is ideally stated in the preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin. As I believe Anatole France admires Gautier, I will venture to quote from it:

“Pleasure seems to me to be the object of life, and the only useful thing in the world. God has so willed it, who made women, perfume, light, beautiful flowers, good wines, spirited horses, greyhounds and Persian cats. He has not said to his angels: ‘Have virtue,’ but ‘Have love,’ and has given us lips more sensitive than the rest of our skin so that we may caress women, eyes raised on high to see the light, subtle scent to breathe the soul of flowers, sinewy thighs to grip the flanks of stallions and to fly swift as thought without railway or engine, delicate hands to draw over the long heads of greyhounds, the velvet lines of cats, and the gleaming shoulders of creatures without virtue; he has given to us alone the treble and glorious privilege of drinking without being thirsty, of lighting tinder and of making love at all times, which distinguishes us from the brutes much more than the habits of reading newspapers and manufacturing maps.”

In this preface lives much of Anatole France, his pure hedonism, his pagan love of the beautiful, his entire lack of moral purpose, counteracted by his consciousness of the decent, the elegant thing. If he believes, as I think he does, in honour, in truth, courtesy, pity, service, it is not owing to any harsh Protestant moral impulse, but to a feeling that there are fine, clean things revealed to us by some obscure Kantian, categorical imperative; if he has a morality at all it is the Ingersollian morality, that is to say obligation perceived by a fine soul. It is this inflames his style and links him with his forbears, with Voltaire, with Renan, with Molière, with the Italians of the sixteenth century, with the amiable Latins, with all the dead who loved the sunshine, with the gay gods, and the warriors who, on the way to the Elysian fields, did not turn their backs upon wine, woman and song. Not for him the sombre fates of duty, fear, retribution; not for him malignant Jove any more than malignant Jehovah. In the trenches in 1870 he read, not Sophocles, not Æschylus, but Virgil. As Brotteaux went to the guillotine he read Lucretius. For him flowers and honey to lay upon the little altars in Ausonian glades, and not the rapes and arguments of ancient Greece.

A Latin by heredity, it follows that Anatole France wields a style of singular purity. His work is very polished and very condensed. He uses as few words as possible to embody his idea, and when he has made his point, as, for instance, in stories such as The Procurator of Judæa, he stops. His desire is to knock out his reader, but he does not, like Zola, then proceed to kneel and to roll upon the prostrate figure, smothering it and flattening it out under a vast bulk. Anatole France never flounders; he does not follow the man who did so much damage to the literature of the nineteenth century by piling up seventeen unessential details, crowned, often by accident, with the essential one. Selection is with him a habit, and that is why Anatole France will never be confounded with the Zolas, the Sudermanns, the William de Morgans. Without selection he never could have achieved his delicate little pictures of men and women, of their passions stated in a paragraph; and still less could he have built those strange animals that he so loves. They are not always philosophical animals like Riquet, the dog, praying to man, his god; sometimes like Miragoane, they are just intelligent, doggy dogs, tail-wagging, greedy, apologetic, fulsome dogs; at other times they are just decorative beasts, especially the cats. For Anatole France, like Théophile Gautier, like Baudelaire, like Edgar Allan Poe, like almost every artist who really is an artist, loves cats. In his eyes the cat is as beautiful as woman. Here is a scrap, which I feel I render inadequately, devoted to sumptuous Hamilcar, the Persian cat in the library:

“Hamilcar, somnolent prince in the city of books, watcher in the night! Thou dost defend against vile rodents those things, manuscript and printed, bought for the old student by his modest hoard and his tireless zeal. In this silent library which thy military virtues protect, Hamilcar, sleep languid as a sultana. For thou dost unite in thy person the formidable air of a Tartar warrior and the indolent grace of an Eastern maid. Heroic and voluptuous Hamilcar, sleep until the mice shall dance in the moonlight before the Acta Sanctorum of the learned Bollandists.”

That is poetry, though, as I have suggested before now, Anatole France, in spite of his great love of the beautiful, is too critical, too humorous, has too much detachment to be written down a poet. He loves the poets, notably Racine, and one does not quite see why. But he is not a poet because, I think, he is too remote; the blood of the earth does not flow in his veins, and it may be that if he were closely questioned he would confess that he thinks life very useful to literature. That is perhaps why he tolerates it so well, why he can smile at it, be serious and yet poke fun at it. What a Fabian he would have made!

One word as to his short stories. He is in these more purely literary than in his novels, presumably because in short stories he has not space enough to get out of hand. A few of them, such as The Procurator of Judæa, and one or two of the revolutionary tales in Mother of Pearl, are as good as any French short stories, while Crainquebille and Putois reach the highest standard of de Maupassant. Still, there is nothing to say about them here: there is only one thing to do, and that is to read them. There are others, though, worth mentioning because, together with their fine literary facture, they carry the author’s ideas. For instance, in Les Sept Femmes de la Barbe Bleue, Anatole France sets to work to rehabilitate Bluebeard, who, he contends, was henpecked and deceived, though a very good fellow. This is Anatole France’s little fling at rumour and misrepresentation. It amuses him to trace rumour to its sources, and I can imagine as good a story as Putois, the gardener who was invented and in the end nearly managed to exist, being written round the story of the bombs in the German governess’s bedroom that floated about during the early part of the war. This is half mystical and Anatole France is not a mystic, but he has written several stories, to which I refer a little later on, starting from which it might be contended that if humanity believed strongly enough in the bomb under the bed the House of Commons might eventually be blown up. Most of the short stories, however, are merely novels in petto; some are mediæval, many Italian, and, every now and then, they are modern and ironic. Most of them, such as La Chemise, where operations become fashionable among the Smart Set and where the professor asks Society, “together a crowd and an élite,” to his five-o’clock operation, “a charming bit of ovariotomy,” to the accompaniment of flowers, pretty frocks, music and ices, are a criticism of life. This story recalls a kind of life we know, for we are told that “the professor’s elegance and grace were marvellous. The operation was taken for the cinema.”

All through these stories runs his philosophy:

“I love life which is earthy life, life as it is, this dog’s life. I love it brutal, vile and gross. I love it sordid, dirty, spoilt; I love it stupid, imbecile and cruel; I love it in its obscenity, in its infamy, with its violence, its stinks, its corruptions and its infections.... On Sundays I go among the people, I mix with the crowd that flows in the streets, I plunge into groups of men, women and children, which form round street-singers or before the booths at fairs; I touch dirty coats and greasy bodices; I breathe the strong, warm scents of sweat, of hair, of breaths. In this well of life I feel further from death. Death: nothingness, that is an infinite naught, and this naught envelops us. Thence we come and hence we go; we are always two nothingnesses as a shell upon the waters. Nothingness is the impossible and the assured; it is inconceivable and it is.”

A quotation such as this, taken in conjunction with the earlier quotation from the preface of Mademoiselle de Maupin, outlines the man within the writer, and I need not labour that the faith of Anatole France is the faith of Epicurus, of Petronius Arbiter, of Villon, of Rabelais, of Fielding. The whole basis of him is sensuality, and I hate to say this in a country such as England, where the maypole has been cut down and Calvinism reigns supreme, where sensuality, that once whispered melodies into the ears of Pan and hung garlands about the birch-trees, has been hated and hunted until it had to take refuge in the dirty talk of the public-house.

The sensuality of Anatole France is like sap arising in the trees, like the moth circling about the candle; it is joyous, frank, unashamed; the world and all that is in it is its toy. In this country it has become disgusting to like good food; you must not even talk of food, it is not done (and the result is English food, the laughing-stock of the universe). But listen to Anatole France on food in Histoire Comique:

“The Castelnaudary stew contains the preserved thighs of geese, whitened beans, bacon and a little sausage. To be good it must have been cooked lengthily upon a gentle fire. Clémence’s stew has been cooking for twenty years. She puts into the pan sometimes goose or bacon, sometimes sausage or beans, but it is always the same stew. The foundation endures; this ancient and precious foundation gives the stew the quality that in the pictures of old Venetian masters you find in the women’s amber flesh....”

Here speaks the old Gaul who feasted on roast meats, drank much hydromel, and as he caressed the long droop of his fair moustache cast a negligent, amiable glance over his white-skinned, blue-eyed, black-haired women. For the Gaul never forgot women; he had anticipated Nietzsche by two thousand years or so, and decided that man was for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior. This offends some of us moderns, for the sensuality of the Frenchman, so strong in Anatole France, the sensuality of eating and drinking, of burlesque, of gross stories, some of them concerned with an apartment ignored in the English household since the days of William IV., lies thick over love.

It seems a pity to us that, in spite of all his æstheticism, of his sense of beauty, it should look as if Anatole France’s view of love were contained in the famous phrase of Alphonse Karr, or Gustave Droz, I forget which:

“Love? A matter of skin.”

Well, love is not a matter of skin, at least for us, and one would wish that Anatole France should have found something ethereal, symbolic in the union of man and woman. I cannot explain what I mean: I detest the word “spirituality,” and I hardly know what I miss in this French view of love that Anatole France holds, but I miss it. This view is not exactly: “One woman is as good as another,” but it certainly is: “One woman is as good as another if she is good-looking.” It is all flesh, and æsthetics, which do redeem the flesh, do not redeem it fully. The French heroine, beloved of Anatole France’s heroes, is merely Galatea animate; she is just the beautiful woman descended from her pedestal at the call of her chosen lover. Nothing calls to him save the warm body that once was beautiful marble, and he is content. The Red Lily illustrates that idea. Here we have two people, an unfaithful wife and her lover. We are convinced by the suggestion of extreme passion that these people have reached the apogee of love. It is an unhappy, tormented love, unrolling near the Arno. It develops among a curious society of literary people, is coloured by the usual literary and artistic ideas of Anatole France. Dechartre, the lover, is tormented because his mistress had before him another lover; he is not tormented by the existence of her husband. His distress grows so intense when he begins to suspect, quite wrongly, that she is unfaithful to him with her first lover, produces a strain so great, that their alliance breaks. Well, that is natural enough, for, as Anatole France himself remarks, man is possessive and woman is not, because she has had to get used to sharing, but it is difficult to understand at first sight why Dechartre should be jealous of another lover, and not jealous of a husband. The answer, which is not evident to everybody, is that the act of love is symbolic and that a husband, taken as a social base, is not comparable with a lover taken for love.6 That is true enough, but where fault must be found with the Gallic view is that there is not a single phrase in the book to show that Dechartre, represented as in the throes of extreme love, wishes to detach his mistress from her husband. He never suggests that he wants her to live with him always, that he wants her society, her presence, the subtle delight of hearing her walk in the room above. He wants nothing but her body from four to six, twice a week: he is honourable, he is an artist, but he is vile, he is a beast. Big words these, but I have come to think that if we differ at all from the brute it is by the courage with which we face the consequences of our deeds, by delicacies of feeling in which caresses have no place, by something that is more than elegance, that can maintain love when sickness, ugliness appear and æsthetics fall to the ground. There is not in the works of Anatole France a line devoted to love. Whether in The Red Lily or in The Merrie Tales of Jacques Tournebroche, or in any of the episodes, “love” is either light and false and lying, or coarse and brutal, or limited by the passing efflorescence of a beauty that must die. He seems, like every other Frenchman I can think of, unable to understand what the Anglo-Saxon means by idealism in love, by that idealism so often made absurd by sentiment, but yet delightful, and distinguished from the impulse of a stag in rut.

6Relations between husband and wife may have ceased, but this does not touch the argument.

And yet, strange to say, Anatole France has written a few stories in which there is a hint of mysticism. Histoire Comique is a story of a haunting; in Adrienne Buquet there is telepathy; in The Graven Stone a fatal influence. There is Putois too, that famous tale of a metaphysical conception in virtue of which a man who was originally a joke ends “like a mythological deity, in becoming actual.” There is A Daughter of Lilith, a tale of an immortal and fatal descendant of the pre-Adamites. But those, I feel, are intellectual exercises, and I suspect that they spring from a passing idea of the author: “I think I’ll write a mystical story; it would be rather fun.”

The true Anatole France which hides under the sentimental old gentlemen, so cynical and so human, born so cold and to-day so young, is the irreverent, jolly, blasphemous Frenchman of the Middle Ages. I have said this often and quoted much in support because I want to make the English understand what is so difficult for them to understand: the Gaul and his joviality. Still I cannot resist quoting a story from Penguin Island, which I am compelled to condense:

There was once a king and he had a beautiful queen. At their court lived a young monk, called Oddoul, who resisted the devil and even woman. So the queen, being woman and ambitious, attempted his seduction. She called him into her chamber, and he would not look upon her. She held out her arms to him, and he fled. Then in her fury, as he fled, she called the guard and accused Oddoul of having attempted to ravish her. He was thrown into gaol. But in the night, as he waited for the time to come when he would be led out to be burnt alive, the cell was visited by the angel of the Lord. And the angel said: “What? Hast thou not done what the Queen accuses thee of?” “No,” said Oddoul. “Then,” cried the angel, “what art thou doing here, idiot?” The angel of the Lord opened the door and Oddoul found himself driven out of the prison. Scarcely had he gone down into the street when a hand from high above emptied upon his head a pailful of slops. And he thought: “Mysterious are Thy designs, O Lord, and Thy ways impenetrable.”

It is not easy to understand Anatole France because, like other men, he is neither good nor evil; he is merely what he is. I do not ask anyone to forgive him because he loved much, nor to try and understand, if that is the only way of forgiving him. It is very much better to thank him for having brought into the dusty old lumber-room of stale ideas the breath of the new; for having proclaimed pity in a world that had slid into callousness; for having been gay when the creeds bade us be sad. To do that, if one can, is enough, for though one may not understand him quite, the times not yet being enlightened, one can offer him the supreme tribute of loving him without understanding.