THE REBEL IMMORTAL
Henry James remarks somewhere that an American has to study for fifty
years of his life in order to attain, culturally speaking, the point
from which a European starts at birth. Just what does he mean by this
unpatriotic utterance? I am reminded of it when I think of Anatole
France, and recall his characteristic sayings. Consider the following:
’Tis a great infirmity to think. God preserve you from it, my son,
as He has preserved His greatest saints, and the souls whom He
loves with especial tenderness and destines to eternal felicity.
Now it is possible to conceive of a Catholic bishop or a Methodist
missionary or a Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan who might be too stupid to
understand that remark; but it is difficult to conceive how,
understanding it, he could withhold the tribute of a smile. Into this
remark a great master of words has distilled the essence of a
civilization, the precious flavor of centuries of culture. There are
only thirty-four words in it, and yet you can afford to meditate upon it
for a long time. The writer of such a paragraph possesses a mind
emancipated from the shams and delusions of the ages; he is skeptical,
realistic, and as witty as it is possible for a man to be; yet also he
is urbane--he does not seize you by the shoulders and shake you, for he
has learned that there are all kinds of strange people in the world, and
he asks merely that you consent to smile with him.
How is such a man brought into existence? His father was a book-seller,
and so he breathed culture in his childhood; he read everything from
every part of the world, especially things written by men long since
dead; things full of that beauty mingled with sadness which is one of
the gifts of time. Anatole France learned to be at home in strange
cultures, and at the same time he studied the masters of his own
country, whose specialties are precision and lucidity and charm of
phrase. At the age of twenty-seven he published a story, “The Crime of
Sylvestre Bonnard,” a sentimental pretty tale about an elderly,
kind-hearted French antiquarian, who rescues a little girl from cruel
mistreatment, and then discovers that under the French law he is guilty
of abduction. It might have been written by any of our magazine writers
of the cheer-up, God’s-in-His-Heaven school--provided only that these
writers had possessed a thousand years of culture.
It was just what the Academy of Richelieu loved, and they crowned it.
The young writer was taken up by an exquisite French lady, who became
his mistress, and set up a salon for him, and helped him to meet all the
editors and critics--which is how you make fame and fortune in Paris,
and sometimes in America, I am told. This Frenchman was clever and
witty, sensual, cynical, but not too much so for his elegant
free-thinking tradition. He wrote other novels and a great quantity of
miscellaneous writings, and in 1896, at the age of fifty-two, his
labors were rewarded by the great French honor, he became one of
Richelieu’s forty Immortals. In the ordinary course of events there was
nothing more for him to do, save to sink back in his comfortable
arm-chair and listen to the plaudits of Paris.
But a strange and alarming thing happened. The struggle over the Dreyfus
case arose, and Anatole France leaped into the arena, joining Zola, whom
he had previously denounced as a beastly writer. Here was something
absolutely without precedent--that an Academician should turn into a
Socialist, and take to attending meetings of workingmen, and addressing
to them remarks unfit to be quoted in respectable newspapers. Worse even
yet, he, the pride and glory of art-for-art’s-sake culture, took to
putting radical propaganda into novels! They had let him in among the
Immortals, and there was no way to get him out; so here was one of the
pillars of literary authority, portraying his country as an island of
penguins, and the pillars of his church and state as grotesque, wingless
birds, dressing themselves in frock-coats and silk hats and hopping
about upon obscene errands. Have a glimpse of them:
“Do you see, my son,” he exclaimed, “that madman who with his teeth
is biting the nose of the adversary he has overthrown, and that
other one who is pounding a woman’s head with a huge stone?”
“I see them,” said Bulloch. “They are creating law; they are
founding property; they are establishing the principles of
civilization, the basis of society, the foundations of the State.”
“How is that?” asked old Maël.
“By setting bounds to their fields. That is the origin of all
government. Your penguins, O Master, are performing the most august
of functions. Throughout the ages their work will be consecrated by
lawyers, and magistrates will confirm it.”
“Penguin Island” was published in 1908; and then came the war, and this
elderly antiquarian--he was seventy then--came forward and enlisted to
fight for his country. But that did not mean, as with many others of
lesser judgment, that he gave up his hopes for the working class, and
surrendered to the propaganda of capitalist nationalism. We find him at
the age of seventy-five, carrying a red flag in a procession of French
radicals, protesting against the acquittal of the assassin of Jaurès.
We find him ready to break an engagement to a literary banquet in order
to address a working-class meeting in protest against capitalist church
and state. He, the greatest of all the Immortals, sets himself against
the other thirty-nine; he, the old man, sets himself against the
cultured youth of his country, who have abandoned themselves to a
mixture of Catholic mysticism with homosexuality, of Dadaist imbecility
with athleticism having for its goal the turning of machine-guns upon
the workers.
The books of Anatole France afford a curious study of struggle between
the old pessimistic, cynical culture of capitalism and the new creative
culture of the awakening proletariat. These cultures are absolutely
irreconcilable, but Anatole France believed in both. He was a social
revolutionist with his conscious mind and judgment, while he remained a
fatalist and a scoffer with his hereditary culture, that ancient
accumulation of despair and terror which he had breathed in with the
dust in his father’s old book-shop.
So he writes “The Gods Are Athirst,” in which he portrays mankind as
given up to endless misery and destruction; or “The Revolt of the
Angels,” in which again the heavens are drowned in blood and there is no
hope. After which he issues a manifesto upholding Russia, or calling
upon the workers to rally to the Third International. He goes before a
convention of the organized teachers of France, and delivers to them an
address of such magnificent eloquence as to move the assemblage to
tears. I have quoted from this address in “The Goslings”; I repeat one
paragraph--because it is the duty of a writer to spread these words on
every possible occasion, to bring to the great master the help upon
which he relies:
Reason, wisdom, intelligence, forces of the mind and heart, whom I
have always devoutly invoked, come to me, aid me, sustain my feeble
voice; carry it, if that may be, to all the peoples of the world,
and diffuse it everywhere where there are men of good will to hear
the beneficent truth! A new order of things is born. The powers of
evil die, poisoned by their crime. The greedy and the cruel, the
devourers of peoples, are bursting with an indigestion of blood.
However sorely stricken by the sins of their blind or corrupt
masters, mutilated, decimated, the proletarians remain erect; they
will unite to form one universal proletariat, and we shall see
fulfilled the great Socialist prophecy: “The union of the workers
will be the peace of the world.”
It was interesting to note, in the obituaries which the death of Anatole
France brought forth, how almost universally this aspect of his life was
glossed over. Our literary reviews told all about him as a master of
French prose, a supreme ironist in the tradition of Rabelais, Voltaire,
and Renan. But they left it for the radical papers to celebrate Anatole
France, the crusader, the carrier of the red flag. I am urged to believe
that our literary Tories are honest, but all this moves me to wonder.
I ask them, once for all, what is it they want? What proof will content
our cultural stand-patters? Here is their crowned favorite, their
revered master, the man who was as witty as it is possible for a human
being to be; and he sets out to prove to them that it is just as easy to
be witty in the service of Justice as in the service of Mammon. I ask
you, gentlemen of letters, do you know how a sentence can be wittier
than this: “The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as
the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal
bread.”