Anatole France is probably the most disillusioned human
intelligence which has ever appeared on the surface of this planet.
All the great civilised races tend to disillusion. Disillusion is the
mark of civilised eras as opposed to barbaric ones and if the dream
of the poets is ever realised and the Golden Age returns, such an age
will be the supreme age of happy, triumphant disillusion.
This was seen long ago by Lucretius, who regarded the fear of the
gods as the last illusion of the human race, and looked for its
removal as the race's entrance into the earthly paradise.
Nietzsche's noble and austere call to seriousness and spiritual
conflict is the sign of a temper quite opposite from this. Zarathustra
frees himself from all other illusions, but he does not free himself
from the most deadly one of all--the illusion namely, that the freeing
oneself from illusion is a high and terrible duty.
The real disillusioned spirit is not the fierce Nietzschean one whose
glacial laughter is an iconoclastic battle-cry and whose freedom is a
freedom achieved anew every day by a strenuous and desperate
struggle. The real disillusioned spirit plays with illusions, puts them
on and takes them off, lightly, gaily, indifferently, just as it happens,
just as the moment demands.
One feels that in spite of his cosmic persiflage and radiant attempt to
Mediterraneanise into "sun-burnt mirth" the souls of the northern
nations, Nietzsche was still at heart an ingrained hyperborean, still at
heart a splendid and savage Goth.
As in every other instance, we may take it for granted that any
popular idea which runs the gamut of the idealistic lecture-halls and
pulpits of a modern democracy is false through and through. Among
such false ideas is the almost universal one that what is called the
decadence of a nation is a sign of something regrettable and
deplorable. On the contrary, it is a sign of something admirable and
excellent. Such "weakness," in a deeper than a popular sense, is
"strength"; such decadence is simply wisdom.
The new cult of the "will to power" which Nietzsche originated is
nothing more than the old demiurgic life-illusion breaking loose
again, as it broke loose in the grave ecstasies of the early Christians
and in the Lutheran reformation. Nietzsche rent and tore at the
morality of Christendom, but he did so with the full intention of
substituting a morality of his own. One illusion for another illusion.
A Roland for an Oliver!
Nietzsche praised with desperate laudation a classical equanimity
which he was never able to reach. He would have us love fate and
laugh and dance; but there were drops of scorching tears upon the
page of his prophecy and the motif of his challenge was the terrible
gravity of his own nature; though the conclusion of his seriousness
was that we must renounce all seriousness. It is Nietzsche himself
who teaches us that in estimating the value of a philosopher we have
to consider the psychology of the motive-force which drove him.
The motive-force that drove Nietzsche was the old savage
life-instinct, penetrated with illusion through and through, and praise as
he might the classical urbanity, no temper that has ever existed was
less urbane than his own.
The history of the human race upon this planet may be regarded--in
so far as its spiritual eruptions are concerned--as the pressure
upwards, from the abysmal depths, of one scoriae tempest after
another, rending and tearing their way from the dark centre fires
where Demogorgon turns himself over in his sleep, and becoming as
soon as they reach the surface and harden into rock, the great
monumental systems of human thought, the huge fetters of our
imaginations. The central life-fire which thus forces its path at
cataclysmic intervals to the devastated surface is certainly no
illusion. It is the one terrific cosmic fact.
Where illusion enters is where we, poor slaves of traditional
ratiocination, seek to turn these explosions of eternal lava into
eternal systems. The lava of life pours forth forever, but the systems
break and crumble; each one overwhelmed in its allotted time by a
new outrushing of abysmal energy.
The reiterated eruptions from the fathomless depths make up the
shifting material with which human civilisations build themselves
their illusive homes; but the wisest civilisations are the ones that
erect a hard, clear, bright wall of sceptical "suspension of
judgment," from the face of which the raging flood of primordial
energy may be flung back before it can petrify into any further
mischief.
Such a protective wall from the eruptive madness of primordial
barbarism, the scepticism of classical civilisation is forever
polishing and fortifying. Through the pearl-like glass of its
inviolable security we are able to mock the tempest-driven eagles
and the swirling glacial storms. We can amuse ourselves with the
illusions from which we are free. We can give the imagination
unbounded scope and the fancy unrestricted licence. We have
become happy children of our own self-created kingdom of heaven;
the kingdom of heaven which is the kingdom of disillusion.
And of this kingdom, Anatole France is surely the reigning king.
From the Olympian disenchantment of his tolerant urbanity, all
eruptive seriousness foams back spray-tossed and scattered. And yet
such a master of the art of "suspended judgment" was he, that he
permits himself to dally very pleasantly with the most passionate
illusions of the human race. He is too deep a sceptic even to remain
at the point of taking seriously his own aesthetic epicureanism.
This is where he differs from Oscar Wilde, from Walter Pater, from
Stendhal, from Remy de Gourmont, from Gabriele d'Annunzio. This
is where he differs from Montaigne. These great men build up an
egoism of grave subjectivity out of their suspicion of other people's
cults. They laugh at humanity but they do not laugh at themselves.
With the help of meta-physic they destroy metaphysic; only to
substitute for the gravity of idealism the gravity of Epicureanism.
But Anatole France has no gravity. He respects nothing; least of all
himself. That is why there is something singularly winning about
him which we miss in these others. There is something which palls
upon us and grows heavy and tiresome after a while about this
massive gravity in the cult of one's own sensations.
Sensations? Well! We all know how subtle and pleasant they can be;
but this perpetual religion of them, this ponderous worship of them,
becomes at last something monstrous and inhuman, something
which makes us cry aloud for air and space. Not only does it become
inhuman and heavy--it becomes comic.
Every religion, even the religion of sensation, becomes comic when
the sharp salt breath of intellectual sanity ceases to blow upon it. Its
votaries seem to be going to and fro wrapped in sheep's wool. The
wool may be stained in Tyrian dyes; but it is wool for all that, and it
tends ultimately to impede the steps of the wearer and to dull not a
few of his natural perceptions.
If one imagines a symposium in the Elysian fields between Wilde
and Pater and d'Annunzio, and the sudden entrance upon them of the
great Voltaire, one cannot but believe that after a very short time this
religion of aestheticism would prove as tiresome to the old ribald
champion of a free humanity as any other ritual.
And in this respect Anatole France is with Voltaire. He has too
humorous a soul to endure the solemnity of the cultivated senses. He
would desert such a group of pious subjectivists to chat with Horace
about the scandals of the imperial court or with Rabelais about the
price of sausages.
Sceptical in other matters, egoists of the type I have mentioned are
inclined to grow unconscionably grave when questions of sex are
brought forward. This illusion at any rate--the illusion of sexual
attraction--they would be most loth to destroy.
But Anatole France fools sex without stint. It affords him, just as it
did Voltaire and Rabelais, his finest opportunities. He fools it up hill
and down dale. He shakes it, he trundles it, he rattles it, he bangs it,
he thumps it, he tumbles it in the mud, in the sand, in the earth--just
as Diogenes did with his most noble tub. Fooling sex is the grand
game of Anatole France's classic wit. The sport never wearies him.
It seems an eternal perennial entertainment. Hardly one of his books
but has this sex fooling as its principal theme.
It seems to his detached and speculative mind the most amusing and
irresistible jest in the world that men and women should behave as
they do; that matters should be arranged in just this manner.
What we arrive at once more in Anatole France is that humorous
drawing back from the world, back into some high pitched
observation-tower of the mind, from the philosophic seclusion of
which the world scene can be easily imagined as different from what
it is. Nothing is more salutary in the midst of the mad confusion of
the world than these retirements. It is to no mere "ivory tower" of
aesthetic superiority that we retreat. It is to a much higher and more
spacious eminence. So high indeed do we withdraw that all the ivory
towers of the world seem far beneath us; beneath us, and not more
or less sacred than other secular erections.
It is from this point of observation that our humour is suddenly
made aware of the startling absurdity of human institution; and not
only of _human_ institution; for it is made aware also of the
absurdity of the whole fantastic scheme of this portentous universe.
We regard the world in these high speculative moods much as
children do when they suddenly enquire of their bewildered parents
why it is that human beings have two legs and why it is that little
girls are different from little boys.
It is one result of these withdrawings to the translunar empyrean that
the life of a man of action upon this earth does not appear any more
or any less remarkable or important than the life of a man of letters.
All human activities from that celestial height are equal; and
whether we plunge into politics or into pleasure, into science or into
theology, seems a mere incidental chance, as indifferent in the great
uncaring solar system as the movements of gnats around a lamp or
midges around a candle.
The great historic revolutions, the great social reformations, ancient
or modern, present themselves from this height as just as importantas
just as unimportant--as the visions of saintly fanatics or the
amours of besotted rakes.
Nothing is important and anything may be important. It is all a
matter of the human point of view. It is all a matter of taste. Looking
at the whole mad stream of things from this altitude, we see the
world as if we were peering through an inverted telescope; or rather,
shall we say, through an instrument called an "equi-scope"--whose
peculiarity it is to make all things upon which it is turned _little and
equal._
The mental temper of Anatole France is essentially one which is
interested in historic and contemporary events; interested in the
outward actions and movements of men and in the fluctuations of
political life. But it is interested in these things with a certain
spacious reservation. It is interested in them simply because they are
there, simply because they illustrate so ironically the weaknesses
and caprices of human nature and the dramatic chances of
ineluctable fate. It is not interested in them because they are
inherently and absolutely important, but because they are important
relatively and humorously as indicative of the absurd lengths to
which human folly will go. It is interested in these things, as I have
said, with an ample reservation, but it must emphatically be noted
that it is a great deal more interested in them than in any works of art
or letters or in any achievement of philosophy.
Anatole France seems indeed to take a certain delight in putting
human thought into its place as essentially secondary and
subordinate to human will. He delights to indicate, just as
Montaigne used to do, the pathetic and laughable discrepancies
between human thoughts and human actions.
He is more concerned with men and women as they actually live and
move in the commerce of the world than in the wayward play of
their speculative fancies, and it gives him an ironic satisfaction to
show how the most heroic and ideal thoughts are affected by the
little wanton tricks of circumstances and character.
This predominant concern with the natural humours and normal
animal instincts of the human race, this refusal ever to leave the
broad and beaten path of human frailty, gives a tone to his writings,
even when he is dealing with art and literature, quite different from
other aesthetes'.
He is not really an aesthete at all; he is too Voltairian for that. As a
critic he is learned, scholarly, clear-sighted and acute; but his sense
of the humorous inconsistencies of normal flesh and blood is too
habitually present with him to admit of that complete abandonment
to the spirit of his author, which, accompanied by interpretative
subtlety, secures the most striking results.
His criticisms are wise and interesting, but they necessarily miss the
sinuous clairvoyance of a writer like Remy de Gourmont who is able
to give himself up completely and with no ironic reservation to the
abnormalities of the temperament he is discussing. Remy de
Gourmont's own temperament has something in it more receptive,
more psychological, more supple than Anatole France's. He is in
himself a far less original genius and for that very reason he can
slide more reservedly into the bizarre nooks and crannies of
abnormal minds.
Anatole France is one of those great men of genius to whom the
gods have permitted an un-blurred vision of the eternal normalities
of human weakness. This vision he can never forget. He takes his
stand upon the ground which it covers, and from that ground he
never deviates.
Man for him is always an amorous and fantastic animal, using his
reason to justify his passions, and his imagination to justify his
illusions. He is always the animal who can laugh, the animal who
can cry, the animal who can beget or bear children. He is only in a
quite secondary sense the animal who can philosophise.
It is because of his constant preoccupation with the normal
eccentricities and pathetic follies of our race that he lays so much
stress upon outward action.
The normal man is rather an animal who wills and acts than an
animal who dreams and thinks; and it is with willing and acting,
rather than with dreaming and thinking, that Anatole France is
concerned. One of the main ironic devices of his humour is to show
the active animal led astray by his illusions, and the contemplative
animal driven into absurdity by his will.
With his outward-looking gaze fixed upon the eternal and pathetic
normalities of the human situation, Anatole France has himself, like
Voltaire, a constant tendency to gravitate towards politics and public
affairs.
In this respect his temperament is most obstinately classical. Like
Horace and all the ancient satirists, he feels himself invincibly
attracted to "affairs of state," even while they excite his derision.
One cannot read a page of his writing without becoming aware that
one is in the presence of a mind cast in the true classic mould.
In the manner of the great classical writers of Athens and Rome he
holds himself back from any emotional betrayal of his own feelings.
He is the type of character most entirely opposite to what might be
called the Rousseau-type.
He is un-modern in this and quite alone; for, in one form or another,
the Rousseau-type with its enthusiastic neurotic mania for
self-revelation dominates the entire literary field. One gets the
impression of something massive and self-possessed, something
serenely and almost inhumanly sane about him. One feels always
that he is the "Grand Gentleman" of literature with whom no
liberties may be taken. His tone is quiet, his manner equable, his air
smiling, urbane, superior. His reserve is the reserve of the great
races of antiquity. With a calm, inscrutable, benevolent malice, he
looks out upon the world. There is a sense of much withheld, much
unsaid, much that nothing would ever induce him to say.
His point of view is always objective. It might be maintained,
though the thing sounds like a paradox, that his very temperament is
objective. Certainly it is a temperament averse to any outbursts of
unbalanced enthusiasm.
His attitude toward what we call Nature is more classical than the
classics. Virgil shows more vibrant emotion in the presence of the
sublimities of the natural elements. His manner when dealing with
the inanimate world is the manner of the Eighteenth Century
touched with a certain airiness and charm that is perhaps more
Hellenic than Latin. As one reads him one almost feels as though the
human race detached itself from its surroundings and put between
itself and Nature a certain clear and airy space, untroubled by any
magnetic currents of spiritual reciprocity. One feels as though
Nature were kept decisively and formally in her place and not
permitted to obtrude herself upon the consciousness of civilised
people except when they require some pleasant lawn or noble trees
or smiling garden of roses to serve as a background for their
metaphysical discussions or their wanton amorous play. What we
have come to call the "magic" of Nature is never for a moment
allowed to interrupt these self-possessed epicurean arguments of
statesmen, politicians, amorists, theologians, philosophers and
proconsuls.
Individual objects in Nature--a tree, a brook, the seashore, a bunch
of flowers, a glade in the forest, a terrace in a garden,--are described
in that clear, laconic, objective manner, which gives one the
impression of being able to touch the thing in question with one's
bare hand.
The plastic and tactile value of things is always indicated in Anatole
France's writings with brief, clear cut, decisive touches, but "the
murmurs and scents" of the great waters, the silences of the shadowy
forests are not allowed to cross the threshold of his garden of
Epicurus. Each single petal of a rose will have its curves, its colours,
its tints; but the mysterious forces of subterranean life which bring
the thing to birth are pushed back into the darkness. The marble-cold
resistance of Anatole France's classical mind offers a hard polished
surface against which the vague elemental energies of the world beat
in vain. He walks smilingly and pensively among the olive-trees of
the Academia, plucking a rose here and an oleander there; but for
the rest, the solemn wizardries of Nature are regarded with an
urbane contempt.
His style is a thing over which the fastidious lovers of human
language may ponder long and deep. The art of it is so restrained, so
aristocratic, so exclusive, that even the smallest, simplest, most
unimportant words take to themselves an emphatic significance.
Anatole France is able to tell us that Monsieur Bergeret made some
naive remark, or the Abbé Jérôme Coignard uttered some unctuous
sally, in so large and deliberate and courtly a way that the mere "he
said" or "he began" falls upon us like a papal benediction or like the
gesture of a benignant monarch.
There is no style in the world so deeply penetrated with the odour
and savour of its author's philosophy. And this philosophy, this
atmosphere of mind, is so entirely French that every least idiomatic
peculiarity in his native tongue seems willing to lend itself, to the
last generous drop of the wine of its essential soul, to the tone and
manner of his speech. All the refinements of the most consummate
civilisation in the world, all its airy cynicism, all its laughing
urbanity, all its whimsical friendliness, seem to concentrate
themselves and reach their climax on every page of his books.
A delicate odour of incense and mockery, an odour of consecrated
wine and a savour of heathen wit, rise up together from every
sentence and disarm us with the insidiousness of their pleasant
contrast. His style is so beautiful and characteristic that one cannot
read the simplest passage of easy narration from his pen without
becoming penetrated with his spirit, without feeling saner, wiser,
kindlier, and more disenchanted and more humane.
I cannot resist quoting from the prologue to "Le Puits de Sainte
Claire," a certain passage which seems to me peculiarly adapted to
the illustration of what I have just said. The writer is, or imagines
himself to be, in the city of Siena.
"Sur la voie blanche, dans ces nuits transparentes, la seule recontre
que je faisais était celle du R. P. Adone Doni, qui alors travaillait
comme moi tout le jour dans l'ancienne académie _degli Intronati._
J'avais tout de suite aimé ce cordelier qui, blanchi dans l'étude,
gardait l'humeur riante et facile d'un ignorant.
"Il causait volontiers. Je goûtais son parler suave, son beau langage,
sa pensee docte et naïve, son air de vieux Silène purifié par les eaux
baptismales, son instinct de mime accompli, le jeu de ses passions
vives et fines, le génie étrange et charmant dont il etait possédé.
"Assidu à la bibliothèque, il fréquentait aussi le marché, s'arrêtant de
préférence devant les contadines, qui vendent des pommes d'or, et
prêtant l'oreille à leur libres propos.
Il apprenait d'elles, disait-il, la belle langue toscane. . . . Je crus
m'aperçevoir en effet qu'il inclinait aux opinions singulières. Il avait
de la religion et de la science, mais non sans bizarreries. . . . C'est
sur le diable qu'il professait des opinions singulières. Il pensait que
le diable était mauvais sans l'être absolument et que son
imperfection naturelle l'empêcherait toujours d'atteindre à la
perfection du mal. Il croyait aperçevoir quelques signes de bonté
dans les actions obscures de Satan, et, sans trop l'oser dire, il en
augurait la rédemption finale de l'archange méditatif, après la
consommation des siècles. . . . Assis sur la margelle, les mains dans
les manches de sa robe, il contemplait avec un paisible etonnement
les choses de la nuit.
"Et l'ombre qui l'enveloppait laissait deviner encore dans ses yeux
clairs et sur sa face camuse l'expressions d'audace craintive et de
grâce moqueuse qui y etait profondement empreinte. Nous
échangions d'abord des souhaits solennels de bonne santé, de paix et
de contentement. . . .
"Tandis qu'il parlait, la lumiere de la lune coulait sur sa barbe en
ruisseau d'argent. Le grillon accompagnait du bruissement de ses
élytres la voix du conteur, et parfois, aux sons de cette bouche, d'où
sortait le plus doux des langages humains, répondait la plainte flutée
du crapaud, qui, de l'autre côté de la route, écoutait, amical et
craintif."
The beautiful delicacy of that single touch "sur la voie blanche, dans
ces nuits transparentes" is characteristic of a thousand others of a
similar kind sprinkled among his books, where gentle and whimsical
spirits discourse upon God and the Universe.
He has a most exquisite genius for these little chance-accompaniments
of such human scenes. "L'Orme du Mail" is full of them; and
so is "Les Opinions de M. Jérôme Coignard."
In "Sur la Pierre Blanche" the impish humour of accidental
encounter brings forward nothing less than the death of Stephen the
Proto-Martyr, as an irrelevant interruption to the amorous pleasures
of one of his least attractive philosophers.
Full of malicious interest as he is in all the outward events of nations
and societies, it is always evident that what Anatole France really
regards as worthy of tender consideration is the conversation of
quaint minds and the "Humeur riante et facile" of wayward and
fantastic souls.
His sense of the fundamental futility of the whole scheme of things
is so absolute that what most modern writers would regard as the
illogical dreams of superannuated eccentrics he is inclined to treat
with smiling reverence and infinite sympathy. Where the whole
terrestrial business is only a meaningless blur upon the face of
nothingness, why should we not linger by the way, under elm trees,
or upon broken fragments of old temples, or on sunny benches in
cloistered gardens, and listen to the arbitrary fancies of unpractical
and incompetent persons whose countenances express an "audace
craintive" and a "grâce moqueuse," and who look with mild wonder
and peaceful astonishment at "les choses de la nuit"?
After perusing many volumes of Anatole France, one after another,
we come to feel as though nothing in the world were important
except the reading of unusual books, the conversation of unusual
people, and the enjoyment of such philosophical pleasures as may be
permitted by the gods and encouraged by the approbation of a
friendly and tolerant conscience.
One always rises from the savouring of his excellent genius with a
conviction that it is only the conversation of one's friends, varied by
such innocent pleasures of the senses as may be in harmony with the
custom of one's country, which renders in the last resort the madness
of the world endurable.
He alone, of all modern writers, creates that leisurely atmosphere of
noble and humorous dignity--familiar enough to lovers of the old
masters--according to which every gesture and word of the most
simple human being comes to be endowed with a kind of royal
distinction. By the very presence in his thought of the essential
meaninglessness of the world, he is enabled to throw into stronger
relief the "quips and cranks and wanton wiles" of our pathetic
humanity.
Human words--the words of the most crack-brained among us--take
to themselves a weight and dignity from the presence behind them
of this cosmic purposelessness. The less the universe matters, the
more humanity matters. The less meaning there is in the macrocosm
the more tenderly and humorously must every microcosm be treated.
It thus comes about that Anatole France, the most disillusioned and
sceptical of writers, is also the writer whose books throw over the
fancies and caprices of humanity the most large and liberal
benediction.
To realise how essentially provincial English and American writers
are, one has only to consider for a moment the absolute
impossibility of such books as "L'Orme du Mail," "Le Mannequin"
or "Monsieur Bergeret à Paris" appearing in either of these countries.
This amiable and smiling scepticism, this profound scholarship, this
subtle interest in theological problems, this ironical interest in
political problems, this detachment of tone, this urbane humanism,
make up an "ensemble" which one feels could only possibly appear
in the land of Rabelais and Voltaire.
Think of the emergence of a book in London or New York bearing
such quotations at the heads of the chapters as those which are to be
found in "Le Puits de Sainte Claire"! The mere look of the first page
of the volume, with its beautifully printed Greek sentence about
_ta physika kai ta ethika kai ta mathmatika_, lifts one suddenly and
with a delicious thrill of pleasure, as if from the touch of a cool,
strong, youthful hand, into that serene atmosphere of large
speculations and unbounded vistas which is the inheritance of the
great humane tradition: the tradition, older than all the dust of
modern argument, and making every other mental temper seem, in
comparison, vulgar, common, bourgeois and provincial.
The chapter headed "Saint Satyre" is prefaced by a beautiful hymn
from the "Breviarum Romanum"; while the story named "Guido
Cavalcanti" begins with a long quotation from "Il Decameron di
Messer Giovanni Boccaccio." I take the first instance that comes to
my hand; but all his books are the same. And one who reads Anatole
France for the sake of an exciting narrative, or for the sake of
illuminating psychology, or for the sake of some proselytising
theory, will be hugely disappointed. None of these things will he
find; nor, indeed, anything else that is tiresomely and absurdly
modern.
What he will find will be the old, sweet, laughing, mellow world of
rich antique wisdom; a world where the poetry of the ancients
blends harmoniously with the mystical learning of the fathers of the
church; a world where books are loved better than theories and
persons better than books; a world where the humours of the
pathetic flesh and blood of the human race are given their true value,
as more amusing than any philosophy and as the cause and origin of
all the philosophies that have ever been!
Anatole France is incorrigibly pagan. The pleasures of the senses are
described in all his books with a calm smiling assurance that
ultimately these are the only things that matter!
I suppose that no author that ever lived is so irritating to
strong-minded idealists. He does not give these people "the ghost of a
chance." He serenely assumes that all ideals are of human, too
human, origin, and that no ideals can stand up long against the
shocks of life's ironic caprices.
And yet while so maliciously introducing, with laconic Voltairian
gibes, the wanton pricking of human sensuality, he never forgets the
church. In nothing is he more French; in nothing is he more civilised,
than in his perpetual preoccupation with two things--the beauty and
frailty of women and the beauty and inconsistency of Christianity.
The clever young men who write books in England and America
seem possessed by a precisely opposite purpose; the purpose of
showing that Christianity is played out and the purpose of showing
that women are no longer frail.
That sort of earnest-minded attempt to establish some kind of
mystical substitute for the religion of our fathers, which one is
continually meeting in modern books and which has so withering an
effect both upon imagination and humour, is never encountered in
Anatole France. He is interested in old tradition and he loves to
mock at it. He is interested in human sensuality and he loves to
mock at it; but apart from traditional piety struggling with natural
passion, he finds nothing in the human soul that arrests him very
deeply.
Man, to Anatole France, is a heathen animal who has been baptised;
and the humour of his whole method depends upon our keeping a
firm hold upon both these aspects of our mortal life.
In a world where men propagated themselves like plants or trees and
where there was no organised religious tradition, the humour of
Anatole France would beat its wings in the void in vain. He requires
the sting of sensual desire and he requires an elaborate ecclesiastical
system whose object is the restraint of sensual desire. With these
two chords to play upon he can make sweet music. Take them both
away and there could be no Anatole France.
The root of this great writer's genius is _irony._ His whole
philosophy is summed up in that word, and all the magic of his
unequalled style depends upon it.
Sometimes as we read him, we are stirred by a dim sense of
indignation against his perpetual tone of smiling, patronising,
disenchanted, Olympian pity. The word "pity" is one of his favourite
words, and a certain kind of pity is certainly a profound element in
his mocking heart.
But it is the pity of an Olympian god, a pity that cares little for what
we call justice, a pity that refuses to take seriously the objects of his
commiseration. His clear-sighted intelligence is often pleased to toy
very plausibly with a certain species of revolutionary socialism. But,
I suppose few socialists derive much satisfaction from that
devastating piece of irony, the Isle of the Penguins; where
everything moves in circles and all ends as it began.
The glacial smile of the yawning gulf of eternal futility flickers
through all his pages. Everything is amusing. Nothing is important.
Let us eat and drink; let us be urbane and tolerant; let us walk on the
sunny side of the road; let us smell the roses on the sepulchres of the
dead gods; let us pluck the violets from the sepulchres of our dead
loves. All is equal--nothing matters. The wisest are they who play
with illusions which no longer deceive them and with the pity that
no longer hurts them. The wisest are they who answer the brutality
of Nature with the irony of Humanity. The wisest are they who read
old books, drink old wine, converse with old friends, and let the rest
go.