I
In the first part of that great, human Book, dear to all good
Pantagruelists, is this picture: "From the Tower Anatole to the
Messembrine were faire spacious galleries, all coloured over and
painted with the ancient prowesses, histories and descriptions of the
world." The Tower Anatole is part of the architecture of the Abbey
of Thélème, in common with the other towers named, Artick, Calaer,
Hesperia, and Caiere.
For lovers of the exquisite and whimsical artist, Anatole France, a
comparison to Rabelais may not appear strained. Anatole, the man, has
written much that contains, as did the gracious Tower Anatole, "faire
spacious galleries ... painted with ancient ... histories." He has
in his veins some infusion of the literary blood of that "bon gros
libertin," Rabelais, a figure in French literature who refuses to be
budged from his commanding position, notwithstanding the combined
prestige of Pascal, Voltaire, Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Hugo, and
Balzac. And the gentle Anatole has a pinch of Rabelais's _esprit
gaulois_, which may be found in both Balzac and Maupassant.
To call France a sceptic is to state a common-place. But he is so
many other things that he bewilders. The spiritual stepson of Renan,
a partial inheritor of his gifts of irony and pity, and a continuator
of the elder master's diverse and undulating style, France displays
affinities to Heine, Aristophanes, Charles Lamb, Epicurus, Sterne, and
Voltaire. The "glue of unanimity"--to use an expression of the old
pedantic Budæus--has united the widely disparate qualities of his
personality. His outlook upon life is the outlook of Anatole France.
His vast learning is worn with an air almost mocking. After the bricks
and mortar of the realists, after the lyric pessimism of the morally
and politically disillusioned generation following the Franco-German
war, his genius comes in the nature of a consoling apparition. Like his
own Dr. Trublet, in Histoire Comique, he can say: "_Je tiens boutique
de mensonges. Je soulage, je console. Peut-il consoler et soulager sans
mentir?_" And he does deceive us with the resources of his art, with
the waving of his lithe wand which transforms whales into weasels,
mosques into cathedrals.
Perhaps too much stress has been set upon his irony. Ironic he is with
a sinuosity that yields only to Renan. It is irony rather in the shape
of the idea, than in its presentation; atmospheric is it rather than
surface antithesis, or the witty inversion of a moral order; he is a
man of sentiment, Shandeàn sentiment as it is at times. But the note we
always hear, if distantly reverberant, is the note of pity. To be all
irony is to mask one's humanity; and to accuse Anatole France of the
lack of humanity is to convict oneself of critical colour-blindness.
His writings abound in sympathetic overtones. His pity is without
Olympian condescension. He is a most lovable man in the presence of the
eternal spectacle of human stupidity and guile. It is not alone that he
pardons, but also that he seeks to comprehend. Not emulating the cold
surgeon's eye of a Flaubert, it is with the kindly vision of a priest
he studies the maladies of our soul. In him there is an ecclesiastical
_fond_. He forgives because he understands. And after his tenderest
benediction he sometimes smiles; it may be a smile of irony; yet it is
seldom cruel. He is an adroit determinist, yet sets no store by the
logical faculties. Man is not a reasoning animal, he says, and human
reason is often a mirage.
But to label him with sentimentalism _à la russe_--the Russian pity
that stems from Dickens--would shock him into an outburst. Conceive
him, then, as a man to whom all emotional extravagance is foreign; as
a detester of rhetoric, of declamation, of the phrase facile; as a
thinker who assembles within the temple of his creations every extreme
in thought, manners, sentiment, and belief, yet contrives to fuse this
chaos by the force of his sober style. His is a style more linear than
coloured, more for the eye than the ear; a style so pellucid that one
views it suspiciously--it may conceal in its clear, profound depths
strange secrets, as does some mountain lake in the shine of the sun.
Even the simplest art may have its veils.
In the matter of clarity, Anatole France is the equal of Renan and John
Henry Newman, and if this same clarity was at one time a conventional
quality of French prose, it is rarer in these days. Never syncopated,
moving at a moderate _tempo_, smooth in his transitions, replete with
sensitive rejections, crystalline in his diction, a lover and a master
of large luminous words, limpid and delicate and felicitous, the very
marrow of the man is in his unique style. Few writers swim so easily
under such a heavy burden of erudition. A loving student of books, his
knowledge is precise, his range wide in many literatures. He is a true
humanist. He loves learning for itself, loves words, treasures them,
fondles them, burnishes them anew to their old meanings--though he
has never tarried in the half-way house of epigram. But, over all, his
love of humanity sheds a steady glow. Without marked dramatic sense,
he nevertheless surprises mankind at its minute daily acts. And these
he renders for us as candidly "as snow in the sunshine"; as the old
Dutch painters stir our nerves by a simple shaft of light passing
through a half-open door, upon an old woman polishing her spectacles.
M. France sees and notes many gestures, inutile or tragic, notes them
with the enthralling simplicity of a complicated artist. He deals with
ideas so vitally that they become human; yet his characters are never
abstractions, nor serve as pallid allegories; they are all alive, from
Sylvestre Bonnard to the group that meets to chat in the Foro Romano of
Sur la Pierre Blanche. He can depict a cat or a dog with fidelity; his
dog Riquet bids fair to live in French literature. He is an interpreter
of life, not after the manner of the novelist, but of life viewed
through the temperament of a tolerant poet and philosopher.
This modern thinker, who has shed the despotism of the positivist
dogma, boasts the soul of a chameleon. He understands, he loves,
Christianity with a knowledge and a fervour that surprise until one
measures the depth of his affection for the antique world. To further
confuse our perceptions, he exhibits a sympathy for Hebraic lore that
can only be set down to a remote lineage. He has rifled the Talmud for
its forgotten stories; he delights in juxtaposing the cultured Greek
and the strenuous Paul; he adores the contrast of Mary Magdalen with
the pampered Roman matron. Add to this a familiarity with the proceeds
of latter-day science, astronomy in particular, with the scholastic
speculation of the Renaissance, mediæval piety, and the Pyrrhonism
of a boulevard philosopher. So commingled are these contradictory
elements, so many angles are there exposed to numerous cultures, so
many surfaces avid for impressions, that we end in admiring the
exercise of a magic which blends into a happy synthesis such a variety
of moral dissonances, such moral preciosity. It is magic--though there
are moments when we regard the operation as intellectual legerdemain
of a superior kind. We suspect dupery. But the humour of France is
not the least of his miraculous solvents; it is his humour that often
transforms a doubtful campaign into a radiant victory. We see him, the
protagonist of his own psychical drama, dancing on a tight rope in the
airiest manner, capering deliciously in the void, and quite like a
prestidigitator bidding us doubt the existence of his rope.
His life long, Renan, despite his famous phrase, "the mania of
certitude," was pursued by the idea of an absolute. He cried for
proofs. To Berthelot he wrote: "I am eager for mathematics." It
promised finality. As he aged, he was contented to seek an atmosphere
of moral feeling; though he declared that "the real is a vast outrage
on the ideal." He tremulously participated in the ritual of social
life, and in the worship of the unknown god. He at last felt that
Nature abhorred an absolute; that Being was ever a Becoming; that
religion and philosophy are the result of a partial misunderstanding.
All is relative, and the soul of man must ever feed upon chimeras! The
Breton harp of Renan became sadly unstrung amid the shallow thunders of
agnostic Paris.
But France, his eyes quite open and smiling, gayly Pagan Anatole, does
not demand proofs. He rejoices in a philosophic indifference, he
has the gift of paradox. To Renan's plea for the rigid realities of
mathematics, he might ask, with Ibsen, whether two and two do not make
five on the planet Jupiter! To Montaigne's "What Know I?" he opposes
Rabelais's "Do What Thou Wilt!" And then he adorns the wheel of Ixion
with garlands.
He believes in the belief of God. He swears by the gods of all times
and climes. His is the cosmical soul. A man who unites in his tales
something of the Mimes of Herondas, La Bruyère's Characters, and the
Lucian Dialogues, with faint flavours of Racine and La Fontaine, may be
pardoned his polygraphic faiths. With Baudelaire he knows the tremours
of the believing atheist; with Baudelaire he would restrain any show
of irreverence before an idol, be it wooden or bronze. It might be the
unknown god!--as Baudelaire once cried.
This pleasing chromatism in beliefs, a belief in all and none, is not a
new phenomenon. The classical world of thought has several matches for
Anatole France, from the followers of Aristippus to the Sophists. But
there is a specific note of individuality, a _roulade_ quite Anatolian
in the Frenchman's writings. No one but this accomplished Parisian
sceptic could have framed The Opinions of Jérôme Coignard and his
wholly delightful scheme for a Bureau of Vanity; "man is an animal with
a musket," he declares; Sylvestre Bonnard and M. Bergeret are new with
a dynamic novelty.
As Walter Pater was accused of a silky dilettanteism, so France, as
much a Cyrenaic as the English writer, was nevertheless forced to step
down from his ivory tower to the dusty streets and there demonstrate
his sincerity by battling for his convictions. After the imbecile
Dreyfus affair had rolled away, there was little talk in Paris of
Anatole France, Epicurean. He was saluted with every variety of abuse,
but this amateur of fine sensations had forever settled the charge of
morose aloofness, of voluptuous cynicism. (Though to-day he is regarded
with a certain suspicion by all camps.) At a similar point where the
endurance of Ernest Renan had failed him, Anatole France proved his
own faith. Renan during the black days of the Commune retired to
Versailles, there to meditate upon the shamelessness of the brute,
Caliban, with his lowest instincts unleashed. But France believes in
the people, he has said that the future belongs to Caliban, and he
would scout his master's conception of the Tyrant-Sage, a conception
that Nietzsche partially transposed later to the ecstatic key of the
Superman. M. France would probably advocate the head-chopping of such
wise monster-despots. An aristocrat by culture and fastidiousness, he
is without an _arrière-pensée_ of the snobbery of the intellect, of the
cerebral exaltation displayed by Hugo, Baudelaire, and the Goncourts.
When France published his early verse--his début was as a poet and
Parnassian poet--Catulle Mendès divined the man. He wrote, "I can
never think of Anatole France ... without fancying I see a young
Alexandrian poet of the second century, a Christian, doubtless, who is
more than half Jew, above all a neoplatonist, and further a pure theist
deeply imbued with the teachings of Basilides and Valentinus, and
the Perfumes of the Orphic poems of some recent rhetorician, in whom
subtlety was pushed to mysticism and philosophy to the threshold of the
Kabbalah."
Some critics have accused him of not being able to build a book. He
knows the rhythms of poems, but he "does not know" the harmony of
essences, said the late Bernard Lazare; he is an excellent Parnassian
but a mediocre philosopher: he is a charming _raconteur_, but he
cannot compose a book. Precise in details, diffuse in ensembles, clear
and confused, neat and ambiguous, continued M. Lazare, he searches
his object in concentric circles. Furthermore, he has the soul of a
Greek in the decadence, and the voice of a Sistine Chapel singer--pure
and irresolute. To all this admission may be made without fear of
decomposing the picture which France has set up before us of his own
personality--a picture, however, he does not himself hesitate to efface
from the canvas whenever his perversity prompts. He is all that his
critic asserts and much more. It is this moral eclecticism, this jumble
of opposites, this violent contrast of traits, and these apparently
irreconcilable elements of his character, which appal, interest, yet
make him so human. But his art never swerves; it records invariably
the fluctuations of his spirit, a spirit at once desultory, savant, and
subtle, records all in a style, concrete and clairvoyant.
His books are not so much novels as chronicles of designedly simple
structure; his essays are confessions; his confessions, a blending of
the naïve and the corrupt, for there are corroding properties in these
novel persuasive disenchantments. Upon the robust of faith Anatole
France makes no more impression than do Augustine, Saint Teresa, the
Imitation of Christ, or the Provincial Letters. Such _nuances_ of
scepticism as his are for those who love the comedies of belief and
disbelief. Not possessing the Huysmans intensity of temperament, France
will never be betrayed into such affirmations; Huysmans, who dropped
like a ripe plum into the basket of the ecclesiastical fruit-gatherer.
France will never lose his balance in the fumes of a personal
conversion. Of Plato himself he would ask: "What is Truth?" and if
Pilate posed the same question, France would reply by handing him his
Jardin d'Epicure--a veritable breviary of scepticism. In Socrates he
would discover a congenial companion; yet he might mischievously allude
to Montaigne "concerning cats," or quote Aristotle on the form of hats.
A wilful child of philosophy and _belles-lettres_, he may be always
expected to say the startling.
Be humble! he exhorts. Be without intellectual pride! for the days of
man, who is naught but a bit of animated pottery, are brief, and he
vanishes like a spark. Thus Job--Anatole. Be humble! Even virtue may
be unduly praised: "Since it is overcoming which constitutes merit, we
must recognise that it is concupiscence which makes saints. Without
it there is no repentance, and it is repentance which makes saints."
To become a saint one must have been first a sinner. He quotes, as
an example, the conduct of the blessed Pelagia, who accomplished her
pilgrimage to Rome by rather unconventional means. Here, too, we
recognise the amiable casuistry of Anatole--Voltaire. And there is
something of Baudelaire and Barbey d'Aurevilly's piety of imagination
with impiety of thought, in France's pronouncement. He is a Chrysostom
reversed; from his golden mouth issue spiritual blasphemies.
Mr. Henry James has said that the province of art is "all life, all
feeling, all observation, all vision." According to this rubric,
France is a profound artist. He plays with the appearances of life,
occasionally lifting the edge of the curtain to curdle the blood of
his spectators by the sight of Buddha's shadow in some grim cavern
beyond. He has the Gallic tact of adorning the blank spaces of theory
and the ugly spots of reality. A student of Kant in his denial of the
objective, we can never picture him as following Königsberg's sage
in his admiration of the starry heavens and the moral law. Both are
relative, would be the report of the Frenchman. But, if he is sceptical
about things tangible, he is apt to dash off at a tangent and proclaim
the existence of that "school of drums kept by the angels," which the
hallucinated Arthur Rimbaud heard and beheld. His method of surprising
life, despite his ingenuous manner, is sometimes as oblique as that of
Jules Laforgue. And, in the words of Pater, his is "one of the happiest
temperaments coming to an understanding with the most depressing of
theories."
For faith he yearns. He humbles himself beneath the humblest. He
excels in picturing the splendours of the simple soul; yet faith has
not anointed his intellect with its chrism. He admires the golden
filigree of the ciborium; its spiritual essence escapes him. He stands
at the portals of Paradise; there he lingers. He stoops to some rare
and richly coloured feather. He eloquently vaunts its fabulous beauty,
but he will not listen to the whirring of the wings from which it has
fallen. Pagan in his irony, his pity wholly Christian, Anatole France
has in him something of Petronius and not a little of Saint Francis.