ANATOLE FRANCE
BY
GEORGE BRANDES
MEN OF CONTEMPORARY LETTERS SERIES
LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
MCMVIII
[Illustration: ANATOLE FRANCE--Bust by Lavergne]
The true author is recognisable by the existence on every page of his
works of at least one sentence or one phrase which none but he could
have written.
Take the following sentence: "If we may believe this amiable shepherd
of souls, it is impossible for us to elude divine mercy, and we shall
all enter Paradise--unless, indeed, there be no Paradise, which is
exceedingly probable." It treats of Renan. It must be written by a
disciple of Renan's, whose humour perhaps allows itself a little more
licence than the master's. More we cannot say.
But take this: "She was the widow of four husbands, a dreadful woman,
suspected of everything except of having loved--consequently honoured
and respected." There is only one man who can have written this. It
jestingly indicates the fact that society forgives woman everything
except a passion, and communicates this observation to the reader, as
it were with a gentle nudge.
Or take the following: "We should not love nature, for she is not
lovable; but neither should we hate her, for she is not deserving of
hatred. She is everything. It is very difficult to be everything. It
results in terrible heavy-handedness and awkwardness."
There is only one man who would excuse Nature for her indifference to
us human beings in these words: "It is very difficult to be everything."
Read this passage: "It is 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."
It is an Abbé who speaks thus, and who speaks without a trace of irony.
One is conscious of the author's smile behind the Abbe's seriousness.
Few are so pithy in their irony as France. He says: "Cicero was in
politics a Moderate of the most violent description."
Few are so picturesque in their satire as he. Others have used the
phrase: Equality before the law--that means equality before the laws
which the well-to-do have made for the poor, and men for women. Others
have maintained that the ideal of justice would be an inequality before
the law adjusted to the differences between individuals. Others have
said: If there is inequality in law itself, where is equality to be
found?
But there is only one man who can have written: "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."
This one man is Anatole France. Most noticeable in this style is its
irony; it stamps him as a spiritual descendant of Renan. But in spite
of the relationship, France's irony is of a very different description
from Renan's. Renan, as historian or critic, always speaks in his
own name, and we are directly conscious of himself in the fictitious
personages of his philosophic dramas, and even more so in those of his
philosophic dialogues. France's irony conceals itself beneath naïveté.
Renan disguises himself, France transforms himself. He writes from
standpoints which are directly the opposite of his own--primitive
Christian, or mediæval Catholic--and through what is said we apprehend
what he means. Other writers may be as witty, may be or appear as
delicately ironical--they still do not resemble him. If we enter the
dépôt of some famous china manufactory with a piece of china from some
other factory, as faultless and as beautiful in colour as those by
which we are surrounded, the saleswoman takes it into her hand, looks
at it, and says: "The paste is different."
In France's case we may search long for paste of the same quality as
that which he has succeeded in producing after thirty-six years of
labour.
Anatole France is no longer young, but his celebrity is of
comparatively recent date. On April 16, 1904, he completed his sixtieth
year, but only for the last eleven years has he really been famous.
He began as quite a young man to write literary and historical essays
and tasteful poems, but he was thirty-seven when he first attracted
attention by his simple tale, _Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard_, and it
was not until 1892-93 that he gave proof of his originality.
His remaining so long in the shade is attributable in the first place
to the tardy development of his complete individuality. He had not
the courage to be completely himself; encouragement from without was
necessary to him.
Another reason for it was the occupation of the foreground by great
novelists who have now disappeared, story-tellers like Maupassant,
Daudet, Zola; and yet another, that men of talent such as Bourget and
Huysmans had not yet gone over to clericalism, or Jules Lemaître to
nationalism, or Hervieu to the theatre. More-over--and this of prime
importance--the great artist in style whose heir he is, Ernest Renan,
was still with us.
Not until the acute sceptic and enthusiastically pious thinker in whose
footsteps he trod, and those luxuriantly fertile authors whose books
excited most attention had passed away, was the space round that tree
of knowledge which Anatole France had planted sufficiently cleared to
allow the sunlight to fall upon it and the tree to become visible from
every side.
Those other Frenchmen were all born in the provinces--Daudet and Zola
in Provence, Maupassant in Normandy, Renan in Brittany, Hervieu at
Neuilly, Bourget at Amiens; Huysmans is of Flemish descent. France, who
is cast in softer mould, and from the very beginning showed himself to
be less sturdy than the Provençals and Normans, is a Parisian born, and
bears the genuine Parisian stamp.
His master, Renan, did not become a Parisian until towards the close of
his life, until he had lost the Breton stamp, and ceased to be a pupil
of the Germans. France was a Parisian from the beginning.
The light and air of Paris were his native atmosphere, the Luxembourg
Gardens were to him French nature, and the street was his school. As
a child he watched the dairy-girls carrying milk and the coal-heavers
coals into all the houses of the Quartier Latin. He knows the Parisian
artisan and small shopkeeper well.
The windows of the stationers' shops riveted his attention with their
pictures, and his first instruction was received in turning over the
leaves of the books in the boxes of the poor salesmen on the Seine
quays.
He himself was the son of a poor bookseller, or rather bookseller's
assistant. He was born in a book-shop, and brought up amongst old, wise
books, mysterious reminders of a life which was no more. From them
he learned how ephemeral existence is, how little of the work of any
generation survives; and this has inspired him with a fund of sadness,
gentleness, and compassion.
It is extraordinary how many small book-shops he has described, in
Paris and elsewhere--their books, their frequenters, the conversations
held in them. Again and ever again does he occupy himself with these
worthy booksellers on the banks of the Seine (who now look upon him as
their guardian spirit), with their wretched life, as they stand there
in the cold and rain, seldom selling anything.
We, to whom not one of the Frenchmen of to-day seems so French
as Anatole France--for he embodies in himself the whole national
tradition, descending from the romance-writers of the Middle Ages
through Montaigne to Voltaire--we are not surprised that he should have
boldly assumed the name of his country in place of his own. France,
however, was also the Christian name of his unassuming father--he was
France Thibaut. But to the humble people of the street in which he
lives, the little Allée Villa Said, the author is not France; they
call him Monsieur Anatole.
The streets by the Seine are always in his mind. He says somewhere: "I
was brought up on this Quai, amongst books, by humble, simple people,
whom I alone remember. When I am no more it will be as if they had
never existed."
Elsewhere he calls these river-side streets the adopted country of all
men of intellect and taste.
And in a third place he writes: "I was brought up on the quays, where
the old books form part of the landscape. The Seine was my delight....
I admired the river, which by day mirrored the sky and bore boats on
its breast, by night decked itself with jewels and sparkling flowers."
A book-lover he was and is.
One of the first characteristics which strikes the reader of France's
works is this literary culture, unusual in a novelist and story-writer,
and also its nature. Amongst French authors as a class we are
accustomed to the unlearned, whose culture is restrictedly French,
to the pupils of the Normal School, whose culture is one-sidedly
classical, and to the learned, whose culture is European. But France's
is a wide, ample culture, gained in a Europe from which the Germanic
nations are excluded. He knows neither English nor German. This is
the chief difference between his culture and Renan's. But the want is
less felt in him than in others. Renan was the Oriental philologist.
The Semitic languages were his field; his intellect had been nourished
upon German science. What France is thoroughly at home in is Latin and
Greek antiquity; but he is also well versed in the Latin and Italian
literatures of the Middle Ages. Therefore he is, be it noted in
passing, a keen supporter of classical school education. "I have," he
says somewhere, "a desperate attachment to Latin studies. Without them
the beauty of the French genius would be gone. We are Latins. The milk
of the she-wolf is the best part of our blood."
He has made himself specially familiar with the age of ferment when
Christianity was struggling with paganism in the ancient mind, with the
Christian legends, which he retails with naïveté and well-concealed
irony, and with Italian and even more particularly French history, from
the days of Cæsar to the eighteenth century, the beginning of which
lives in his _Reine Pédauque_.
His art occupies itself very frequently with religious feelings and
situations. And here the contrast with Renan is strongest. For whereas
Renan's mind was always religiously disposed and his language often
unctuous, France, in treating of religious subjects, in spite of
apparent reverence, is as callous in his inmost soul as Voltaire.
To his pictures of the past have been added in the last stage of his
development pictures drawn from the France of to-day, and portraits of
personages who have as lately formed the subjects of conversation as
Verlaine and Esterhazy.
It is not modern life, however, which he favours as author or man.
One day, when a visitor to whom he was showing his books expressed
surprise that there were so few, and apparently no modern works among
them, France said: "I have no new books. I do not keep those which
are sent me; I send them on to a friend in the country." (The "friend
in the country" was very probably a French euphemism for one of those
booksellers on the Seine quays whom France knows so well.) "But do
you not care to make acquaintance with them?" "My contemporaries No!
What they can tell me I know quite as well myself. I learn more
from Petronius than from Mendès." It was, therefore, doubtless half
unwillingly that France for several years undertook to discourse
critically, in the feuilleton of the Temps, on the productions of his
contemporaries. The four volumes in which he has collected his articles
are, nevertheless, extremely interesting. In them, from beginning to
end, he maintains that such a thing as pure, impersonal criticism
is impossible, that the critic can never do anything but represent
himself--that, consequently, when he speaks of Horace or Shakespeare
it simply means that he is speaking, in connection with Horace or
Shakespeare, of himself.
France, then, spoke always of himself. "I hope that when I speak of
myself every one will think of himself." As critic he communicated
his personal impressions, and often related anecdotes, chiefly of
occurrences during his own childhood and early youth, which elucidated
and explained these impressions. A critic in the strict sense of the
word he was not, and when his books began to sell better he gave up
criticism. His utterances in the four volumes referred to are most
characteristic of his personality, revealing, as they do, its spirit,
its limitations, and its prejudices--prejudices which he has gradually
outgrown.
The friend to whom France replied, "I have no modern books in my
house," asked, smiling: "Not even your own?" "No," answered France;
"what a man has built himself--even supposing it to be a palace--he
knows so well that he cannot endure the sight of it. I could not bear
to have my own books in my hands. Why should I look at them?"
"To avoid repetition."
"I certainly do perpetually repeat myself."
This is unfortunately true--it is one of the besetting sins of the
author. Too often does the same thought recur in his pages, expressed
almost in the same words. At times he repeats in one book, page for
page, what he has written in another.
We can see what a faithful portrait of himself France has given us in
the person of the sculptor in _Le Lys Rouge_ by comparing the above
answer with the following passage.
Madame Martin-Bellême says: "I see none of your own works, not a single
statue or relief."
Dechartre replies: "Do you imagine that it would be a pleasure to me to
live among my own works? I know them far too well ... they bore me."
That Dechartre is only a mask for France is almost acknowledged in
what follows: "Even though I have modelled a few bad figures, I am no
sculptor--rather a bit of a poet and philosopher."
In France's literary life, after a preparatory stage which lasted
fifteen years, there are two periods, which differ so much from each
other that one might almost say: There are two Frances.
In the first of these periods he is the refined satirist, who, from
a station high above the human crowd, observes its endeavours and
struggles with a superior, compassionate smile. In the second he
appears as the combatant. He not only attaches himself to a party, but
affirms as he does so his belief in the very things at which he has
jested and scoffed--the sound instinct of the people, the significance
of the majority, the increasing reality of progress--in the doctrines
which as a thinker he had declined to accept, those of democracy and
socialism.
When a friend once politely but plainly reproached him with this
attitude as not perfectly honourable, France answered in a manner which
avoided the real point by asking: "Do you know any other power capable
of opposing that of the Church and Nationalism in combination except
the Socialist Labour party?"
He turned the theoretical into a practical question.
When the friend remarked that he himself, under similar circumstances,
had plainly announced his practical adherence to a party, but at the
same time his dissent from its doctrine, France turned to some ladies
who were present, and said, laughing: "Is he not impossible? As honest
and obstinate as a donkey!"
For more than half of his life France undoubtedly agreed with his Abbé
Coignard, who had an affectionate contempt for mankind, and who would
not have signed the Declaration of the Rights of Man, not a line of
it, "because of the sharply defined and unjust distinction made in it
between man and the gorilla." He in those days inclined, like Coignard,
to the belief that men are mischievous animals who can be kept under
control only by force or cunning.
Even many years later, after he has proclaimed himself a democrat, he
makes his mouthpiece, Bergeret, say to his dog: "To-morrow you will
be in Paris. It is an illustrious and noble city. The nobility, to
tell the truth, is not common to all its inhabitants. It is, on the
contrary, to be found in only a very small number of the citizens. But
a whole town, a whole nation, exists in a few individuals who think
with more power and more justice than the rest." And later, in the
same book, when Biquet, with gaping jaws and flaming eyes, has flown
at the heels of the clever workman who has been setting up Bergeret's
book-shelves, his master explains to him that what exalts a nation
is not the foolish cry that resounds in the streets, but the silent
thought which is conceived in a garret, and one day changes the face
of the earth.
France does not share the reactionary's fear of the power of the
masses. But if he does not fear it, it is not because of their wisdom.
It is because of their caution. He knows that fear of the unknown
renders universal suffrage a perfectly safe institution. He has
made too good use of his eyes and his reasoning powers to have more
reverence for the sovereign people than for any of the other sovereigns
to whom men throughout the ages have offered homage and flattery. He
knows that knowledge is sovereign, not the people. He knows that a
foolish cry, though taken up by thirty-six millions of voices, does
not cease to be foolish, and that truth is irresistible and will make
itself ruler of the earth, though it may be perceived and proclaimed
only by a single man, and though millions may unite and shout in chorus
against his "individualism."
France is no optimist. He has seen too much declension and apostasy
around him in France and Europe generally, to believe in the fable
of uninterrupted progress. He has lived through times of universal
indifference and apathy, when no sting was sharp enough to stir men to
think, much less to act. When men's souls are hungering and thirsting
after unrighteousness, it is of little use offering them a refreshing
draught of culture. As is said of the "people" in Bergeret: "It is
not easy to make an ass which is not thirsty drink." France knows,
too, what popularity means. He has good reasons for making one of his
principal characters say: "If the crowd ever takes you lovingly into
its arms, you will soon discover the vastness of its impotence and of
its cowardice." And we have elsewhere his quiet, witty explanation
of the election of a Nationalist candidate for the Municipal Council
and the defeat of the Republican. The Nationalist candidate was
entirely ignorant of all the subjects connected with the office, and
this ignorance stood him in good stead; it rendered his oratory more
spontaneous and eloquent. The Republican, on the contrary, lost himself
in technical questions and details. Although he knew his public, he
harboured some illusions regarding the intelligence of the electors
who had nominated him. From a certain respect for them, he dared not
venture on too much humbug, and entered into explanations. Consequently
he seemed cold, obscure, tiresome--and all support was withdrawn.
But, on the other hand, France is no pessimist. He knows and says of
the France of to-day: "The weak are in the wrong. That is the sum
of our morality, my friend. Do you suppose that we are on the side
of Poland or Finland? No, no! That is not the way the wind blows at
present!" But he also knows that the earth will not finally belong
to armed barbarity. Alone, unarmed, naked, truth is stronger than
everything. Might and violence oppose it in vain. It strikes at
injustice and annihilates it. The word of man changes the world. The
alliance of strong reasons and noble thoughts is an indissoluble
alliance, and against its onslaught nothing can stand. Bergeret, the
tranquil philosopher, is absolutely certain of the final victory of
reason. "The visions of the philosopher have in all ages aroused men of
action, who have set to work to realise them. Our thoughts create the
future. Statesmen work after the plans which we leave behind us."
Certain it is that the future is hidden from us. But we must, as
France says, work at it as the weavers work who produce the Gobelin
tapestry without seeing the pictures which they are weaving. Nor is
it altogether true that the future is hidden. Or, granting it to be
so to us, "we can conceive of more developed beings to whom to-morrow
is realised as yesterday and to-day are. It makes it the easier to
imagine beings who perceive simultaneously phenomena which appear
to us separated by a long interval of time, when we remember that
our own eyes, looking up to the night sky, receive, mingled beams of
light which have left different stars at intervals of centuries, and
centuries of centuries."
A man holding such views as these may be claimed as an adherent by
both the Radical and the Conservative party, as Ibsen was for a time
in Scandinavia. France actually was incorporated in the Conservative
party. As late as 1897 he was the candidate for the Academy whom the
Conservative party, the Dukes, opposed to Ferdinand Fabre, an author
hostile to the power of the Church.
Highly valuing moderation and tact, he at that time detested his
future companion in arms, Zola--detested him, indeed, without
moderation--wrote: "I do not envy him his disgusting celebrity. Never
has a man so exerted himself to abase humanity and to deny everything
that is good and right. Never has any one so entirely misunderstood the
human ideal." There is more love of good taste here than appreciation
of genius. It must be remembered that France afterwards publicly
recanted this and many similar utterances. He did so in the beautiful
and heartfelt speech which he made at Emile Zola's grave; but he had
done it long before.
He overlooked the genius of the man who was to become his best comrade
in arms because of that man's bad taste and exaggerations, and himself
exaggeratedly praised the men with whom he was afterwards compelled
to engage in mortal combat, and of whose narrowness and weaknesses he
afterwards had ample experience.
He wrote in serious earnest: "I do not believe that more intelligent
men than Paul Bourget and Jules Lemaître can ever have existed."
He had no perception then of Bourget's fear of hell, or of Lemaitre's
want of moral equilibrium. Here is his testimonial to the latter, the
future Nationalist fanatic: "He is one of the men who bear ill-will to
none, but are long-suffering and benevolent. His is a fearless spirit,
a smiling soul; he is all tolerance."
When this was written Jules Lemaître was already malicious and
ungenerous, though perhaps not yet base. A few years later he was, as
Vice-President of the Patrie Française, leader of the band which kept
Dreyfus prisoner in the île du Diable and advocated the _coup d'état_
against Loubet. A few years later Paul Bourget had returned to the
bosom of the Roman Catholic Church, and was attacking with the utmost
violence every progressive movement, even the enlightenment of the
people and instruction for the working man. These were France's models
of intelligence.
Compared with the attitude of these men, France's own attitude during
the past six years may almost be termed exemplary.
It may be that as the popular orator--a career for which he was not
intended by nature--he has proclaimed himself rather more strongly
convinced than he is in his inmost soul; this does not prevent its
being the real man who has come to light during the last decade--the
man who was concealed behind the thinker's play of thought and the
poet's metamorphoses.
Suddenly he stripped himself of all his scepticism and stood forth,
with Voltaire's old blade gleaming in his hand--like Voltaire
irresistible by reason of his wit, like him the terrible enemy of the
power of the Church, like him the champion of innocence. But, taking a
step in advance of Voltaire, France proclaimed himself the friend of
the poor in the great political struggle.
That he did thus come forth was undoubtedly a consequence of the
circumstance that the whole civilisation of France and her old position
as protector of justice appeared to him to be endangered during a
crisis in public morality; but, in the absence of some instigation from
without, he might quite possibly have remained inactive. The person
who influenced him more than any other at this time was a lady in whose
house he has for years been the most welcome of daily visitors--whose
house is, indeed, his second home.
France did not hesitate to bring the whole weight of his influence
publicly to bear when it came in France to a trial of strength between
a few chosen spirits on the one side, and the army, the Church, those
in authority, and the misled masses on the other.
In his capacity as combatant France has written the last two volumes of
his _Histoire Contemporaine_, published his speeches in the _Cahier de
la Quinzaine_, spoken at the unveiling of Renan's statue and at Zola's
grave, and written the Introduction to Combe's collected speeches It
is one of the signs of the times that he should now be the man to whom
the Prime Minister of France applies to have his utterances placed
before the French reading public. It shows what a degree of influence
is ascribed to him, and how definitely he has espoused a cause.
France has at times introduced himself into his books. He takes
the retiring and wise element in his nature, and out of it creates
Monsieur Bergeret. He takes the serene sensualism, and of it constructs
Trublet, the doctor of the _Histoire Comique_. He takes his intensely
beauty-loving ego, and we have the sculptor Dechartre in _Le Lys
Rouge_. He introduces himself into this same novel in the person of
the author Paul Vence, almost with the mention of his name--this, of
course, to prevent its being observed that Anatole France is also the
principal character, the sculptor; just as Mary Robinson is named in
the book to conceal her identity with Miss Bell, the English authoress
in it, and Oppert is referred to to prevent its being said that he is
Schmoll, the antiquarian, as he undoubtedly is.
When Vence is introduced to us in the heroine's drawing-room we are
told: "She considered Paul Vence to be the one really clever man who
came to her house. She had appreciated him before his books had made
him famous. She admired his profound irony, his sensitive pride, his
talent, ripened in solitude."
And to such an extent is Paul Vence France himself that when, towards
the end of the book, he remarks: "He was a wise man who said, 'Let us
give to men for their witnesses and judges Irony and Compassion'"--an
utterance to be found in more than one of France's books--Madame
Martin-Bellême answers: "But, Monsieur Vence, it was yourself who wrote
that."
Profound irony is, then, the first quality which he attributes to
himself.
We have seen how this irony, unlike Renan's, is indirect; we only catch
a glimpse of it through the naïveté of another person.
We are told, for instance, in Thaïs, of the heroine, a Grecian
courtesan: "This woman showed herself at the festival games, and did
not hesitate to dance publicly in such a manner that her excessively
agile and artful movements suggested the most dreadful passions and
excited to them." This is felt and spoken from the standpoint of a monk.
Pafnucius, in the same book, sees the devil torturing souls. The
narrator of the occurrence expresses no doubt or incredulity; it is
nowhere remarked that this was a vision, not reality. No! "Small green
devils pierced his lips and his throat with red-hot irons."
This naïveté is a rare quality in French literature, the literary art
of the French being (in spite of Lafontaine) as a rule not naïve, but
even in Molière, and throughout his whole century, as well as the next,
perfectly self-conscious. Yet naïveté is a powerful means of producing
artistic effects--the indirect process which requires the reader's own
co-operation being undoubtedly always more effective than the direct
communication, which does not impart the useful little impetus to the
intellect.
France, in his historical tales, writes ingenuously, as a contemporary
would have spoken and thought. We are most conscious of this in
the series collected and published under the title of Clio. Simple
tales they are, yet this book, which bears the name of the goddess
of history, concerns itself with some of the greatest historical
personages--Homer, Cæsar, Dante, Joan of Arc, Napoleon. Of these only
Homer and Napoleon are directly presented to us.
When the tale, _The Singer of Kyme_, first appeared, its seemingly
arbitrary invention displeased many. Why take up this legend of the
blind or half-blind old man? Why give this insignificant figure, this
poor creature going from place to place earning his bread by his
songs, the awe-inspiring name of Homer? But upon maturer reflection we
acknowledge how correctly France has seen, and what wisdom there is in
his view of the matter. The singer of his tale is unmistakably akin to
the bards described in the Homeric poems; and it is only natural that
his house should have been cramped and low in comparison with that of
his neighbour, the wealthy soothsayer.
The secret of the art of France's historical style is, as already
said, that he thinks and speaks in the spirit of the age which he
is portraying, seems to share its views, to accept its beliefs and
superstitions, its prejudices and ideas, without a trace of irony or
of fatuity, but with an artistic skill which forcibly brings out the
contrast between the spirit of those ages or countries and ours.
Take, for instance, in the story just mentioned, the way in which he
communicates to the reader, by means of his description of the old
singer's methods, his own conception of the genesis of the Homeric
poems. When a king requests the old man to sing, but to let it be the
truth that he sings, he answers: "What I know of the heroes I have
from my father, who learned it from the Muses themselves; for of old
the Muses were wont to visit the divine singers in caves and woods. I
shall mingle no lies with the old histories." And the author adds: "He
spoke thus from prudence. For to the songs which he had learned in his
childhood he was in the habit of adding verses which he had taken from
other songs or found within himself. _But he did not confess this,
fearing Jest he should be blamed for it_. The chieftains almost always
asked for the old tales, which they believed to have been dictated
by a divinity, and mistrusted the new songs. Therefore he carefully
concealed the origin of those which he had composed himself. _And
as he was a very good poet, and carefully observed the established
customs, his verses were in no wise distinguishable from those of his
forefathers_; they resembled them in form and beauty, and from the
moment of their conception were worthy of immortal fame." The singer
is, we observe, praised, in the spirit of the age, for the quality
which, according to modern ideas, detracts from his worth.
In precisely the same manner is the dialogue entitled _Farinata degli
Uberti_ thrown into relief. With his unerring critical instinct
France has selected the most interesting of all the figures in
Dante's _Inferno_. And this figure has for us one element of interest
in addition to those which it possessed for Dante? namely, the
diametrical opposition between Farinata's views and ours. In our days
it is a very honourable thing to fight for one's countrymen against
foreign troops, and an abominable thing to stir up civil war. When
Farinata is justifying himself for having fought on the side of Siena
against his Florentine fellow countrymen, he says: "Undoubtedly it
would have been better for us Florentines to have fought out the
quarrel amongst ourselves. Civil war is such a fine and noble thing, a
thing of such delicacy, that the implication of foreigners in it ought,
if possible, to be avoided.... I do not maintain the same of wars
with other States. They are useful, at times necessary, enterprises,
undertaken to defend or to extend the frontiers of a country or to
further its commerce. But as a rule there is neither much advantage nor
much honour to be gained by fighting in these vulgar wars. For them a
sensible people prefers to employ mercenary troops, under experienced
leaders, who can do a great deal with a small force."
To appreciate the characteristic qualities of this dialogue the reader
should compare it with the corresponding versified dialogue by Robert
Browning, in which the old Italian passionateness finds expression.
Browning's language is more vehement than France's, more spasmodic and
more spontaneous.
France, as a rule, produces his effect entirely by the contrast
between the inner logic of men's feelings in these old days and in ours.
The most fully elaborated of the tales is that entitled _Commius, the
Atrebate_, which describes the career of a Gallic chieftain in the
time of Cæsar. Although the author appears to have drawn as freely on
his imagination here as in The _Singer of Kyme_, he has in this case
built upon a sound historical foundation. The reader with Cæsar's
_Commentaries_ fresh in his memory will remember what they tell about
the Atrebate chief, Commius. To France it has been a congenial task
to probe the mind of a barbarian of those days--to describe Commius's
care-free life as the chief of his tribe, to show how he is won over
by the Romans and feels flattered by being called Cæsar's friend, but
is gradually led to regard the loss of freedom as a disgrace, until
his feeling towards the Romans becomes the barbarian's fierce hatred.
Most readers will feel that not until they made acquaintance with this
story had they a thorough understanding of the difference between the
Roman methods of warfare and those of the barbarians, and in especial
of the skill in engineering which had been acquired by the little dark
soldiers who made war more with the pickaxe and the spade than with
the javelin and the sword. Very masterly is the description of the
barbarian king's astonishment and affright when, after an absence of
a few years, he returns to his poor capital, Nemetoeenna (the Arras
of to-day), and finds it transformed by the Romans into a magnificent
town, with temples and colonnades. He cannot but believe them possessed
of magic power. We follow him with keen interest as he wanders through
the town disguised as a beggar; we watch his surprise at the paintings
on the houses, of the subjects of which he understands nothing; we see
him murder a young Roman who is sitting in the amphitheatre composing
Latin verses in a Greek metre to his Phoebe. Here again France produces
his effect by the silent throwing into relief of the difference between
men's ideas in those days and in ours. He writes as follows, for
instance, of the prefect of the Roman horse, Caius Volucenus Quadratus,
who resolves to invite Commius to a friendly conference, and to have a
deadly blow dealt him from behind whilst he himself is taking him by
the hand.
"He was a good general, learned in mathematics and mechanics. In
times of peace, under the terebinth trees of his Campanian villa, he
conversed with other high officials upon the laws, manners, and customs
of different races. He lauded the virtues of olden days, extolled
liberty, read Greek history and philosophy. He was distinguished for
nobility and refinement of mind. And as Commius the Atrabate was a
barbarian, hostile to Rome and the Roman cause, he considered it right
and wise to have him assassinated."
Although it is only in faint silhouette that Cæsar is presented to us,
we are conscious here, as elsewhere, that Anatole France is deeply
interested in him. He admires him without any cordial sympathy. His
Abbé Coignard, who muses upon Cæsar, is repelled by his cruelty. The
cutting off of the Gauls' hands at Uxellodunum is, of course, not
forgotten. Yet Cæsar was more merciful than any other Roman general.
But France, following his usual custom, puts into one book all that
tells in favour of Cæsar, and into another what tells against him.
He has done the same with Napoleon. In _Le Lys Rouge_ the shallowness
of Napoleon's character is dwelt upon--nay, insisted upon to such
an extent that poor Napoleon III. is actually maintained to be a
more interesting figure. In the short story, _La Muiron_ (the ship
which conveyed Bonaparte from Egypt to France), we are, on the other
hand, told of the young commander's inclination to mysticism, of his
mysterious belief in his own future. And France puts into his mouth the
following profound words: "No man escapes his fate. Brutus, who was a
mediocrity, believed in the power of the human will. A greater man does
not harbour that illusion. He sees the necessity which limits him....
Children are rebellious. A great man is not. What is a human life? The
curve traced by a projectile." Bonaparte says this at the very moment
when, with implicit faith in his own luck, he is venturing out on the
Mediterranean among the English cruisers. The whole short story is
based, as it were, upon his premonition of coming greatness.
But here, as always, France, with the unerring taste of the really
great writer, avoids cheap effect. India-rubber in hand, he goes over
all the outlines, erasing, toning down.
It is characteristic, and in harmony with the naïveté of the style,
that naïveté should form a distinguishing quality of the most lifelike
characters which France has produced. Another of their qualities is
often strongly developed, sometimes very shameless sensuality, which is
not repugnant to him, and which it amuses him to delineate.
Take Abbé Coignard in _La Reine Pédauque_, a man with an astoundingly
able mind, a childlike soul, and a shameless body. Take Choulette in
_Le Lys Rouge_, a childlike, drunken, shameless genius. This portrait
of Verlaine we find again, with variations, in the Gestas of _L'Étui
de Nacre_. In all three there is a mixture of simplicity and cynic
voluptuousness--a half-childlike absence of shame.
Abbé Coignard undermines everything established with his doubts and
leads an exceedingly loose life, but remains faithful in the very
smallest particular to the Catholic religion. Even more childlike than
he himself is his disciple, Tourne-broche. Choulette is the old, ruined
Bohemian, eternally young as the poet, melting with drunken compassion
for the poor and the mean--as is said of Coignard, "half a St. Francis
of Assisi, half an Epicurean, a big, believing, shameless child."
It is in virtue of this combination--naïveté and shamelessness--that
Riquet the dog becomes one of France's best characters. No man is as
devoid of shame as a dog, and no child is more childlike.
Biquet has great difficulty in seeing things from Monsieur Bergeret's
point of view. He flies at the heels of the worthy carpenter, merely
because that workman wears a blouse and carries tools; he is steeped in
all the old prejudices of the feudal age.
But his "Thoughts" are a little masterpiece of canine innocence and
compressed irony. Let me give a few examples.
"Men, animals, and stones grow larger as they approach me, and become
enormous when they are quite close. It is not so with me. I remain the
same size wherever I am."
"The smell of a dog is a delicious smell."
"My master keeps me warm when I lie behind him in his arm-chair.
That is because he is a god. In front of the fire there is a warm
hearthstone. The hearthstone is divine."
"I speak when I choose. From my master's mouth, too, issue sounds which
have a kind of meaning. But their meaning is less plain than that
which I express with my voice. Everything uttered by my voice means
something. But from my master's mouth comes much senseless noise."
"There are carriages which horses draw in the streets. They are
terrible. There are carriages which move of themselves, puffing loudly.
These, too, are full of malice."
"People in rags deserve to be hated, and also those who carry baskets
on their heads or roll casks. Children who run about the streets,
chasing each other and screaming, are hateful too."
"I love my master because he is powerful and terrible."
"An action for which one is thrashed is a bad action. An action for
which one is caressed or given something to eat is a good action."
"_Prayer_.--O Bergeret, my master, god of carnage, I adore thee.
Praised be thou when thou art terrible, praised when thou art gracious!
I crawl to thy feet, I lick thy hands. Great art thou and beautiful
when, seated at thy spread table, thou devourest quantities of food.
Great art thou and beautiful when, bringing forth tire from a little
chip of wood, thou changest night into day. Keep me, I pray thee, in
thy house, and keep out every other dog!" This is a parody of human
religion, good-natured and yet trenchant.
When, in his turn, Monsieur Bergeret addresses the dog, he addresses in
him the whole undeveloped portion of the human race.
"You too, poor little black being, so feeble in spite of your sharp
teeth and your gaping jaws, you too adore outward appearances, and your
worship is the ancient worship of injustice. You too allow yourself to
be seduced by lies. You too have race hatreds.
"I know that there is an obscure goodness in you, the goodness of
Caliban. You are pious; you have your theology and your morality. And
you know no better. You guard the house, guard it even against those
who are its protection and ornament. That workman whom you tried to
drive away has, plain man though he be, most admirable ideas. You would
not listen to him.
"Your hairy ears hear, not him who speaks best, but him who shouts
loudest. And fear, that natural fear which was the counsellor of your
ancestors and mine when they were cave-dwellers, the fear which created
gods and crimes, makes you the enemy of the unfortunate and deprives
you of pity."
The irony gains in power by being veiled in the innocence of the dog.
The irony in France's writings is generally veiled in some such
manner. In Monsieur Bergeret à Paris, for instance, the standpoint of
the author's opponents is presented to us in two chapters which are
read aloud by Monsieur Bergeret from a supposed work of the year 1538,
in which France, with extraordinary skill, has imitated the language,
style, and reasoning of the Trublions, the Nationalists of that age.
Just as something in France's intellectual qualities generally,
reminds us of Voltaire as the narrator, so something in his principal
characters and in the spirit of his novels recalls _Candide_.
Candide, too, was naïve. France has read Voltaire again and again,
and assimilated much of him. How often, for instance, does the story
of Cosru's widow in _Zadig_ crop up in France's pages! A Voltairean
sentence such as: "The belief in the immortality of the soul is
spreading in Africa along with cotton goods," sounds as if it might
have been written by France. The naïveté of the modern writer is
certainly the more genuine, though in greatness as an author he, of
course, falls far short of his predecessor.
The four volumes of the _Histoire Contemporaine_, the last two of
which, with their witty tirades oil the Dreyfus affair, were of no
small assistance to the opponents of the Nationalists, are, though
of unequal value, a very remarkable product of ripe experience and
Olympian superiority. The principal character, the gentle and wise
Monsieur Bergeret, unfortunate as a husband, fortunate in that he was
able to obtain a divorce, is, as a type, in no respect inferior to the
personages in whom other great French authors have embodied themselves.
He is a worthy brother of Alceste, Figaro, and Mercadet.
More artistically perfect than this lengthy four-volume novel are the
short modern stories published under the title of _Crainquebille_. The
first of these, which gives its name to the book, is told placidly,
simply, cuttingly, bitterly. The plot is so simple that it can be
compressed into a few lines. A decent old man, a street vendor of
vegetables, has stopped with his barrow in front of a shop in a very
busy thoroughfare. He is waiting for payment for some leeks which he
has sold. A policeman orders him to move on, and, heedless of the old
man's muttered, "I'm waiting for my money," repeats the order twice
in the course of a few moments, and then, enraged by Crainquebille's
"resistance to authority," arrests him and accuses him before the
magistrate of having made use of the insulting expression in which the
common people give vent to their dislike of the police--a thing which
the old man has certainly not done. The magistrate, who places more
faith in the assertion of the policeman than in the denial of the poor
man, sentences the latter to a fortnight's imprisonment and a fine of
fifty francs.
When he comes out of prison Crainquebille finds that his customers
have deserted him for another hawker, and will have nothing more to
do with him because of his disgrace. He sinks deeper and deeper into
poverty and misery, until at last he feels that the only way left him
to provide himself with a shelter is to rush at a policeman shouting
the offensive expression which he had before been unjustly accused of
using. This policeman, however, leaning stoically against a lamp-post
in pouring rain, despises the insult, and takes not the slightest
notice of it, so that the poor man's last resort fails him.
Crainquebille is painfully touching; the next little story, _Putois_,
is both witty and pregnant with meaning.
"Lucien," says Zoé to her brother, Monsieur Bergeret, "you remember
Putois?"
"I should say so. Of all the familiar figures of our childhood, no
other is still so vividly before my eyes. He had a peculiarly high
head."
"And low forehead," adds Mademoiselle Zoé.
And now brother and sister intone in turn, with perfect seriousness, as
if they were giving a description for legal purposes: "Low forehead,"
"Wall-eyed," "Unable to look one in the face," "Wrinkles at the corner
of the eyes," "Thin," "Rather round-shouldered," "Feeble in appearance,
but in reality extraordinarily strong--able to bend a five-franc piece
between his first finger and thumb," "Thumb enormous," and many other
particulars.
Monsieur Bergeret's daughter Pauline asks: "What was Putois?" and is
told that he was a gardener, the son of respectable country people;
that he started a nursery at Saint-Omer, but, proving unsuccessful with
it, had to take work where he could find it; and that his character was
none of the best. When Monsieur Bergeret the elder missed anything from
his writing-table he always said: "I have a suspicion that Putois has
been here."
"Is that all?" asks Pauline.
"No, my child, that is not all. The remarkable thing about Putois was
that, well as we knew him, he nevertheless...."
"Did not exist," said Zoé.
"How can you say such a thing!" cried Monsieur Bergeret. "Are you
prepared to answer for your words, Zoé? Have you sufficiently reflected
upon the conditions of existence and all the modes of being?"
Then Monsieur Bergeret explains to his daughter that Putois was born as
a full-grown man in the days when he himself and his sister were boy
and girl. The Bergerets inhabited a small house in Saint-Omer, where
they led a quiet, retired life, until they were discovered by a rich
old grand-aunt of Madame's, Madame Cornouiller, the owner of a small
property in the neighbourhood, who took advantage of the relationship
to insist upon their dining with her every Sunday--a Sunday family
dinner being, according to her, imperative among people of their
position.
As Monsieur Bergeret was bored to death by these entertainments, he in
time rebelled, refused to go, and left it to his wife to invent excuses
for declining the invitations. And thus it came about that the usually
truthful woman said one day: "We cannot come this week. I expect the
gardener on Sunday." Putois had received his first attribute.
Glancing at the scrap of ground belonging to the house, Madame
Cornouiller asked with astonishment if this were the garden in which
he was to work, and on being told that it was, very naturally remarked
that he might just as well do it on a weekday. This speech in its turn
necessitated the reply that the man could only come on Sunday, as he
was occupied all the week. Second qualification.
"What is your gardener's name, my dear?" "Putois" replied Madame
Bergeret without hesitation. From the moment in which he received a
name, Putois began to lead a kind of existence. When the old lady
inquired where he lived, he necessarily became a species of itinerant
workman--a vagrant, in fact. So now to existence had been added status.