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WRITERS OF THE DAY
GENERAL EDITOR: BERTRAM CHRISTIAN
ANATOLE FRANCE
_By W. L. GEORGE_
_NOVELS_
_A BED OF ROSES_
_THE CITY OF LIGHT_
_ISRAEL KALISCH._ (_American Title: UNTIL THE DAY BREAK_)
_THE MAKING OF AN ENGLISHMAN_
_THE SECOND BLOOMING_
_SHORT STORIES_
_OLGA NAZIMOV_
_MISCELLANEOUS_
_WOMAN AND TO-MORROW_
_DRAMATIC ACTUALITIES_
[Illustration: ANATOLE FRANCE]
ANATOLE
FRANCE
By
W. L. GEORGE
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
_First Published in 1915_
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. INTRODUCTORY 7
II. SATIRIST AND CRITIC 26
III. PHILOSOPHER AND THEOLOGIAN 60
IV. HISTORIAN AND POLITICIAN 77
V. THE CRAFTSMAN AND THE MAN 100
BIBLIOGRAPHY (FRENCH TITLES) 122
ENGLISH BIBLIOGRAPHY 123
AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY 125
INDEX 126
AUTHOR’S NOTICE
In this monograph I have used the translated titles of the works. When
French titles appear it should be inferred that the book in question is
so far untranslated.
TO MY FRIEND
SASHA KROPOTKIN LEBEDEFF
I
INTRODUCTORY
Irony is for the ironic. He has shown himself military at the last,
but I believe Anatole France would have smiled, a little wistfully,
if told that a young man had sentenced himself to read every one of
his works and to write a book about them while there raged round him a
European War. Such an atmosphere may seem unpropitious, but it was not
really so; it was an atmosphere of paradox; it was odd to analyse the
great pacifist while Europe writhed in conflict; still odder to think
of him as throwing aside his pen and at the age of seventy taking up
his forsworn sword. But in the case of Anatole France the work is as
great as the man and it afforded me a contrast with patriotism. This
background of patriotism, so queerly compounded of beer, sweat, fine
courage, self-sacrifice, self-interest, of insane prejudices, heavy
ignorances and melting heroisms, was so exactly what I needed to bring
out the dapper quality of the great Frenchman’s thought. No muddled
impulses here, but a clear, cold light which reveals, together with
all that is beautiful, all that is ugly; here a brain that is without
illusions, and yet without bitterness; that is not taken in by flags,
and priests, and frontiers, yet at the same time can love priests for
their faith, flags for their symbolism, frontiers for the contrasts
they create in man. In _On Life and Letters_, Anatole France tells us
that during the war of 1870 he sat practically under the fire of the
German guns, with M. F. Calmette, reading Virgil. I did not write these
lines under the fire of the German guns but, in the hectic atmosphere
of war-time, to write about Anatole France created in me no doubt much
the same kind of feeling as was his that day.
I do not apologise for the egotism which is already invading this
monograph, and I suppose I shall remain egotistic as I go on. For the
works of Anatole France are too bulky, too many to be appraised one by
one; they raise so many issues that a fat quarto volume would hardly
suffice to analyse all, and it would be rather dull. Believing that
criticism is “the adventures of the soul among masterpieces,” I am much
more inclined to give the adventures of my intellect (claiming no soul)
among the works of Anatole France. I have read very little about him,
indeed but one book, by Mr Georg Brandes, and in the early part of 1914
a number of articles when Anatole France paid us a visit. They are very
distressing, those articles, as they appear to have been written mainly
by men who do not know what they are talking about, but can talk about
it exactly to the extent of a column. I refer to the alleged evolution
of Anatole France, of which something must be said a little further on.
The temptation to translate long quotations was very great, for
translation is a challenging exercise and an uneasy, but, so far as
possible, I have resisted it. I think it only fair to say that, as
a rule, I have not translated very closely, but attempted to render
selected passages, fitting the style to the matter; that is, for
philosophic or descriptive passages I have, as much as possible, used
Latinised English; for the more familiar portions I have drawn upon our
slender stock of Anglo-Saxon.[1] As for the classifications, Anatole
France satirist, critic, politician, philosopher, etc., they are
necessarily rather rough; they overlap because not one of his books is
one thing, and one thing only. In that direction too I must claim the
reader’s indulgence.
[1] I should like to say in this respect that I am greatly
indebted to Mr John Lane, who owns the British copyright of
most of the works of Anatole France, for leave not only to
quote portions of his translations, but also to retranslate
and condense the French text. A full list of the English
titles of the works will be found at the end of this volume.
Yet another word: I come neither to bury Anatole France nor to praise
him; there is in one-man criticism a danger that it should be too
favourable, for the critic tends to choose as a subject an author whom
he whole-heartedly worships. Now I do not worship Anatole France; I
have had to read every one of his works over again in the last few
weeks, and if there is anything calculated to make one hate a writer
for evermore it is to read all his works one after the other. People
are afraid to criticise Anatole France adversely; he seems to have
attained the position now accorded to Galileo (who was tortured), to
Joan of Arc (who was burned), to Wagner (who was hooted), to everybody,
in fact, who ever did anything worth while. In his early years, when
de Maupassant, Zola, Daudet, were alive, he was ignored; everything
was done to keep him down: the Académie Française went so far as to
give him a prize. But times have changed; Anatole France is acclaimed
all over the world; everybody quotes him, and those who cannot quote
him quote his name; he is above criticism. This would be very bad
for him if he were not also above adulation. People dare not say the
things which should be obvious: that he repeats himself; that he is
sentimental; that his novels are, from the point of view of French
technique, incoherent; that, as expressed by his characters, his
conception of love is rather disgusting; in fact, they take all the
humanity out of him by endowing him with all the graces; they erect to
him a statue which represents him just about as much as the sort of
statue they occasionally put up to some highly respectable politician
whom they depict stark naked, and beautiful as a young _discobolus_.
The reason probably is that it is not enough to understand Anatole
France; one also has to understand the French, the gay, sensual,
garrulous French of the Middle Ages, the gay, sensual, courteous
French of the seventeenth century, the gay, sensual, cynical French of
Voltairian times, and the sensual, cynical French of to-day. Anatole
France is all these, a sort of historical congress of French epochs, a
retrospective exhibition of French mentalities. That perhaps explains
the confusion which reigns in the minds of a great many people as to
his alleged evolution from reaction to red socialism, a confusion so
great that it seems to have touched even Mr Georg Brandes.
It is not wonderful that Anatole France should be so representative,
for he is a provincial by extraction, a Parisian by birth and
environment. The whole of his biography is revealed in his books, so
it is enough to say that he was born in 1844, in the Quarter (that was
inevitable), that he grew up in his father’s old bookshop near the
quays of the Seine, listening, as he grew up, sometimes to the talk
of republicans, for those were the days of the Second Empire, much
more often to that of elegant half-worldling abbés and aristocrats,
for his father was a pronounced Royalist and Catholic, as was also his
mother.... Old books, good talk, and the Seine lazily flowing under
the plane-trees before there were steam trams. It is all very like
Anatole France, like the four volumes of _Contemporary History_ where
the bookshop is the centre, like _Pierre Nozière_ and _My Friend’s
Book_. Then little France (whose real name is Thibault) went to the
Collège Stanislas to be brought up as a good Royalist child. But he
did not do particularly well there, thus bearing out the legend of the
prize boy. Notably he loafed. Anatole France in life has always loafed,
which is natural enough in one who was born near bridges. Who would not
loaf who has a flowing river to watch? It might be said that Anatole
France has loafed through thirty-five volumes.
As he grew up he accomplished desultory tasks, he taught, he wrote
articles for the papers; in 1868 he published his study of Alfred de
Vigny; in 1873 and 1876 he gave us two volumes of verse, _Poèmes Dorés_
and _Les Noces Corinthiennes_. Not very startling or attractive verse;
however deep Anatole France’s poetic feeling, he has never approached
greatness as a poet, perhaps because he was always too calm, too
detached, because so seldom did his eye in fine frenzy roll. Only when
at last, in 1879, he published his first work of creative prose, two
longish stories, _Jocasta_ and _The Famished Cat_, followed, two years
later, by _The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard_, and in 1882 by _Les Désirs
de Jean Servien_,[2] was born the Anatole France we know to-day.
[2] The title is given in English if the work has been
translated, in French if it has not.
I cannot lay too much stress upon that. Anatole France was potentially
in 1881 what he is now. It has continually been suggested that, up
to 1898 and the revival of the Dreyfus case, Anatole France was a
reactionary, a clerical, an anti-democrat; that, somehow, in an
unexplained manner, he underwent a change of heart and suddenly turned
into a humanitarian socialist; and a few bold folk hinted, when _The
Gods are Athirst_ appeared in 1913, that Anatole France, because he
painted a dreadful and therefore not over-kind picture of the French
Revolution, had reacted again. Briefly: the genius as weathercock. It
has even been suggested that Anatole France wrote this reactionary book
to make his peace with the respectable classes and to get into the
Académie Française: the answer is that Anatole France was a member of
that august body seventeen years before the publication of the book.
An examination of Anatole France’s early works is vital to this
question, notably of _Jocasta_, which has very little to do with the
myth, for there is no Œdipus to murder his father and marry his mother;
Anatole France is too modern for that. It is a queer, horrible story of
the daughter of a shady middleman who, instead of marrying the young
doctor she loves, weds a wealthy and sinister old Englishman, whom,
to her knowledge, his valet murders. Fearing discovery and haunted by
remorse (the Furies), emulating Jocasta, she hangs herself. This story
would hardly be worth mentioning save for its fine literary style and
its high characterisation of Fellaire, the solemn, kindly, bumptious,
sentimental middleman, of Haviland, the dry and methodical collector,
if already here Anatole France were not at the age of thirty-five
indicating what he would become. For he makes a journalist say in
conclusion, after discussing the immortality of the soul and deciding
that it is really a very complicated question: “Fortunately the
Almighty is not a subject for an up-to-date par.”
In the second story, _The Famished Cat_, where again we have the
quite magical picture of Godet-Laterasse, the seedy revolutionary,
and of the absurd people concerned with absurd arts at the Famished
Cat tavern, we find another incarnation of the future Anatole France:
the sculptor Labanne, lazy, ironic, who moralises on art rather as
will Choulette in _The Red Lily_, fifteen years later. But it is in
_The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard_ that Anatole France most clearly
indicates his own future. This is just the straggling story of Bonnard,
the old professor, who observes the world, interested in women,
Benedictine chronicles, the Arc de Triomphe, cats and the love affairs
of fourteenth-century queens. The old gentleman watches over the
granddaughter of one whom he loved but never married. He behaves quite
quixotically, protects her against a schoolmistress who ill treats her;
at last he kidnaps her to make her happy, and all ends well in spite of
a little tragedy when the girl marries and old Bonnard sells his books
to give her a dowry. It is all most incoherent, and one never quite
knows what Sylvestre Bonnard’s crime was; it may be the abduction (for
old Bonnard, learned in the law of the sixth century, knows nothing
of the Code Napoleon), or it may be, which is much more likely, that
when he sells his books there are some he cannot bear to part with,
even to afford his ward a dowry, and that he goes by night now and
then to steal a few of them from the pile. The whole story is full of
charm, and Mr Georg Brandes is unjust when he describes it as a simple
tale. It is much more than that: it singularly reveals Anatole France
himself, for here we have a man aged thirty-six writing as a kindly,
rather cynical, faintly ironic old gentleman, fond of the classics and
of humanity. Children make him sentimental; he lectures his cat on
immortal truth. He says: “I have always preferred the folly of passion
to the wisdom of indifference.” And that is true, only one feels that
he loves best the folly of passion when it afflicts others. The book
ends on a melancholic note, which is perhaps not so melancholic as it
seems, for it brings out life passing by, all golden and bloody, as an
old, old ship with a sumptuous figurehead, with ragged silken sails,
carrying the embalmed corpses of those who first signed on, and their
own sons growing up, full of sap, their thick hair streaming in the
wind. Already in this book Anatole France is gentle. He is remorseful
because “he has made fun of an unhappy man”; he is full of pity for
a beggar-boy who will not accept a bit of gingerbread, and says: “He
dares not touch it: in virtue of precocious experience he does not
believe in happiness.” He states a general theory: the time that God
gives each one of us is as a precious fabric which we embroider as well
as we may. This man of thirty-six is already old; he has laid his hand
on the head of man as if he were a little child, and said: “Creature
that thinkest to find eternity in the intensity of thy sufferings, in
their permanence, in the impossibility of thy loves, and the greatness
of thy charms; oh, little creature on this blind world, I, old man, old
God, who have seen so many worlds like this one busily spinning, let
me beg thee be not so urgent, so hot, so young. For I am old, old as
truth, and I know the shortness of thy pains.”
Who is Sylvestre Bonnard? Sylvestre Bonnard is Bergeret, is Coignard,
is Brotteaux, he is the first of all those nice old gentlemen who
pass through the pages of Anatole France. He has never changed; he
was born like a young rat in a book-case, and so he remained. Those
old gentlemen believe in service, resignation; they are tolerant and
indulgent, and are always ready to say when the time comes, to any
God you prefer, for they don’t mind: “_Et nunc dimittis servum tuum,
Domine_.”
The philosophical humanitarian who was to defend Dreyfus existed,
then, in 1881; the subsidiary motives existed too in those years. For
instance, in _My Friend’s Book_ (1885) the small boy says: “I saw my
father, my mother and the maid as very gentle giants who had witnessed
the birth of the world, immutable, everlasting, unique of their kind.”
That is exactly what the little dog, Riquet, thinks of man in general
and what Anatole France perfidiously allows us to conclude man has
always thought of God. Already he is cynical, and yet smiling, for he
says: “I have faith no longer in my old friend, life: yet I still love
it.” But there is in this book a more important indication of the man
to come; it is not only the alleged Socialist of 1898 that already
exists, but the passionate pagan of 1914. In _My Friend’s Book_ he
takes a little girl to a Punch and Judy show. Punch kills the devil,
and Pierre Nozière (Anatole France) remarks: “The devil dead, good-bye
sin. Maybe beauty, this ally of the devil, will vanish with him. Maybe
we shall not again see the flowers that intoxicate and the eyes that
slay.” Any student of Anatole France will realise that in 1885 the
author was already expressing what he would state more fully in 1914
in _The Revolt of the Angels_--namely, his fear and hatred of ascetic,
beauty-hating, death-desirous Christianity.
And there is more: forgive me if I paint the lily a little, but
others have painted it and in colours which displease me. The alleged
reactionary of _The Gods are Athirst_, the man who was supposed to
have gone back in 1914 upon the humanitarian and republican sentiments
of the Dreyfus period, that man was, in 1882, in _Les Désirs de Jean
Servien_ (a thoroughly second-rate novelette), painting an absurd
revolutionary. The Commune reigns; he shows the hero the people rioting
in the Luxembourg Gardens, and says: “M. Servien, look upon this scene
and never forget it: here is a free people. _Indeed the citizens were
walking upon the grass, plucking flowers in the beds, and breaking
off the branches of the trees._” Anatole France had in those days few
illusions as to the behaviour of free peoples! And again in the short
stories which make up _Mother of Pearl_ (1892) one is oppressed by
Anatole France’s hatred of the revolutionaries, their brute ignorance,
vanity, stupidity, their mean revengefulness, and their silly imitation
of Roman attitudes.
Anatole France is what he was, and if he seems to have changed
now and then, or to have been inconsistent, it is because he is a
developed human being, a rare bird. He has not cut out his views
as with a stencil; they are fluid, they overlap, and he can hold
simultaneously two entirely divergent views. I submit that any man of
high intellectual development tends to hold two views upon one topic.
One view is that of his instinct, the other is that of his reason.
In the case of Anatole France the instinct is always hedonistic; he
is a pagan; he loves Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, and even the
Catholic Church, for their beauty; he is fond of all the good things
of the world, beautiful women, flowers, sweetmeats; of all the fine,
disdainful aristocratic ideas of the artists and the philosophers....
But there is what may be called his social conscience, which is
utilitarian and Socialistic. That conscience tells him that however
much beauty he may extract from it, this world, filled with wars, with
cruelties, with factories, with ugly houses and ugly clothes, with
mean prejudices, is a world for which he is responsible because he
is a man. The dream of that ugly world will not let him sleep easily
upon his rose-decked couch. There is the conflict which has puzzled so
many of his readers; sometimes an Epicurean, at other times a sort of
Lloyd Georgeite is apparent. This does not mean that Anatole France is
throwing over any ideas; he is merely being more or less influenced
by one side of his own self. His love of humanity has always made it
difficult for him to enjoy the fruit he raised to his mouth if it
occurred to him just then that other mouths might go hungry.
II
SATIRIST AND CRITIC
If Anatole France is to be remembered--that is, for a while, which is
perhaps all a man can hope--it will be as a critic and as a satirist.
Whether he will be remembered longer than his contemporaries, Tolstoy
or Mr Shaw, I do not know. Though he has delighted us, the race of
delights is short and pleasures have mutable faces; he may share the
fate of Flaubert, who is menaced; of de Maupassant, who is going;
or of Schiller, forgotten; of Walter Scott, reduced to a juvenile
circulation; of Thackeray, staking all upon one novel; of Dickens,
surviving by the picturesque; of Tolstoy, convicted as a moralist; of
Greeks uneasily staggering under the burden of illogical murder and
absurd incest ... I do not think that he will join the glorious band:
Homer, Shakespeare, Molière. For Anatole France has understood all
things, but mainly in their details. He has made a mosaic, not a marble
court; seated on Olympus, his eyes have been too keen, and he has seen
men too clearly, man not enough. But still he is, I suppose, assured of
his line in any biographical dictionary that may be printed in the year
3000, and that is a good deal. I like to think of that entry in the
_Cyclopædia of Literature_ (published by the International Government
Press; price, seven days labour bonds, net). It runs something like
this:
FRANCE (Anatole). Pen-name of Jacques Anatole Thibault. French
writer, b. 1844. d. . Satirist and critic. Some of his
work has merit as reflecting the faintly enlightened views
of an observer living in barbarous times.
Anatole France is the only living satirist. He has actually no rivals;
there are men such as Messrs Max Beerbohm, Hansi, Mirbeau, Hector
Munro, F. P. Dunne, who have a glimmering of what satire means; Mr
Wells would have more than a glimmering if, unfortunately, he did not
hold deep convictions about right and wrong, a weakness to which, in
spite of all appearances, Mr Shaw also succumbs; but Anatole France
alone upholds the ancient tradition of Voltaire, of Defoe and Swift.
His satire is always effective because it is always light, always
pointed and always smiling. He has none of the bitterness of Swift and
therefore he is the truer cynic, for true cynicism is not fierce; it
is always genial. He never labours a point; he states, presents the
contrasts between, for instance, what a rich man may do as opposed to a
poor one, and then passes on, laughing, Pan-like dancing, with perhaps
a tear or two in his laughter.
Though almost every book he has written is satirical in intent, or
at least in incident, five volumes are satire pure and simple; as I
have no space to analyse all his works, these five representatives
must expound him. They are _Penguin Island_ and the four volumes of
_Contemporary History_ (_The Elm Tree on the Mall_, _The Wickerwork
Woman_, _L’Anneau d’Améthyste_, _Monsieur Bergeret à Paris_). They
overlap a little, but the spirit which informs them is different.
_Penguin Island_ is broad, applicable to the whole history of man,
while the other four volumes cover rather the modern irregularities of
the French State. For this reason, _Penguin Island_ is a bigger and a
finer thing; indeed it is probably the biggest thing Anatole France
has done, because, dealing as it does with the earliest superstitions
of man, his faith in gods and in God, with the rise of feudalism, the
roots of democracy, war, the birth of art, the action and reaction of
parties, it has a sweep so large that it envelops even ages now in
the womb of time. It is a terrible book, not so much because it is
the thinly veiled history of the French people--that is to say, the
story of follies, miseries and crimes (the story of any other imperial
people)--but because at the end Anatole France reaches forth into the
future. And what he sees is a development of capitalism by the side of
which modern capitalism is as a puling child; he summarises in a phrase
a period of greater New York: “the houses were never high enough.” He
sees the masses rising, revolution, the break-up of the social system,
the return of pastoralism, man once more nomadic ... towns forming
... another aristocracy ... Parliaments ... industry and capitalism
fastening upon the world, and again the houses never high enough....
That is a vision of horror, of a world unchanging, unchangeable, of man
as a dog ever returning to his own vomit. I should like to pursue the
dream further, to the death of the sun, when the earth shall grow cold
and a terrible term be brought to the stupidity of man; he shall once
more be a fearful brute hiding in a cave, until at last, upon his cold
and dying globe, among settling mists, he shall yield up the last spark
of a misused life....
Anatole France is certainly wrong, for no barbarism which the world has
ever known ever was so barbarous as the barbarism that went before. If
the life of man describes a curve, this is not a circle; he does not
interminably return to the same point; rather the curve is a cycloid,
ever bending back upon itself and yet slowly moving onwards towards the
unknown goal. Anatole France does not, I think, quite deny that, but he
is not over-fond of what he calls idle speculation: where his knowledge
stops he is inclined to say: “After all, what does it matter to Sirius?”
The island where the penguins lived was evangelised by St Mael, who
quite naïvely relates how he navigated to its shores in a stone trough.
God served him as rudder and sail. It would have been all right if the
saint had not been short-sighted, but he took the penguins for men
and baptized them, which gave rise to great trouble in heaven and a
wonderful ecclesiastical debate. For St Patrick said that baptism could
not avail birds; St Damasius said it could, for Mael was competent; St
Guenolé said it could not, because penguins were not conceived in sin;
St Augustine thought it could if given in proper form. This caused much
ill feeling in Paradise; Tertullian grew quite vicious and said he was
sorry that the penguins had no soul, as thus they could not go to hell.
The intervention of the Almighty was hailed with unanimous cheers,
which St Augustine backed up by begging Him not to give the penguins a
soul because, as they could not keep the law, they would burn in hell
“in virtue of God’s adorable decrees.” Upon this the disturbance turned
to scandal, and to end it the penguins were turned into men.
Then the troubles of the once happy birds began. They were clad and
modesty was born. Property arose, and murder. The Catholic Devil had
a hand in this and remarked that the murderers were creating rights,
constituting property, laying the bases of civilisation, of society
and the State. He added that the source of property is force. Later
a state formed and the poor only were taxed because they could not
resist, and because there were more of them. A freebooter arose: he
became a king. His armies went to war and were beloved, for they won.
Art appeared; Margaritone foresaw the decadence of ecclesiastical
art and, in a horrid dream, something like post-impressionism. The
priest, Marbode, visited Virgil in hell; the Latin poet remarked that
Dante was rather a bore and that Christ was the god of barbarism.
Then history unrolls. There is a revolution (obviously 1789); Trinco
(Napoleon) appears and a loyal penguin states that glory cannot cost
too much. Modern times give Anatole France a yet greater chance, for
he takes us to New Atlantis (America), where commercial wars are
executed on contract, because a business people must have a policy of
conquest; the European War of 1914, if one dives deep under the crust
of patriotism, sounds very like the war of New Atlantis against Third
Zealand “where they killed two-thirds of the inhabitants to compel
the remaining third to buy from New Atlantis umbrellas and braces.”
Plutocracy. Socialism. Royalist agitations, supported by the leaders of
the army, the wineshops, the newsboys, the police and the courtesans.
All through this section runs the Pyrot case. A traitor (Dreyfus) sold
ninety thousand bundles of hay to the foreigner--that is to say, he
did not sell them, for they did not exist. Yet General Panther says:
“Evidently Pyrot stole them, so all we have to do is to prove it.” To
which another General replies: “Arrest Pyrot. Find some evidence; the
law demands it.”
Then the agitation, difficult because the people like to believe in
guilt and are too stupid to doubt. Still no evidence, and evidence
manufactured. Here Anatole France puts into the General’s mouth
beautiful phrases: “Don’t have evidence; it makes the case less clear”;
and: “It may be better to have no evidence, but still if you must have
some, trumped-up evidence is better than the truth, for it is made
to order.” And so on through popular agitations, Royalist manœuvres,
Boulangism, the renaissance of Catholicism (supported by Jewish money),
political adultery, the rule of gold, until we come to the time when
houses are never high enough....
This is not the satire of Englishmen. It has not the truculence of
Defoe’s _A Short Way with Dissenters_; nor does it state the author’s
view as does any one of Mr Shaw’s plays; nor is it so veiled as
_Gulliver’s Travels_. All this is together elusive and obvious; it aims
at showing the reader what lies under history, man in the soldier’s
coat, his meanness, his greed, his lust for power, and the horrible,
crusted stupidity to which alone are traceable his crimes.
I should not advise any Englishman who is not conversant with French
history to read _Penguin Island_, but I should not advise any
Englishman at all to read the four volumes of _Contemporary History_
unless he has lived in France for the last fifteen years and mixed
in every kind of French society. He will find in those books droll
stories, and droll incidents; he will see that the author is getting
at something, but that is all. For those volumes do not deal with
the big outer movements which one can watch from the columns of _The
Times_. They are concerned with the mysteries inside French politics,
paralleled here by the “Confederates,” the Marconi case, the theft
of the crown jewels at Dublin, the secret history of the rebellion
of the officers at the Curragh. No Frenchman would understand a book
dealing with those things, so it is too much to expect an Englishman
to understand _Contemporary History_. The circumstances that led to
the writing of these books are simple enough. The Dreyfus case was
used as a platform for clerical, Royalist and militarist agitation.
The Government set to work to break the Church and broke it (after
which the Church mended itself and became stronger than ever); the
Nationalist revival took place, and since that time there has
been much manœuvring, some intended to restore the Bourbons and
quite ridiculous, some of it designed to gain well-paid posts for
reactionaries, and that one much in earnest. The interesting parts
of the four books are the commentaries of M. Bergeret, a university
professor in a little town, who, I need hardly say, is (just like
Sylvestre Bonnard, Coignard, Trublet, Brotteaux) Anatole France
himself. The four books, published between 1897 and 1901, more or
less cover that period. In _The Elm Tree on the Mall_ unfolds, with
local politics, the life of Bergeret, married to a shrew, unloved of
his daughters, disliked by most people because he thinks for himself,
which amounts to saying that he does not think like anybody else. Round
him eddy representative characters, the Abbé Guitrel, who wants to be
a bishop and is proceeding towards the episcopate half by apostolic
mansuetude, half by way of Ignatius of Loyola; Worms-Clavelin, the
_préfet_ (chief of the local executive), who is a Jew, a Freemason, a
Conservative Catholic, an advanced Republican, a Socialist, a Royalist
and a few other things necessary to the maintenance of his post; his
wife is friendly to Guitrel because the Abbé makes her feel French (she
was born Noemi Coblenz) and because she “likes to protect one of those
tonsured heads charged for eighteen centuries with the excommunication
and extermination of the circumcised.” There is General de Chalmot, a
soldier, who thinks that if you destroy belief you ruin the military
spirit, because you take away the hope of another life; there is
Paillot’s bookshop where Bergeret meets the county, the lawyers, the
doctors, to talk of books, politics, actresses and their figures....
Nothing in particular happens. Guitrel’s bishopric is the leading
string of the action; there is Madame Worms-Clavelin helping Guitrel,
who finds her, at bargain prices, chasubles with which she covers her
armchairs; there is a young girl, Claudine Deniseau, who, inspired by
St Radegunde, becomes a prophetess, indulges in healing, predicts
frost and the return of the king; there is Worms-Clavelin, trying to
keep the prophetess quiet, because so ancient a person as St Radegunde
ought really not to cause a row in a country town. An old lady of
eighty is murdered by her boy-lover, which causes Bergeret to remark
that murder is quite natural and fortunate, for without evil one
could not see beauty. Worms-Clavelin kisses Madame de Gromance on the
shoulder, (a local custom); a senator promotes shady companies while
his wife embroiders altar-cloths; and somehow the story ends with
Guitrel very much out of the running for the episcopal stakes.
What matters in the book is Bergeret, sitting under the elm-tree
on the Mall, or in the bookshop, thinking, talking, smiling at the
comedy. Notable are his talks with Lantaigne, another candidate for the
bishopric, and the type of the intellectual priest. Anatole France may
detest the Catholic attitude, but he understands it admirably, and
when Lantaigne contends that one can have two opinions, one conscious
and rationalistic, the other intuitive and theological, he makes a
very fine case. For him, in the case of Joshua, celestial astronomy
is not the astronomy of man, and in celestial mathematics, 3 + 3 may
make nine, because we do not know all the properties of numbers. At
other times Bergeret, who talks to anybody, tells the melancholic
story of Napoleon III., who never managed to grant his foster-brother
a small post in the civil service: “The Emperor was a charming fellow
but, alas, he had no influence.” And so the book wanders on with the
opinions of Bergeret, happy, like Æsop, in the freedom of his mind,
in spite of the narrowness of his home, conscious that the State is
honoured so long as it taxes the poor, and that the republic is easiest
to live under because it does not govern much, that revolutions help
none save the flourishing and the ambitious. It would all be profoundly
pessimistic if it were not always genial. One feels sure that if
Bergeret had an agreeable wife, a good cook, and a volume of Lucretius
(Oh, Omar!), he would let the State do just what it liked.
The story continues in _The Wickerwork Woman_, with Bergeret working up
his lecture in the worst room in his flat, where stands the wickerwork
figure used for dress-making, symbolic of his unpleasant wife. He
grumbles, and then considers the Romans. “They were not heroes, they
preferred making roads, they only made war for business reasons.” He
thinks of soldiers and wonders whether the sergeant has a right to tell
a conscript that his mother is a sow: he decides that the sergeant has
this right, for without it there can be no hierarchy or discipline.
Then the cook gives notice, and Guitrel goes to Paris while Bergeret
talks to a tramp who says that when he was young he lost his pride
because people made fun of him....
The town is greatly upset because the prophetess cannot give the
logarithm of nine. (Another case of celestial mathematics?) Madame
de Gromance passes, and Bergeret reflects that to see a pretty woman
is a stroke of luck for an honest man. He is “grateful to her for
dressing with art and discretion.” But tragedy invades the Bergeret
household, for Roux, a pupil, becomes the lover of Madame Bergeret ...
in circumstances which make it impossible for the professor to doubt
his eyes. After a murderous moment Bergeret decides that this is all
really very trifling, throws the wickerwork figure through the window,
and goes out to talk to Paillot, the bookseller; he reflects vaguely on
adultery and its meaninglessness. Guitrel and the archdeacon hold an
earnest discussion on omelettes. Inspired by Marcus Aurelius, Bergeret
concludes that the art of life is a benevolent contempt for man: all
Anatole France is there. For him those lovers were chimpanzees, and he
feels a little superior because he is “a meditative chimpanzee.”
The conversations continue to develop. Fremont, inspector of fine arts,
is “patriotic, even in art”; Worms-Clavelin states that he loathes the
Empire, but adds: “Still we make wine, grow corn, as under the emperor
... we work on the Stock Exchange, eat, drink, make love as under the
emperor.” The upshot is: “Don’t touch the machine, for it will be all
the same whatever you do.”
The execution of the murderer of the old lady enables Bergeret to state
his views, which are, as usual, exceedingly unpopular, for he will
not have it that the murderer was a degenerate: had not Mithridates a
double row of teeth? Nor shall tattooing prove the crime, for are not
fashionable travellers tattooed? And then he wanders off on the fiction
of the aristocratic type in woman, which is entirely derived from the
smart shopgirl and the plebeian actress. The shady senator is arrested,
but released, says his wife, owing to the intervention of the Almighty.
Meanwhile Bergeret refuses to speak to his unfaithful wife, which
causes great trouble in the house, because the cook, disliking the
goings-on, gives notice again; the new cook can make only one kind of
soup, which is very annoying. And so the book rambles on until Madame
Bergeret, unable to bear dumb disdain, leaves with her two daughters.
Before leaving she has disgraced herself again with Lacarelle, “the
Gaul,” who only made love to her because his moustache was so long that
this was expected of him. The Dreyfus case is beginning to bubble, and
Guitrel, friendly to the _préfet_, finds it difficult to defend the
Jews, except “the converted ones who have done a lot for the Church by
their wealth.” Long story of Saint Austregisile, and of the Virgin’s
miraculous foot. Honorine, the visionary, has a miraculous trance, and
then retires into a bush to make love to a tramp. Fat and beautiful
Madame de Bonmont entertains Guitrel. History of the rise of this
county family, late Nathan, and of Madame de Bonmont’s love-making with
Raoul, duellist and gambler, illustrious because he fought a Jew who
had in a café asked for the Army List and thereby outraged the French
flag. As the agitation progresses, the loyal populace sacks the shop of
Meyer, the bootmaker, and retires, having struck a good blow for their
country. In these days Bergeret is happy, talking to Riquet, his dog,
“a religious beast,” thinking and talking of Hercules, whom he looks
upon as a sort of boxer at a fair, and of the history of Spain....
Little boys pass, shouting: “Down with Zola!...”
Bergeret is a Dreyfusist. It does not make him any more popular than
he became when he said that Joan of Arc was only a military mascot.
Bergeret wistfully begins to desire Madame de Gromance, but knows
that he has no chance; so he returns to his thoughts and to the
all-pervading Dreyfus case, realising that the crowd cannot reason,
that “it holds with established error.” Young de Bonmont meanwhile
sends his beautiful mother to see a most glad-eyed Cabinet minister
who has power to make Guitrel a bishop, because if Guitrel is made a
bishop he can induce the local duke to invite young de Bonmont to the
hunt. One is sorry for Madame de Bonmont, so fat and so innocent, but
one does not feel sorry when young Dellion, who is for the time being
favoured of Madame de Gromance, enlists her influence on the side of
Guitrel, and while she is putting on her stays discusses the future
of the bishopric. The talk veers to fashions, and while she attaches
her suspenders Madame de Gromance argues whether his mother, Madame
Dellion, was truly virtuous. Meanwhile Madame Worms-Clavelin, also
supporting Guitrel, makes--well, let us say, great concessions to the
secretary of the Cabinet minister, in the cause of chasubles at bargain
prices and of good government....
Bergeret continues to attack most things: antisemitism, because he is
not big enough to hate ninety thousand people; nationality, because
there is no such thing, for the alleged French are only Gauls,
Iberians, Celts, Romans, Franks and Saracens. Guitrel, made a bishop,
is broken for attacking the Government, while poor Madame de Bonmont
leaves her amethyst ring on Raoul’s bedroom mantelpiece.
In the last volume, Bergeret, now a professor in Paris, reflects on
the quality of meat, the soul of dogs, and the essence of heroism.
Panneton de la Barge delivers a passionate speech on the army which is
“the consolation of the present and the hope of the future,” and ends
by enlisting Bergeret’s influence to get his son out of two years’
military service. Madame de Bonmont has now fallen into the arms of
Lacrisse, secretary of the Royalist group, for she wishes to save
France. Lacrisse’s chief occupation is to coach generals in evidence to
be used at the Dreyfus trial. Conspiracy. A letter from the Pretender;
great sensation which leads to the conquest of Lacrisse, for Madame de
Bonmont gives him “a historic embrace.” He then compels her reluctantly
to subscribe to the funds. Royalist fête. And Panneton begins to cook
the local elections with the help of Madame de Gromance: he finds that
the one place where they can talk politics is a flat furnished with a
graduated series of sofas.
Meanwhile Bergeret indulges in charity to a beggar called Clopinel, and
then remarks: “I have done wrong, I have given alms ... I have tasted
the shameful joy of abasing my fellow-man, I have signed the odious
pact which preserves strength for the strong, weakness for the weak.
I have sold to my brother fraternity at short weight.... I have been
tempted. Oh, seducer! Oh dangerous Clopinel! Delicious Clopinel....”
Slump in Royalist plots, arrests. Lacrisse stands for the town
council as a republican Liberal, with the help of Father Adéodat,
who will let him be a republican in public if only he will be a true
man in committee. And the Contemporary History ends at a Royalist
dinner-party, on memories of a riot, the triumph of Mr Loubet, who
triumphed just because he happened to be there; this is the downfall
of reactionary and clerical hopes, but Madame de Gromance gives up to
Dellion her hospitable heart....
It all sounds rather cruel, and there are touches, such as Lacrisse
coaching Generals in the evidence they will deliver against Dreyfus,
such as the description of M. de la Barge trying to get his son out of
military service after proclaiming that the army is the ideal of his
soul, which provoke in the reader just what Anatole France wants: not
laughter, but an ironic, lingering, vinegary smile. Time after time,
in every one of his books he obtains this effect; it is the effect of
sharp contrast, of suddenness; it recalls a page of Machiavelli who,
after describing how an Italian tyrant had one of his ministers sawn
in half, alive, in the market-place, goes on: “But to return to more
important things....”
That produces a shock, and when applied to irony this is an effect
still more powerful than when it is applied to fiction, as, for
instance, in Ambrose Bierce’s _An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge_. But
the irony is not artificial: it is the sort of irony given to those
who walk the world with their eyes open. It inspires the feeling of
amusement which invaded a few of us during the great European War,
when we read in the newspapers articles about Russian culture, and
remembered what the same newspapers used to say about the Bear. I could
not help smiling at our attitude to the sausage-eaters when recalling
how completely we had forgotten the frog-eaters and candle-eaters of
times gone by. Very likely, though the war roused him to action in
defence of ancient French culture, Anatole France chuckled over the
intimate friendship between France and England, which, in 1898, at the
time of Fashoda, and in 1899, at the time of the Boer War, was such an
intimate hatred. He would have chuckled still more had he known that a
patriotic English inn-keeper had changed the name of his tavern from
“The King of Prussia” to “The Czar’s Head.” For history has staying
power, and one wonders a little whether, as generations pass, “The
Czar’s Head” may not have to turn into “The Roosevelt Arms,” “The
Garibaldi,” or perhaps one day into “The Chung Ling Soo....”
But ironic as it all is, it is very living. This should strike
nobody as extraordinary, for life is most ironic: it would be
quite intolerable to some of us if it were not. But this is worth
saying because a great many other satirists--Swift, Rabelais,
Cervantes--obtain most of their effects by distortion. Anatole France
obtains his by bringing out the essential incongruity of life:
funerals passing under the windows of the Ritz where there is a smart
luncheon-party, sermons bidding us love our enemies while newsboys
shout casualty lists; life is full of it. That is why the archdeacon
and another cleric hold, in the midst of a theological crisis, that
earnest argument about omelettes. Life and people are like that,
and there is nothing at all distorted in the diplomatic, furry,
soft-spoken priests who ... well, let us say, do not discourage their
fair penitents from committing adultery with powerful republicans,
provided this serves a good cause. After all Judith ... and Jael, and
all that. And it does not seem monstrous that the new bishop should be
selected while Madame de Gromance does up her suspenders, for it is
quite conceivable that lovers should now and then, at intervals, talk
politics.
And he is fair. He is not fair like Byron, who hated most people and
disliked the others, but because he can see oddity and occasionally
beastliness in the people of whom he approves. He is for the Jews in
this Dreyfus quarrel, but that does not make him anti-Christian; he
is as impartial in his attacks as a mosquito. Indeed a great many
Jews wish they had been saved from their friend, for pictures such as
that of Madame Worms-Clavelin and her husband, of Madame de Bonmont,
that most Christian of Jewesses, anxious to forget the tent of hides,
remembering in the most sacred (and even most amorous) moments that
there is such a thing as a Stock Exchange, are not always kind.
But, kind or unkind, the satire is never laid on thickly. Not once does
Anatole France suggest that Mademoiselle Deniseau is a sham prophetess:
no, that would be clumsy; she merely cannot give the logarithm of
nine....
In those four books modern French society stands forth quite stark,
with a rather decayed charm, a naïveté born from an excess of
complexity. Anatole France strips it of all its gewgaws, patriotism,
faith, morality: of all its little affectations; ... and then,
having exposed it, he consents to love it because his satire rests
on his philosophy. That philosophy, with which I deal further on, is
enunciated in every volume by the nice old gentlemen who embody him,
Bonnard, Bergeret and the others: irony and pity; despise man but
love him, see his weakness and yet hope; he may not be immortal, yet
he is eternal, indestructible as all matter; and though he be no more
than a mite in cheese yet he is the expression of life, the soul of
beauty, the one thing in the world which is holy. For Anatole France
is sweet and pitiful. All through his work we feel that, and in none
so much as in a little story, _Crainquebille_. This is the simple tale
of an old hawker who was run in for not moving on, just because he was
waiting for sixpence owed to him for vegetables. The policeman trumped
up against him a charge of having shouted “Down with the Peelers!”
When he comes out of gaol Crainquebille is ostracised; that makes him
quarrelsome; then, having no friends, he drinks; becoming drunken, he
loses his customers and sinks deeper and deeper into poverty. And the
terrible indictment of the law that makes criminals by listening to the
strong and flouting the poor, ends on the picture of old Crainquebille,
forlorn, degraded and starving, going up to a policeman and shouting:
“Down with the Peelers!” so as to get a night’s lodging in the cells.
But, irony of ironies, this policeman shrugs his shoulders, and walks
away.