about Anatole France in his more literal rôle of critic. He has done
an immense amount of literary criticism in _Le Temps_ and in scattered
articles, most of which have been collected in the four volumes of _On
Life and Letters_ and in _Le Génie Latin_. He is sympathetic and kindly
in the extreme when dealing with the work of young men, particularly
if they are scholars, if they are interested in the things he loves,
mediævalism, sculpture, history, etc., and he will forgive a great deal
to good intentions, but when he does not like a book Anatole France is
a terrible reviewer, so terrible a reviewer that I trust this little
monograph will not fall into his hands. Ignoring then the gentler side
of him, I will reproduce two extracts from his criticisms. The first
is from a review of Georges Ohnet’s book, entitled _Will_. Mr Georges
Ohnet, as I suppose everybody knows, has for a long time enjoyed great
vogue in France for, have no illusions about it, the French are no more
literary than we are and have a passion for stories of moated granges,
immaculate officers (comparatively chaste), remorseful women who
sacrifice their beauty for the ideal, and all that sort of thing; with
a little arrangement, the sentimental-heroic novels of Mrs Barclay, and
the sentimental-religious novels of Mr Hall Caine would have in France
a good circulation. In fact, the sensuous religiosity of Mr Hall Caine
enjoys in France quite adequate popularity. And here is what Anatole
France says of this kind of novel, _Will_, as published by Mr Georges
Ohnet:
“The title is a whole philosophy. _Will_, that is what speaks to
the heart and mind. _Will_ by Georges Ohnet! How one feels the
man of principle who has never doubted! _Will_ by Georges Ohnet,
73rd edition! What a proof of the power of the will! Locke did
not believe that the world was free. But his _Essay on the Human
Understanding_ did not reach seventy-three editions in a single
morning. Here we have Locke victoriously refuted! The will is not
an illusion, for Mr Georges Ohnet has willed to have seventy-three
editions, and he has achieved them.”
Anatole France, after this amiable beginning, remarks that Mr Georges
Ohnet’s notions are displeasing, that his style is ungraceful; he
quotes him, and the result is quite ghastly. And he ends on words which
rescue the reader from doubt:
“There is not a page, not a line, not a word, not a syllable of
that book which has not shocked, saddened, and offended me. I was
disposed to weep over it with all the muses for company.”
Another review, that of Zola’s book, _The Dream_, I cannot resist
mentioning. The book is not very well known in England, which is a
pity, as it might please the worshippers of the latter-day Swan of
Avon. It is pure. Anatole France is aware of that, for he wickedly
heads his review: “Mr Zola’s Purity.” As it certainly was not Zola’s
habit to be pure, surprise at the accident was legitimate. And so
Anatole France writes:
“If in order to be poetic, graceful, and touching, it were enough
to resolve, Mr Zola would certainly be at the present moment
the most graceful, the most poetic, the most winged, and the
most uplifted among novelists ... he espouses chastity and thus
affords us the most edifying example. One can only regret that he
celebrates this mystic alliance with too much noise and uproar....”
Anatole France analyses the tale of the beautiful heroine, in her
saintly cathedral town, and adds: “Zinc factories and flat irons
occupy too much space in Mr Zola’s soul.” He then convicts Zola of
gross ignorance of the period he describes, remarks casually: “Saint
Joseph’s lily becomes in his hand an instrument for advertisement,”
and, alluding to his previous works, sums up: “I prefer Mr Zola on all
fours to Mr Zola winged.”
III
PHILOSOPHER AND THEOLOGIAN
Like many agnostics, Anatole France is more interested in religion than
is many a believer. Like those old encyclopædists of the eighteenth
century, he is always crushing the infamous one, which the faithful
generally support because assured that the so-called infamous one
cannot be crushed. And that infamous one is not only the Catholic
religion but religion itself. I do not want to raise an argument as to
what is religion: in the sense in which Anatole France attacks it it is
a precise faith in some creative and conscious spirit which manifests
itself, not only in this world, but in some conceptive other world.
Of that Anatole France will hear nothing. He can do without it; he is
strong enough to stand alone, and to meet death “as one about to seek
a great perhaps.” He needs no prop, and he would smile at a letter I
received a little while ago from a devout Catholic who urged me to draw
on “the strength and consolation which streamed from that little hill
near Jerusalem, two thousand years ago, and now flows from the slope
that rises by the side of the yellow waters of the Tiber.” Anatole
France sees the poetry of this conception, but though he sees the idea
as poetic he does not see the statement as true. For him religion or
faith is cowardice; it is the cry of man who dares not die, and in
every one of his books he has used the most cunning methods to express
his feeling.
One of the most notable ways has been to express the ideas of men
through the mouth of Riquet, the dog.[3] For the dog, as Anatole France
said in another place, is a religious beast, and here are some of the
thoughts which pass through its brain:
“My master warms me when I lie behind him in his armchair; that is
because he is a god.” (“The Lord will provide.”) “In my master’s
voice are many vain sounds. It is difficult and necessary to define
the thought of the master.” (Catholic exegesis of the Bible.) “I
love my master, Bergeret, because he is terrible and powerful.”
(Jewish worship of Jehovah.) And the little black dog prays:
“Oh, my master, Bergeret, God of Slaughter, I worship thee! Hail,
oh God of wrath! Hail, oh bountiful God! I lie at thy feet, I lick
thy hand. Thou art great and beautiful when at the laden board thou
devourest abundant meats. Thou art great and beautiful when, from a
thin strip of wood causing flame to spring, thou dost of night make
day....”
[3] In _Monsieur Bergeret à Paris_, and in the story entitled
_Riquet_.
Here indeed in the old professor who can whip Riquet is the God of
Sabaoth, the God of Battles; in the professor with the carving knife is
He who multiplied the fishes and the loaves. And I need not labour that
when Bergeret strikes a match it is very wonderful: so was Genesis and
the making of the sun....
For his aggressive, childish superstitions, for his puerile desire
to find an unnatural explanation to what he does not understand,
Anatole France might despise man, yet he loves him. He finds charm
in hierophantic absurdity; he feels the poetry of the little hill.
And he goes further: he feels the poetry even of the Middle Ages,
though it was a period of bestial and ungraceful ignorance, raping
knights, robber troubadours and fine ladies who never changed their
underclothing; he loves historic truth as well as the highfalutin
nonsense of Amadis of Gaul. For Amadis has a picaresque air. In his
book, _The Well of St Clare_ notably, are several stories supposed to
be told by a Siennese priest. There is that of Saint Satyr, out of
whose tomb came a multitude of mists, each one of which was a woman.
They floated in the darkling air; through their light tunics shone
their light bodies. The clerics had hunted them into the tomb of the
saint who was accepted of God the Christ, because the goat worshipped
in his own fashion. (Anatole France hints that all religions have
the same root and that one worshipper is as good as another; he has
written another story on these lines, _Amycus and Célestin_.) The
tomb is opened and the heart of the priest who saw the vision is in
most mediæval style torn out by the ghosts of hags. In another story,
_The Security_, the Virgin stands bail for a year for a debt, and
leads the merchant’s barque back in time to redeem her, because he
believed in her; there are other queer stories, such as _The Lady
of Verona_, who so loved her body that she begged Satan to save it;
such as _The Mystery of the Blood_, where a saint cheers a criminal
whose blood falls upon her gown. She says: “Take not from me my purple
and my perfumes.” In all these stories he shows how charmed he is by
this childish mediævalism. And yet he does not espouse it, for in the
_Opinions of Jérome Coignard_ he says: “All those stories of Satanic
fornication are disgusting dreams, and it is a shame that Jesuits and
Dominicans should have made them up into treatises.”
His theology is usually intermingled with his philosophy. In the story
called _Komm l’Atrébate_ (in _Clio_) the warrior believes that the
same moon does not shine over Rome and over Gaul, because Rome is so
far away; in _La Muiron_ (in _Clio_) Buonaparte expounds his theory of
government by faith: “The right to deny God is granted to a learned man
shut up in his study, not to a leader of peoples whose power over the
vulgar rests upon his community with their ideas. To govern men one
must think like them on all great questions and allow oneself to be
carried by public opinion.”
Anatole France wishes to govern no man, and to be governed of no
man. He is the most anarchistic of Socialists. And how could he feel
otherwise if indeed he be Coignard, who “despised man tenderly,” who
thought that “on earth one cannot help sinning”? The Abbé Coignard,
in 1893, was full of cynical contempt for democracy, of disbelief in
the importance of forms of government, and in the value of change; yet
Coignard hated prisons and armies; he thought all war hateful, except
civil war; for him glory, nobility, honour were words; glory, notably,
was accident; modesty was Calvinism; he thought that there was a pure
and an impure, but heaven alone knew which was which.... All that is
the Francian philosophy mixed in with the Francian religion: doubts and
smiles.
But now and then, when he is annoyed by the externals of Christianity,
Anatole France becomes more militant. He has written (in _Mother of
Pearl_) a story entitled _The Procurator of Judæa_, which ranks with
the finest of de Maupassant’s, and is deeper in intention than anything
de Maupassant ever wrote. A generation after the Crucifixion, Pilate,
then talking the waters for gout in Northern Italy, meets an old
friend who was once at Jerusalem. They talk of horses, of the policy
of Vitellius, of the waters, of the things that would interest Roman
gentlemen, and, little by little, they come to talk of those silly,
noisy, obstinate Jews who used to raise such wrangles and such schisms
in Jerusalem. And they talk of Mary Magdalene, in her pre-scriptural
days: “By the light of a smoky little lamp, on a wretched carpet she
danced, raising her arms to strike the cymbals. Her back arched, her
head thrown back, as if drawn down by the heavy weight of her ruddy
hair, her eyes drowned in lust, ardent and languishing, she would
have caused Cleopatra herself to blush for envy....” They sigh, for
Magdalene was very beautiful and seductive (in her pre-scriptural
days). Then the friend recalls that she followed “a young Galilean
thaumaturge who was crucified,” says the friend, “for I don’t know
what crime.” Pontius Pilate thinks for a long time; crucifixion was
so commonplace in those days. After a while he says: “Jesus? Jesus of
Nazareth? No, I don’t remember him.”
I know that many who read this will charge Anatole France with
blasphemy. Well, blasphemy has its uses: it parts the sheep from the
goats; it impresses the waverers and drives such of them as are weak of
faith into agnosticism, while it shocks the faithful and strengthens
their militancy. The blasphemer may render a service to the faith.
Blasphemy need not be ignorant; indeed, true blasphemy is possible only
in the enlightened: the unenlightened find it easier to believe; it
is so difficult to believe when one does not know. Now Anatole France
does not know, and he is, so far as that goes, in the position of St
Francis, but where he differs from St Francis is that he does not
believe that which he does not know. (I am assuming that St Francis did
believe, that he did more than want to believe.) For Anatole France
understands perfectly well the Catholic attitude and its Christian
variations; he has a full understanding of it, its simplicity, gaiety,
charm, of its tender humanity, of the beautiful Catholic sympathy
with the weakness of man, with the feeble hands that cannot seize more
than the hem of the seamless garment. He loves this Catholicism which
he detests because, after all, while spreading among the people brute
ignorance, infamous asceticism, prejudices and an intolerance resulting
in a cruelty foreign to the tiger, it somehow, through the Dark Ages,
kept burning the flame of the arts. The Catholicism of Anatole France
is that of Cimabue, of Raphael, of Marot, of Shakespeare (no Protestant
he), the Catholicism of those friars who pored over Greek texts, of
those inspired workmen who painted stained glass, of the fine ladies
with the pearl-braided hair who, with hands delicate as sprays of fern,
embroidered chasubles, and, all of them, interposed a bulwark between
the culture of man and the stinking men-at-arms. That Catholicism is
the Catholicism of song and dance, the Catholicism of the juggler
and the troubadour, not only the Catholicism of the stake but the
Catholicism of Merrie England before Calvin came to blow a black
breath upon a world not yet made grey by the Galilean.[4]
[4] Anatole France would hate our Puritan practices, such as
the prohibition of billiards in hotels and of cricket in
the parks on Sunday.
It might be concluded that Anatole France is an atheist, but that is
not correct; he has said too definitely that though man may not be
immortal, he is eternal. He merely does not know whence we came nor
whither we go, nor I think does he care much; he is merely a member of
the band, Voltaire, Renan, Huxley, Spencer, Darwin, Haeckel (doubtful
that one), who were not willing to believe without understanding,
and yet agreed that there might be something in which to believe if
one could understand it. Briefly, he is an agnostic. He refuses to
make the slightly self-conscious effort which certain literary men,
in England and in France, successfully make to accept the spiritual
origin of miracles and such like matters. What is, is, and what may be,
may be: that is enough. But his theology is so intermingled with his
human interests that at bottom he is a pagan; he loves beauty so well
that he discovers it even in faith, and it is evident that he would
have found much pleasure in the rites of the ancient Greeks. In his
celebrated novel, _Thais_, he hails pagan beauty as he holds up for our
contemptuous sympathy the sorrow of Paphnutius, the monk of Arsinoe.
The monk set forth to redeem Thais, the courtesan; for her beauty and
her soul he abandoned his cell and his hair shirt. She was unhappy
and superstitious, and she feared the life to come; at his behest she
turned to the Christian God. But Paphnutius burned himself with the
torch he had lit; Thais assailed him in dream, and though he strove to
fight his passion by solitude, by fasting, by becoming a stylite, he
failed. In dream he dishonoured his soul, and at last, surrendering, he
rushed to Thais, but found her dying and become a saint; doubt, fear
and despair had compassed his downfall, and it was too late to love:
he could be naught save a vampire.
The story is one of violent pageantry, of Alexandria crimson, purple
and gold, of Alexandria dancing on the rosy wharves where great ships
with brown sails unloaded silks and spices, Alexandria offering up
to the old gods, Hermes of the secret smile and Aphrodite of the
cup-like breasts, not the smoking holocausts of Jehovah, but honey
and garlands of flowers.... And on the other side, quite near the
sceptical, cynical, gay, intellectual Greeks, who for a pastime and
as in a Chelsea drawing-room discussed man and God, the horrid state
of the Christian anchorites, self-starved, self-flogged, verminous,
sour, contemptuous of the beauty of the body, of learning. There is a
bitter irony in the efforts of Paphnutius, the stylite, for as he sits
upon his column as far as he can from man and as near as possible to
God, his reputation as a saint waxes; round him there grows a town,
Stylopolis, an ancestor of Lourdes; first of all come shrines and
convents, then traders, then a government, then banks, theatres ... the
rich, the sons of the rich ... courtesans. He does not hate Paphnutius
nor love him, for the monk was unfortunate, not guilty; gladly would
he have torn out his heart and burnt it as an offering to God the
Christ. His was a white, burning soul, but he had beyond a soul a body
needing lightness, satisfaction. His flesh was weak, and it is pitiful
rather than rejoicing that Anatole France sorrows for his error, when
the monk sees Lucifer as “the serpent with golden wings which twisted
round the tree of knowledge its azure coils formed of light and love,”
when he sees Jehovah, the brutish tyrant, the power of ignorance and
superstition, the power of darkness, Jehovah, understanding nothing,
a mere dream. It is a terrible day for Paphnutius when he understands
that “the Serpent began to speak to Adam and Eve and to teach them the
highest truths, those which do not demonstrate themselves.”
All this feeling is in _The Revolt of the Angels_, the most remarkable
of Anatole France’s theological books, as _Penguin Island_ is his
principal political book. It is an amusing story, this idea that the
angels, as knowledge and thought spread among them, should one by one
desert the heavenly choir, come to earth to live among men, to love
them, and attempt to overthrow Him who has stood in the way of every
science and of every art. The book is brilliant because it so casually
intermingles the actual with the fantastic. The angels who descend to
earth and turn into men become music masters (obviously), conspirators,
commercial travellers, and here below prepare the spiritual revolution.
The career of the principal angel, Arcade, is exceedingly amusing, for
he ravages by night the theological libraries, being bent on gaining
an education which was not given him in Paradise. And there is a fair
amount of the most incongruous, but almost engaging, indecency. It
would be too much to describe the incident exactly here, but I think I
may say that Arcade, who is the guardian angel of a young man called
Maurice, appears in the latter’s bedroom at a moment ... well, at an
inopportune moment. And when at last he has convinced Maurice that he
really is an angel, Maurice says something which could be said only
by a Parisian: “You may be an angel, but you are not a man of the
world.” He is wrong, for a little later Arcade, in the very same room,
demonstrates to the lady whose reputation he compromised by his sudden
materialisation, that angels are close relatives of men.
But apart from scenes where angels button up the boots of ladies,
which is very clever of them, considering how little practice they
can have had, there is in the book to a much greater extent than in
_Thais_ a passionate plea for the intellectual side of paganism, the
one embodying all that is young and all that is enlightened, embodying
the joys which the god of the Jews endeavoured to drive out of the
domain of man. And there is more than one picture of Satan as the
god of grace (presumably precipitated into hell on account of his
advanced ideas), of Satan loving man. There is picture after picture
of the Son of the Morning who once was Pan. In the end the angels do
not revolt, for Satan in his dream realises that if he overthrows God
and establishes himself as another god, he will only become as his
predecessor, harsh, dogmatic, intolerant, greedy of praise, hostile to
anything which might rear up in the mind of the people the idea of a
new god. Satan will not reign, and he sums up: “What matters if man is
no longer subject to Ialdabaoth, if the spirit of Ialdabaoth is still
in them? if like him they are jealous, violent, quarrelsome, greedy,
inimical to the arts and to beauty? what matters if they have rejected
the ferocious demon if they listen not to the friendly demons who teach
all truths, to Dionysus, Apollo and the muses? As for us, celestial
spirits, sublime demons, we have destroyed Ialdabaoth, our tyrant, if
we have destroyed in ourselves ignorance and fear.”
IV
HISTORIAN AND POLITICIAN
Though deeply interested in the past, Anatole France has written
singularly little pure history. His vision being universal, most of his
critical work is informed with historic feeling, but in spite of his
love of ancient chronicles, in spite of knowledge which might shame the
College of Heralds and the Record Office put together, he has preferred
to use history as raw material for romance. He has been right, in a
way, for most historians have used romance as the raw material of
history and made of it, with a few exceptions, such as Green, Gibbon,
Michelet, Mommsen, an unreadable, unfinished product. Anatole France
knows that, and possibly he has hesitated to write history because he
had not the details he needed to write it as he wished; those details
were the history of the people, the real history, the ploughman’s
menu, and what the merchant said to his wife about Mr Pitt before
they fell asleep; battles and dates make him smile. He expresses this
very well in the preface to _The Life of Joan of Arc_. “To discern
the future one must consider not the enterprises of the great but the
confused movements of the labouring masses.”
Once only has he written an actual historic work, and that is his
monumental study of Joan of Arc. It has made him more unpopular than
all his works put together, from which it is easy to conclude that it
is a work of worth and nobility. It is an enormous, encyclopædic study
showing that he has consulted every possible source of information:
archives, chronicles, diaries, private letters and reports of the
merest tittle tattle; he knows almost too much about the Maid of
Orleans, and this makes it difficult to read the work. But the one
who perseveres will be richly rewarded, for Anatole France sheds some
new light upon the _chevalière_. It is the preface and the addendum
have made him hated by the clericals, for he impugns the chronicles
as mostly having been written by chroniclers paid by the knights;
pitilessly he shows up their discrepancies, their omissions, he
depicts Joan of Arc as a hallucinated, hysterical girl, subject to
visions which in those days afflicted many a girl on the threshold
of womanhood. For him her sight, smell, hearing, sense of contact,
all were decayed, and he inclines to think that she was influenced by
priests favourable to the cause of Charles VII. Those priests were
politicians and, knowing her simplicity, led her and used her. They
had no difficulty in this, for the people were ignorant and believed
because they wanted to believe. As he himself says: “Belief in her
sanctity was as hypnotic as would be to-day a belief in aeroplanes.”
It is not wonderful that, assuming an attitude such as this towards
one whom M. Bergeret called a military mascot, Anatole France should
have been violently attacked by the reactionaries; that was a little
unfair, for all through the book Anatole France recognises the
simplicity, the purity, the courage and the true enthusiasm of Joan,
but he will not grant her divine inspiration. That is unpardonable in
the eyes of the reactionaries, who forget that it took the popes over
four hundred and fifty years to canonise her; they want to use Joan
of Arc in the cause of the Church and the King, and it does not do at
all to have that touching conviction disturbed: it was not the Kaiser
invented the alliance of Meinself (und Gott).