only by ploughing it.” He has told the story simply, without heroics,
painted a poetic picture of Joan growing up “on bitter soil among
rough and sober folk, fed on rosy wine and brown bread, hardened by a
hard life”; she had knowledge of tree-worship, and hung garlands on
the boughs as does to-day Russian youth on the birch-tree; she was a
pagan and grew up among private wars, fire, blood and murder. It is all
extraordinarily living, for Anatole France speaks familiarly, using the
names of local tradesmen, peasants and lawyers. And so the story goes
on on the well-known lines, continually critical, for Joan reveals the
clerical influence by using terms known only to ecclesiastics[5]; she
uses sometimes peasant language, sometimes rhetoric, as if she had a
double personality; she is fierce, obstinate, firm, as if hypnotised;
she impresses the crowd by refusing Charles the name of King until
she herself has led him to Reims. Anatole France is fair even to the
English, who were cruel only because they were afraid of her as “a
superhuman, terrible, frightful creature, a demon from hell before
whom the bravest quailed.” Anatole France criticises Joan also as a
strategist, in which rôle, it seems, she was most incompetent; but
faith may inflame where strategy fails. Her strength came evidently
from her inflated view of her mission, so common in lunatic asylums,
for she went so far as to dream of a crusade against the Turks and the
Hussites....
[5] Miracle?
All this is implied, not stated; Anatole France advances few opinions,
digresses not often; he tells the story simply and allows us to draw
our own conclusions. Apart from the historical references, the book is
as simple as Renan’s _Life of Jesus_, and as damaging. Anatole France
is happiest when painting pictures of the enthusiastic mobs, swearing
the oaths of men-at-arms and singing songs with the ribald women,
painting pictures of the towns in the wars of the Middle Ages. At
times, however, he cannot restrain himself, must discuss a side issue
that interests him, such as the worship of virtue and of virgins. Then
his charm grows Virgilian: “In this land of Gaul the white priestesses
of the forests had left some memory of their holy beauty; and sometimes
one saw, fleeting in the Isle of Sein, along the misty shores of the
sea, the pale shadow of the nine sisters who, in bygone days, at will
laid or awoke the storm.”
It is not a disrespectful, but a critical book, and I suppose it is
true enough that the inspiration of Joan merely served to bring luck
to the French troops, was indeed a military mascot. To claim more is
to claim a little too much, for did not, during the European War,
Englishmen, Frenchmen, Russians, Germans all invoke the Almighty and
make quite sure that He was on their side? Yet everybody cannot win;
the Christian God is no Janus.
Far more interesting for ordinary reading is his pseudo-novel, _The
Gods are Athirst_. In that book he tells the story of a Jacobin,
Gamelin, living through the Revolution of 1789, active terrorist, ready
to sacrifice sister, mother, sweetheart, upon the altar of liberty,
hard, narrow in the forehead, obsessed. Anatole France leads us through
sumptuous scenes, the murder of Marat, the death of Robespierre,
while Gamelin every day grows more bloodthirsty, more pitiless. The
creature is marvellously living, for in his madness and his blood-lust
he responds to all the affectations of revolutionary days, the
personal oppositions between the red hands and the white hands, to the
ridiculous imitation of Roman citizenship which led to men calling
themselves Brutus or Cicero. Yet the ridiculous is not without its
nobility, for Gamelin falls at last a victim to the guillotine, and
then says, splendidly: “I die justly. It is well that we should bear
those insults levelled at the republic against which we should have
protected it. We were weak, we have been guilty of indulgence. We have
betrayed the republic.... Robespierre himself, pure and saintly, sinned
by gentleness, by pity ... I have spared blood, let my blood flow.”
That is not so extraordinary as it seems, for Gamelin, the executioner,
believes in virtue, in a high ideal and, as everybody should know,
there is no creature in the world so brutal and so venomous as one who
is working for the good of mankind.
The virtue of the book is not in the history, but in Anatole France’s
acute consciousness of the things that happen while history is being
made. There are picnics, talks about art; there is a sentimental
amourette between Brotteaux, the old aristocrat, and a sweet
courtesan; there is an old priest who does not mind having his head
cut off, but does object in court to being called a Capuchin when
he really is a Barnabite. It is all deeply human, and one scene at
least is unforgettable, a love scene. (Of course ... those are mostly
unforgettable.) It is not the recurrent scene between Gamelin and his
mistress who, by the way, and it is a charming irony, invites his rival
to her bedroom on the day of Gamelin’s execution in exactly the words
she used to Gamelin himself; it is a scene on the day when Charlotte
Corday murdered Marat. There is a great crowd and Gamelin, in the
press, meets his friend Desmahis. He tries to detain him to talk about
Marat, but Desmahis is almost in tears; he curses the crowd, he was
following a fair-haired girl, a shopgirl, a divine girl, and the crowd
has parted them. “But Marat ...” says Gamelin. “Marat, Marat!” growls
Desmahis. “That’s all very well, but I’ve lost my fair-haired girl.”
It is hard to realise that men follow shopgirls while empires fall, but
it is most likely, and I suspect that Anatole France thinks it more
important.
As it is the fate of Anatole France to be unpopular whatever he does,
it is not surprising that _The Gods are Athirst_ should have annoyed
the advanced people as much as _The Life of Joan of Arc_ did the
reactionaries. That is because he loves truth and is one of the few
people in the world who realise that truth is neither blue nor buff. He
has been charged with having fouled the noblest work of man; that is
untrue, only he is determined not to be taken in and will not see the
Red Virgin as spotless. Great things can be done by little men, done
clumsily, cruelly, and yet somehow done. That is more or less what
Anatole France shows in this book; the verdict of the people is not for
him the voice of God, but this does not imply that the voice of the
aristocrat is any more divine. He cannot help seeing that the democracy
is ignorant, prejudiced, greedy, coarse-minded, and yet at the same
time he finds in it the seeds of generosity and of that justice so much
more costly than the mercy now and then vouchsafed with a fine gesture
by those who dominate man. Irony and pity, pity and hope, it is always
the same gospel.
In _The Gods are Athirst_ Anatole France seemed to have receded from
the pronounced socialism which colours his views. That is all on the
surface, and in _The Revolt of the Angels_, published a year later,
it was obvious that he had denied none of his views; only, and it
is so difficult to make people understand this, Anatole France is a
Socialist and he is also sane. He will not have it that a Socialist
is necessarily a saint; that the democracy is immaculate; and it
is because he finds the human being behind the tribune, while the
followers of the tribune insist upon seeing him as a sort of historical
hero, a county Achilles, that in their quite honest stupidity they
are annoyed. If Anatole France had been born in England and entered
politics there, his influence would not have been large, because, in
this country, what we like is a good, stodgy, immovable view; if at the
age of twenty you believed in Mr Gladstone, at the age of sixty you
have to believe in Mr Asquith, and there you are. Doggedness, never
say die, the bulldog breed, all that sort of stuff. The idea is that
one should run one’s head against a brick wall in the hope of knocking
it over: one does sometimes, if one’s head is hard enough, but that
successful kind of head does not readily admit a new idea. Being a
Frenchman, Anatole France has been more fortunate; he is not a bit more
original than Mr. Shaw, though infinitely more _sympatique_, for his
smile is honeyed, not vinegary; still, if Mr Shaw had been a Frenchman
his countrymen would have taken him seriously. And we, too, perhaps,
once he was translated.
Anatole France came into the open in the course of the Dreyfus
case, and since that time he has never ceased to interest himself
actively instead of philosophically in everything that was unhappy
and oppressed--workers, natives, generally speaking the underdogs.
His little book, _The Church and the Republic_, published in 1905, in
which he demolishes the case for the absolute freedom of the Catholic
Church, because there is not absolute freedom, but only so much as does
not clash with other freedoms, had an immense success and powerfully
assisted M. Combes in his campaign for Disestablishment. Anatole
France, heir of Voltaire and Renan, has always seen the Church, a
survival full of charm and grace, as the enemy of the people. Had it
not been for the hierarchy, I do not believe he would have attacked
the faith: religion would have made a pretty toy for the child that
calls itself man. But religion allied with ministers and financiers,
sabre-rattlers, religion _à la_ Kaiser, he has sworn to root out. He
wants to do this because he has a vision of a humanity to come when
none shall suffer at the hands of the State, when one sex will not
crush and the other deceive, when black faces may smile on white. He
has expounded his creed in many political speeches, though he is not a
good speaker; he has come before his audience with his long, whimsical,
Pan-like face and his sorrowful eyes, flicking them with irony and yet
touching their hearts, asking always for justice and yet for sanity.
His speeches are like his writings, except that he has a Latin fondness
for the rhetorical question. They are polished, literary, and he
generally begins like an American by telling his audience one or two
humorous stories: he believes in laughter, and he who laughs with him
will soon think with him. But there is always a sting in those stories:
it is not for nothing that he is so fond of telling the old fairy tale
of the wrestler who could turn himself into a dragon and then, if St
George appeared, into a duck: there are many of our Cabinet ministers
who have been dragons at the Albert Hall and ducks in Committee Room
15, with, as Anatole France says, “a domestic animal’s mild voice.”
It is, however, his writings that matter most; though opposed to war,
it is interesting to observe that he approves of the European War of
1914. At the age of seventy he demonstrated this by laying down his pen
and asking the French War Office for a rifle. But in the main he hates
war, though he be not Tolstoyan enough to believe in non-resistance.
He hates war because it is not good business for the soul of man; I do
not think he is much upset by slaughter or starvation, for humanity
must die somehow, but he knows that a war makes vile those who survive.
And if one reads _The White Stone_ one easily understands him. It
is an incoherent work, for the several stories it contains are quite
unrelated; it is the sort of conversation four or five cultured
men might hold if they were to sit up for the night with wine and
cigarettes. It is rather long-winded, here and there dull, pedagogic,
but it represents him fairly well from an intellectual point of view,
though it contains none of the indecency, blasphemy and Falstaffian
fun which pervade his writings. It is philosophical, a little rigid,
rather Protestant: but then Anatole France is seldom a good Catholic,
except when he is chalking up on the cathedral wall: “To hell with the
Pope!” The first part is classical, and holds nothing that he has not
said in other works except one concentrated phrase: “The saints are
a new mythology.” He then passes on to the story of Gallio, who is
perhaps, philosophically speaking, the most seductive pagan in the New
Testament, a minor rival being, of course, Pontius Pilate.
Here is Gallio, administrator of a Roman province, facing the problems
of Nero’s unsuitable marriage with Octavia, of the education of little
boys, and of the fish trade.... It is all very Roman, a little pompous,
a little dull, rather like England about 1860. Gallio is not joyous,
for he has no illusions; he knows that “men will die, will kill every
enemy,” that “human laws are daughters of anger and fear.” And he has
official troubles, for the Jews are always indulging in religious
wrangles, refusing to have images of the emperor in their temples. This
gets Gallio into trouble, and he thinks it absurd, for “one should
honour all religions, think them all holy.” But the wrangles of the
Jews are forced on him, and he despairs of making them understand that
they must manage their own silly business, that he is interested only
in law and order. He personally thinks that this new God, Christ, is a
mere jumble of two old ones, of Orpheus, who descended into hell, and
of Adonis, who suffered and died. Gallio does not object to the new
God, but he wishes he would not embarrass the Government; in Gallio’s
view the new God is a bore, but he is also a nuisance, for “there are
in Asia lots of these youthful gods who die and rise again, and good
women take more pleasure in them than they should.” And then Gallio
goes on wearily to control complex administration, while the modernised
fictional version of the Acts unfolds ... and Stephen is stoned while a
philosopher makes love to Ioessa....
This touches Anatole France’s theories of government, and it is not
wonderful that he should be so interested in Saint Paul, whom Gallio
would have looked upon as an uneducated person. He speculates agreeably
on the discomfort Paul would feel in Rome to-day, unable to understand
Catholics and Protestants, and amazed because Judgement Day had not
yet occurred. “The only place for him to-day would be Jerusalem.” But
Anatole France does not long dwell upon this jumble of religion and
government which was evidently suggested to him by the differences
between the French State and the Catholic Church. He becomes more
general. He believes in a future peace brought about, not by man’s
goodness, but by economic necessity, which must please Mr Norman
Angell. This, of course, involves a change in our attitude to coloured
races, who “know us only by our crimes.” Anatole France sees that from
the point of view of Asia we are the white peril, and he can find no
reason why Admiral Togo should not come with twelve battleships to
bombard Brest to assist the Japanese trade in France. And then he
agreeably meanders; he figures the revolting French besieging the
legations of China and Japan in Paris, and Marshal Oyama bringing the
allied armies of the East to the Boulevard des Italiens to demand the
punishment of the French Boxers, burning down Versailles in the name of
a superior civilisation, and stealing the dinner-set of the Elysée. It
is all very cutting if we remember what we did in 1900, and Anatole
France amiably adds: “No, this has not happened. Yellow men are not
civilised enough so faithfully to imitate the white.”
For Anatole France, the colonial mania is purely economic, and he
considers that Japan has done a great service to the union of races
by compelling the white man to respect the yellow; he does not
despair even of the black, who, he points out, are evolving in South
America, growing educated and much superior to the Europeans of 2000
B.C. Of course this means “no more colonies,” which he looks upon as
swindles, for “France has expended men and money so that the Congo,
Cochin-China, Annam, Tonkin ... may buy cotton-goods in Manchester,
weapons in Birmingham and Liège, spirits in Dantzig, and claret in
Hamburg.” He is right, though humanity will not realise that until the
day comes for it to haul down its buntings. But he is not hopeless.
He believes that even military men are growing more peaceful, that
they want “a pompous, magnificent, shining peace, proud as war.”
Evidently he must hold such a belief, for in the same book is his
idea of Utopia. It is a queer, intellectual Utopia, very different
from Mr Wells’, and probably rather distasteful to most of us. He
figures men and women in the international State, dressed alike (and I
wonder whether the other Anatole France has not in his mind the wicked
thought of encouraging delightful surprises), work done by machines,
a six-hours’ day, aeroplanes, small private dwellings, no towns, few
crimes (property having gone); he suppresses the legal class, alcohol
... he even suppresses the colon by operation and then eugenics. It is
the ordinary Socialist Utopia with the labour bond system, the right
to live for art and science, and the wages of ability; the family, of
course, goes, and the sexless increase. That is not unattractive, for I
gather that Anatole France wishes to make procreation less accidental
and to confine it to those who feel intimately impelled to it. He
sees the cinema and the phonograph ousting the book, which is too
individualistic; drama as dead, owing to a lack of comedy and tragedy
in life. That is what most of us will dislike in his Utopia (that is to
say, tragedy in the lives of other people and comedy in ours). Religion
persists, but in a great schismatic mess, and there is even a Pope who
fulfils his mission after hours, for he is a dyer in Rome. All this
is fairly commonplace, but it carries a number of fine criticisms,
some of them generous, such as that of capitalism, which “was a great
social progress, created the proletariat, made a state inside the
State, prepared the emancipation of the workers and supplied them with
means to power.” That shows a true sense of the evolution of man: the
need for educating him out of his nomadic state by showing him how to
combine in factories, armies, republics. And Anatole France is not too
ambitious, for he does not think that equality can be established
“as we do not know what it is.” All he wants is to assure a living to
all and to make work honourable. Likewise he does not imagine perfect
liberty, because it is not possible, and, above all, he does not
believe that men will be good or bad: “They will be what they will be.”
That is what he dreams as he sleeps on the white stone, the species
of man evolving into another race possibly fine, possibly vile, but
yet worth dreaming of because, as Mr Wells says, man is not final,
and so long as a thing is not final it has the charm of a closed bud
that conceals a flower the colour of which we do not know. Anatole
France does not say whether the flower will burst forth gorgeous red or
virginal white; it will be what it will be, and so best, for whatever
its colour and its form it will be that thing which he loves in his
quiet, smiling, sober way, the flower of life.
V
THE CRAFTSMAN AND THE MAN
This may seem _énorme_ and yet somehow it is not: Anatole France is
not exactly a literary man. He is not a literary man in the sense of
Flaubert or Turgenev, for he is not content with being the god in
the machine, he is always allowing you to see him guiding it; indeed
in most of his work he is the god in the car. That is probably why
Anatole France has never adopted classical form. He appreciates it,
and in the many critical articles he has written he has praised just
those people whose form was perfect ... but it is the sick man, not
the robust man admires health. There is not one of his novels properly
holds together. I mean that there is not one that develops harmoniously
the story of certain human beings in a given atmosphere. At times, for
instance in the four volumes of _Contemporary History_, you have the
sense of developing lives, and then Anatole France puts on somebody
else’s coat, like Maître Jacques, transforms himself from coachman
into cook, calls himself Bergeret or Bonnard, or, more audaciously,
takes on the shape of Vence, the genial worldling, or of Dechartre, the
passionate sculptor, and talks. As soon as that happens the novel is
forgotten; Anatole France takes the reader by the hand and draws him
away to pick intellectual primroses. A delightful exercise; only when
hundreds of these primroses are picked you have forgotten the novel
you deserted. I have mentioned already the incoherence of _The Crime
of Sylvestre Bonnard_. Then there is the famous _Red Lily_, which is
supposed to be a love story; it is a love story of the most passionate
kind, only it is so inextricably mixed up with mystical excursions by
a vagabond, ragged poet, evidently modelled on Verlaine, with views on
pictorial art by Vence and Dechartre, that, interested as one is all
the time, one loses one’s sense of proportion. When the lovers meet
in the beautiful Florentine pavilion one is never sure that theirs is
a love feast: at any moment it may turn into an essay on the glazes
of Botticelli. Anatole France must at one time have been conscious of
this, for in one of his books, _Histoire Comique_, he made a great
effort to tell the story of a little actress who threw over her actor
lover for a young diplomat, and found after the suicide of the actor
that never more could she come together with her new lover because in
their tenderest moments she was haunted by the bloody spectre of the
dead man. _Histoire Comique_ is finely written, and in the best French
literary style; it eloquently evokes the life of the French actress, so
much on the edge of the _demi-monde_ and now and then over the edge.
It is almost as good as _Les Petites Cardinal_ ... and then Anatole
France spoils it. In comes Doctor Trublet, in other words Anatole
France himself, talking about medicine, about morality, about faith,
talking, everlastingly talking. Trublet talks delightfully, but while
he talks one thinks of the pretty little actress in whom one had grown
interested, and thinks: “Oh, dear old doctor, do stop talking; kisses,
not words, shall win the prize.” But then Anatole France has never
cared whether his ideas were relevant to the _story_; it has always
been enough for him that they should be relevant to the _temperament_
he sketches.
Perhaps for this reason, and it is an important observation if one is
to judge Anatole France fairly, his characters are unusually living.
People like Captain Victor, Tudesco, bombastic, ebullient, Falstaffian
people, move in our midst. Their creator is always poking fun at them;
persistently he erects Aunt Sallies and then throws bouquets at them.
He teases them because he loves them. It should be observed, however,
and I do not want to be ill-natured about it, that Anatole France never
pokes fun at the characters that embody his own personality. Bergeret,
the other nice old gentlemen, Vence, Dechartre, are never absurd; they
are amiable, scholarly, tender, generous, and have a strong sense of
humour. I do not say that Anatole France ought to see his ridiculous
side; I do not see it myself, but it must be there. Only, and you must
take my word for this without asking for evidence, it is not in the
nature of any human being, save the Englishman, to “take himself off.”
I have known a good many Frenchmen, Germans, Austrians, Spaniards, and
have never found in any one of them a glimmer of self-deprecation: they
were all supermen, and I expect were much the same before the birth of
Nietzsche. Still, and I repeat that I do not want to be ill-natured
about it, in spite of that little failing, it must be owned that this
little band of incarnations of Anatole France is very human; after
all, Anatole France is probably human himself, so far as a man can be
human when he is sane. Their humanity resides in their passion for
life. Every one of them holds the creed which is ideally stated in
the preface to _Mademoiselle de Maupin_. As I believe Anatole France
admires Gautier, I will venture to quote from it: