Chapter II: Part 2

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).

Animosity has not disturbed Anatole France, for “one conquers the earth 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:

“Pleasure seems to me to be the object of life, and the only useful
thing in the world. God has so willed it, who made women, perfume,
light, beautiful flowers, good wines, spirited horses, greyhounds
and Persian cats. He has not said to his angels: ‘Have virtue,’
but ‘Have love,’ and has given us lips more sensitive than the
rest of our skin so that we may caress women, eyes raised on high
to see the light, subtle scent to breathe the soul of flowers,
sinewy thighs to grip the flanks of stallions and to fly swift as
thought without railway or engine, delicate hands to draw over
the long heads of greyhounds, the velvet lines of cats, and the
gleaming shoulders of creatures without virtue; he has given to us
alone the treble and glorious privilege of drinking without being
thirsty, of lighting tinder and of making love at all times, which
distinguishes us from the brutes much more than the habits of
reading newspapers and manufacturing maps.”

In this preface lives much of Anatole France, his pure hedonism, his pagan love of the beautiful, his entire lack of moral purpose, counteracted by his consciousness of the decent, the elegant thing. If he believes, as I think he does, in honour, in truth, courtesy, pity, service, it is not owing to any harsh Protestant moral impulse, but to a feeling that there are fine, clean things revealed to us by some obscure Kantian, categorical imperative; if he has a morality at all it is the Ingersollian morality, that is to say obligation perceived by a fine soul. It is this inflames his style and links him with his forbears, with Voltaire, with Renan, with Molière, with the Italians of the sixteenth century, with the amiable Latins, with all the dead who loved the sunshine, with the gay gods, and the warriors who, on the way to the Elysian fields, did not turn their backs upon wine, woman and song. Not for him the sombre fates of duty, fear, retribution; not for him malignant Jove any more than malignant Jehovah. In the trenches in 1870 he read, not Sophocles, not Æschylus, but Virgil. As Brotteaux went to the guillotine he read Lucretius. For him flowers and honey to lay upon the little altars in Ausonian glades, and not the rapes and arguments of ancient Greece.

A Latin by heredity, it follows that Anatole France wields a style of singular purity. His work is very polished and very condensed. He uses as few words as possible to embody his idea, and when he has made his point, as, for instance, in stories such as _The Procurator of Judæa_, he stops. His desire is to knock out his reader, but he does not, like Zola, then proceed to kneel and to roll upon the prostrate figure, smothering it and flattening it out under a vast bulk. Anatole France never flounders; he does not follow the man who did so much damage to the literature of the nineteenth century by piling up seventeen unessential details, crowned, often by accident, with the essential one. Selection is with him a habit, and that is why Anatole France will never be confounded with the Zolas, the Sudermanns, the William de Morgans. Without selection he never could have achieved his delicate little pictures of men and women, of their passions stated in a paragraph; and still less could he have built those strange animals that he so loves. They are not always philosophical animals like Riquet, the dog, praying to man, his god; sometimes like Miragoane, they are just intelligent, doggy dogs, tail-wagging, greedy, apologetic, fulsome dogs; at other times they are just decorative beasts, especially the cats. For Anatole France, like Théophile Gautier, like Baudelaire, like Edgar Allan Poe, like almost every artist who really is an artist, loves cats. In his eyes the cat is as beautiful as woman. Here is a scrap, which I feel I render inadequately, devoted to sumptuous Hamilcar, the Persian cat in the library:

“Hamilcar, somnolent prince in the city of books, watcher in
the night! Thou dost defend against vile rodents those things,
manuscript and printed, bought for the old student by his modest
hoard and his tireless zeal. In this silent library which thy
military virtues protect, Hamilcar, sleep languid as a sultana.
For thou dost unite in thy person the formidable air of a Tartar
warrior and the indolent grace of an Eastern maid. Heroic and
voluptuous Hamilcar, sleep until the mice shall dance in the
moonlight before the _Acta Sanctorum_ of the learned Bollandists.”

That is poetry, though, as I have suggested before now, Anatole France, in spite of his great love of the beautiful, is too critical, too humorous, has too much detachment to be written down a poet. He loves the poets, notably Racine, and one does not quite see why. But he is not a poet because, I think, he is too remote; the blood of the earth does not flow in his veins, and it may be that if he were closely questioned he would confess that he thinks life very useful to literature. That is perhaps why he tolerates it so well, why he can smile at it, be serious and yet poke fun at it. What a Fabian he would have made!