XVIANATOLE FRANCE: THE LAST PHASE
Anatole France is seventy-six years old, but his mind is still vigorous, if that word be not too brisk when applied to such a subtle, supple, undulating intelligence as his. He now writes prose glowing with patriotism. Like the late Remy de Gourmont he shed his cynic’s skin when war invaded his beloved land. And it was not the first time that he, a writer of humanitarian impulses, opened the door of his ivory tower and descended into the stormy arena; witness the Dreyfus case. However, it would be idle to deny that his best work is well behind him. Prefaces to letters to distinguished men and women he occasionally publishes, such as Sur la Voie Glorieuse, or Ce que disent nos morts; but the Anatole France of La Révolte des Anges seems to have vanished forever. In the vast whirlwind of European events his scepticism, irony, and pessimism have given way to pity and tenderness for human suffering. The son of the bookseller Thibaut may figure, some day, in a modern hagiography of those lay-saints who fought for a new spiritual freedom.
The subject-matter composing Sur la VoieGlorieuse is altogether patriotic and contains much that is striking. The cloven hoof of the original faun that lurks somewhere in this Frenchman’s temperament is shown in a passage wherein he groups the Christmas festival with other antique festivals and symbols of Adonis and Mithra. A pagan to the end. Possibly the best pages are devoted to a free translation from Herodotus, a dialogue between the potentate Xerxes and a Spartan slave. The moral rings clear. Of quite different material is fashioned The Revolt of the Angels. We cannot conscientiously recommend the fiction to elderly persons of either sex, though, no doubt, it is favorite reading of the “advanced” college girl. What would be vulgarity in another writer is turned to favor and prettiness by the wand of the Gallic enchanter. Violence, rapine, hissing irony, and Rabelaisian episodes make a feast for lovers of Anatolian literature. Those who have retained any old-fashioned prejudices concerning propriety—morality is out of the running—may expect to be shocked. Has he not said: “Man, seek not to know thyself! Man is not a reasoning animal.”
In this fable the deity that created us is in the new cosmology only a tribal god, who, since he deposed Lucifer in pitched battle, rules tyrannically. He keeps close watch on our mud-pie of a planet because he suspects that numerous angels disguised as men and women are fomenting a second angelic rebellion. Withthem are the socialists and anarchists, and this gives M. France an opportunity to score monarchical forms of government. The clerical order is lashed. He spares no one. He repeats his familiar axiom: “Les guerres sont toujours les affaires.” There are pages in which sensuality and sheer burlesque are mingled in a disquieting compound. The book is one of the most daring. In its essence it is a supreme revolt against all social systems that uphold slavery: industrial, militaristic, religious, political. The debasing Asiatic systems that still make captive the conscience of mankind are mercilessly attacked, and while the castigating hand is incased in velvet the shining steel is none the less deadly.
Constable, the English landscapist, said that a good thing can’t be done twice. Anatole France has demonstrated the contrary in his latest, let us hope not his last book, Le Petit Pierre, another series of exquisite notations of childhood. His delightful Livre de Mon Ami gave us glimpses of his early days. Fascinating are the chapters devoted to Pierre and Suzanne in this memoir. The tenderness of M. France, and his power of summoning up the wonder and awe of our youth, may be seen in Abeille; the development of the lad is followed in Pierre Nozière. A portrait of the young Anatole reveals his excessive sensibility. His head was large, the brow too broad for the feminine chin, though the long nose and firm mouth contradict possible weakness in the lowerpart of the face. It was in the eyes that the future of the child might have been read—they were lustrous, in shape beautiful, with a fulness that argued eloquence and imagination. Such eyes were possessed by the boy Charles Dickens. France has told us that he was a strange child, whose chief ambition was to be a saint, a secondSt.Simon Stylites, and after that thrilling experience to write a history of France in fifty volumes! In Le Petit Pierre his memory for the important little events of a child’s existence is unusual; evidently nothing has been invented, all happened. Through the haze of the immemorial years there now and then sharply shines some significant incident, some old wives’ tales, a portrait of an elderly contemporary—like the Balzacian Uncle Hyacinthe or the incomparable evocation of the beloved servant Mélanie—a dog, like Caire, the truant parrot, the boy chimney-sweep, and the sweet smile of Pierre’s mother, who seems to be every one’s mother so admirably generalized is the type—what a magician is this writer! Told with naïveté and verve, we feel in every page of Le Petit Pierre the charm of personality.
In clarity Anatole France is the equal of Renan and John Henry Newman, and, while at one time clarity was a conventional quality of French prose, it is rarer to-day. Symbolism has supervened, if not to darken counsel, certainly to trouble verbal values. Never syncopated, moving at a moderate tempo, in transitionssmooth, replete with sensitive rejections, crystalline in diction, a lover and a master of large, luminous words, the very marrow of the man, Anatole France is in his style. And what a model he should be for those wilful young writers who boast that lumpy, graceless paragraphs are better suited to their subjects than swift, clear, concise prose. It was not so long ago that one scribe positively glorified in his own dull style; he asserted that it was a truthful reflection of his drab themes. There is, indeed, such a thing as an apposite garbing, a verbal orchestration. The pellucid sentences of Mr. Howells, so free from the overblown, are happily wedded to his admirable character etching. Flaubert, master of ornate, or “numerous” prose, as well as cool, rhythmic prose, wrote Salammbô in a purple, splendid key, and Madame Bovary in the greyer tonalities of the province; yet nothing could be further removed from the style of either novel than Sentimental Education, which is urban and suffused with sober daylight. It was a favorite contention of de Gourmont that at his sovereign best Flaubert is to be found in Bouvard et Pécuchet, the style of which is sinewy, pregnant, powerful. The principal mistake of beginners is to believe that ornament is good style. In Anatole France matter and manner are perfectly welded.
Few writers swim so easily as he under their heavy burdens of erudition. His knowledge is precise, his range wide. He is a humanist. Heknows many literatures. He loves learning for the sake of learning. He loves words, treasures them, fondles them, burnishes anew their meanings tarnished by custom. He seldom tarries in the half-way house of epigram. Over all, his interest in humanity sheds a tranquil glow. Without a marked feeling for the dramatic, nevertheless, he surprises mankind engaged in its minute daily acts; those he renders as candidly as snow in the sunshine; just as the old Dutch painters stir our “emotion of recognition” with a simple shaft of light passing through a half-open door, or upon an old wrinkled woman polishing her spectacles. He sees and notes many gestures, inutile or tragic, and notes them with the enthralling simplicity of a complicated artistic nature. He deals with ideas so vitally that they seem human. Yet his personages are never abstractions, nor do they serve as pallid allegories. They are all alive from Sylvestre Bonnard to the group that meets to chat in the Foro Romano (Sur la Pierre Blanche); from his Penguins to his Angels. A dog, a cat, he depicts with the same love; his dog Riquet bids fair to endure in literature. France is an interpreter of life, not precisely after the manner of the novelist, but life as viewed through the temperament of a poet of extreme delicacy and one doubled by a tolerant philosopher.
This ultramodern thinker, who has outgrown the despotism of positivist dogma, has the soul of a chameleon. He loves, he understands,Christianity with a fervor and a knowledge that surprise, until we measure the depth of his affection for antique cultures. Further to confuse us, he exhibits sympathy with the Hebraic lore. He has rifled the Talmud for half-forgotten tales. He delights in juxtaposing the Greek sophist and the strenuous Paul. He contrasts Mary Magdalen repentant with a pampered Roman matron. He is familiar with the proceeds of science, particularly astronomy. With the scholastic speculations of the Renaissance, with the simple affirmations of mediæval piety, he is as conversant as with the destructive Pyrrhonism of a boulevard philosopher. So commingled are his contradictory cultures, so numerous his angles, so avid of impressions is he, that we end in wholly admiring the exercise of a beneficent magic that can blend into a happy synthesis moral dissonances and harmonize such a bewildering moral preciosity. But there are moments when we regard the operation as intellectual legerdemain. We suspect dupery. However, it is his humor that is the most potent of his solvents. This humor often transforms a doubtful battle into radiant victory. We see him, the protagonist of his own psychical comedy, dancing on a tight rope in the airiest fashion, deliciously capering in the metaphysical void, and, like a prestidigitator, bidding us doubt the very existence of his rope.
Proofs from life gay pagan Anatole does not demand. He has the hesitations of profounderudition. Possessing the gift of paradox, he rejoices in his philosophic indifferentism. Notwithstanding his famous phrase, “the mania of certitude,” Renan was ever pursued by the idea of an Absolute. He cried for proof. To Bertholet he wrote: “I am eager for mathematics.” To him numbers promised rigid reality. Not so, however, to M. France, who could have asked with Ibsen whether two added to two do not make five on the planet Jupiter! To Montaigne’s “What know I?” he opposes the injunction of Rabelais: “Do what thou wilt!” Of Plato he might have asked, “What is Truth?” and if Plato in turn would have posed the same question, Anatole could reply by handing him a copy of Jardin d’Epicure, that perfect breviary of Anatolian scepticism. In Socrates perhaps he would discover a congenial companion; yet he might mischievously allude to Montaigne “concerning cats,” or quote Aristotle as to the form of hats. And then we spy him adorning the Wheel of Ixion with garlands. A wilful child of belles-lettres and philosophy, M. France always may be expected to utter the starting, lucent phrase.
He believes in the belief of God. By the gods of all times and climes he swears. His the cosmic soul. A man who infuses into his tales something of the Mimes of Herondas, La Bruyère’s Characters, and the Lucian Dialogues, with faint flavors of Racine and La Fontaine superadded, may be pardoned his polychromaticfaiths. This chromatism in creeds, a trust in all or none, is rather diverting. But the classic world of thought shows several exemplars for M. France, from the followers of Aristippus to the Sophists. Nevertheless, there is a specific note of individuality, a roulade altogether Anatolian in the Parisian. No one but this accomplished sceptic could have devised The Opinions of Jerome Coignard, and his scheme for a Bureau of Vanity (Villiers de l’Isle Adam invented a machine for manufacturing glory). “Man is an animal with a musket,” declares Anatole. Here is a morsel for hypocrites: “Even virtue may be unduly praised. Since it is overcoming which constitutes merit, we must recognize that it is concupiscence which makes saints.” This sounds like William Blake done into choice French; Blake who has said that “the fool cannot enter the kingdom of heaven be he ever so pious”; that Blake who believed that the road to wisdom lies through the valley of excess.
Henry James has declared that the province of art is all life, all feeling, all observation, all vision. According to this rubric, M. France is a many-sided artist. Philosopher as well, he plays with the appearances of life, lifting betimes the edge of the curtain to curdle the blood of his spectators with the sight of Buddha’s shadow in some grim cavern beyond. He shows his Gallic tact in decorating the empty spaces of theory and the blank spots of reality. A follower of Kant, in his denial of the objective, wecannot imagine him approving of that sage’s admiration of the starry heavens and the moral law. Both are relative, would be the report of the Frenchman. Yet he yearns for faith. He humbles himself beneath the humblest. He excels in exposing the splendor of the simple soul, though faith has not anointed his intellect with its chrism. He admires the golden filigree of the ciborium; its spiritual essence escapes him. At the portals of Paradise he lingers, or stoops to pick a rare and richly colored feather. He eloquently vaunts its fabulous beauty. But he hears not the whirring of the wings whence it has fallen. Pagan in his irony, his pity wholly Christian, Anatole France betrays a nuance of Petronius and a touch ofSt.Francis. Because of this spiritual dislocation—or dare I say bilocation?—he is in art, letters, and life a consummate flowering of the dilettante.