Every religion, even the religion of sensation, becomes comic when the sharp salt breath of intellectual sanity ceases to blow upon it. Its votaries seem to be going to and fro wrapped in sheep’s wool. The wool may be stained in Tyrian dyes; but it is wool for all that, and it tends ultimately to impede the steps of the wearer and to dull not a few of his natural perceptions.
If one imagines a symposium in the Elysian fields between Wilde and Pater and d’Annunzio, and the sudden entrance upon them of the great Voltaire, one cannot but believe that after a very short time this religion of aestheticism would prove as tiresome to the old ribald champion of a free humanity as any other ritual.
And in this respect Anatole France is with Voltaire. He has too humorous a soul to endure the solemnity of the cultivated senses. He would desert such a group of pious subjectivists to chat with Horace about the scandals of the imperial court or with Rabelais about the price of sausages.
Sceptical in other matters, egoists of the type I have mentioned are inclined to grow unconscionably grave when questions of sex are brought forward. This illusion at any rate — the illusion of sexual attraction — they would be most loth to destroy.
But Anatole France fools sex without stint. It affords him, just as it did Voltaire and Rabelais, his finest opportunities. He fools it up hill and down dale. He shakes it, he trundles it, he rattles it, he bangs it, he thumps it, he tumbles it in the mud, in the sand, in the earth — just as Diogenes did with his most noble tub. Fooling sex is the grand game of Anatole France’s classic wit. The sport never wearies him. It seems an eternal perennial entertainment. Hardly one of his books but has this sex fooling as its principal theme.
It seems to his detached and speculative mind the most amusing and irresistible jest in the world that men and women should behave as they do; that matters should be arranged in just this manner.
What we arrive at once more in Anatole France is that humorous drawing back from the world, back into some high pitched observation-tower of the mind, from the philosophic seclusion of which the world scene can be easily imagined as different from what it is. Nothing is more salutary in the midst of the mad confusion of the world than these retirements. It is to no mere “ivory tower” of aesthetic superiority that we retreat. It is to a much higher and more spacious eminence. So high indeed do we withdraw that all the ivory towers of the world seem far beneath us; beneath us, and not more or less sacred than other secular erections.
It is from this point of observation that our humour is suddenly made aware of the startling absurdity of human institution; and not only of human institution; for it is made aware also of the absurdity of the whole fantastic scheme of this portentous universe. We regard the world in these high speculative moods much as children do when they suddenly enquire of their bewildered parents why it is that human beings have two legs and why it is that little girls are different from little boys.
It is one result of these withdrawings to the translunar empyrean that the life of a man of action upon this earth does not appear any more or any less remarkable or important than the life of a man of letters. All human activities from that celestial height are equal; and whether we plunge into politics or into pleasure, into science or into theology, seems a mere incidental chance, as indifferent in the great uncaring solar system as the movements of gnats around a lamp or midges around a candle.
The great historic revolutions, the great social reformations, ancient or modern, present themselves from this height as just as important — as just as unimportant — as the visions of saintly fanatics or the amours of besotted rakes.
Nothing is important and anything may be important. It is all a matter of the human point of view. It is all a matter of taste. Looking at the whole mad stream of things from this altitude, we see the world as if we were peering through an inverted telescope; or rather, shall we say, through an instrument called an “equi-scope” — whose peculiarity it is to make all things upon which it is turned little and equal.
The mental temper of Anatole France is essentially one which is interested in historic and contemporary events; interested in the outward actions and movements of men and in the fluctuations of political life. But it is interested in these things with a certain spacious reservation. It is interested in them simply because they are there, simply because they illustrate so ironically the weaknesses and caprices of human nature and the dramatic chances of ineluctable fate. It is not interested in them because they are inherently and absolutely important, but because they are important relatively and humorously as indicative of the absurd lengths to which human folly will go. It is interested in these things, as I have said, with an ample reservation, but it must emphatically be noted that it is a great deal more interested in them than in any works of art or letters or in any achievement of philosophy.
Anatole France seems indeed to take a certain delight in putting human thought into its place as essentially secondary and subordinate to human will. He delights to indicate, just as Montaigne used to do, the pathetic and laughable discrepancies between human thoughts and human actions.
He is more concerned with men and women as they actually live and move in the commerce of the world than in the wayward play of their speculative fancies, and it gives him an ironic satisfaction to show how the most heroic and ideal thoughts are affected by the little wanton tricks of circumstances and character.
This predominant concern with the natural humours and normal animal instincts of the human race, this refusal ever to leave the broad and beaten path of human frailty, gives a tone to his writings, even when he is dealing with art and literature, quite different from other aesthetes’.
He is not really an aesthete at all; he is too Voltairian for that. As a critic he is learned, scholarly, clear-sighted and acute; but his sense of the humorous inconsistencies of normal flesh and blood is too habitually present with him to admit of that complete abandonment to the spirit of his author, which, accompanied by interpretative subtlety, secures the most striking results.
His criticisms are wise and interesting, but they necessarily miss the sinuous clairvoyance of a writer like Remy de Gourmont who is able to give himself up completely and with no ironic reservation to the abnormalities of the temperament he is discussing. Remy de Gourmont’s own temperament has something in it more receptive, more psychological, more supple than Anatole France’s. He is in himself a far less original genius and for that very reason he can slide more reservedly into the bizarre nooks and crannies of abnormal minds.
Anatole France is one of those great men of genius to whom the gods have permitted an un-blurred vision of the eternal normalities of human weakness. This vision he can never forget. He takes his stand upon the ground which it covers, and from that ground he never deviates.
Man for him is always an amorous and fantastic animal, using his reason to justify his passions, and his imagination to justify his illusions. He is always the animal who can laugh, the animal who can cry, the animal who can beget or bear children. He is only in a quite secondary sense the animal who can philosophise.
It is because of his constant preoccupation with the normal eccentricities and pathetic follies of our race that he lays so much stress upon outward action.
The normal man is rather an animal who wills and acts than an animal who dreams and thinks; and it is with willing and acting, rather than with dreaming and thinking, that Anatole France is concerned. One of the main ironic devices of his humour is to show the active animal led astray by his illusions, and the contemplative animal driven into absurdity by his will.
With his outward-looking gaze fixed upon the eternal and pathetic normalities of the human situation, Anatole France has himself, like Voltaire, a constant tendency to gravitate towards politics and public affairs.
In this respect his temperament is most obstinately classical. Like Horace and all the ancient satirists, he feels himself invincibly attracted to “affairs of state,” even while they excite his derisio
n. One cannot read a page of his writing without becoming aware that one is in the presence of a mind cast in the true classic mould.
In the manner of the great classical writers of Athens and Rome he holds himself back from any emotional betrayal of his own feelings. He is the type of character most entirely opposite to what might be called the Rousseau-type.
He is un-modern in this and quite alone; for, in one form or another, the Rousseau-type with its enthusiastic neurotic mania for self-revelation dominates the entire literary field. One gets the impression of something massive and self-possessed, something serenely and almost inhumanly sane about him. One feels always that he is the “Grand Gentleman” of literature with whom no liberties may be taken. His tone is quiet, his manner equable, his air smiling, urbane, superior. His reserve is the reserve of the great races of antiquity. With a calm, inscrutable, benevolent malice, he looks out upon the world. There is a sense of much withheld, much unsaid, much that nothing would ever induce him to say.
His point of view is always objective. It might be maintained, though the thing sounds like a paradox, that his very temperament is objective. Certainly it is a temperament averse to any outbursts of unbalanced enthusiasm.
His attitude toward what we call Nature is more classical than the classics. Virgil shows more vibrant emotion in the presence of the sublimities of the natural elements. His manner when dealing with the inanimate world is the manner of the Eighteenth Century touched with a certain airiness and charm that is perhaps more Hellenic than Latin. As one reads him one almost feels as though the human race detached itself from its surroundings and put between itself and Nature a certain clear and airy space, untroubled by any magnetic currents of spiritual reciprocity. One feels as though Nature were kept decisively and formally in her place and not permitted to obtrude herself upon the consciousness of civilised people except when they require some pleasant lawn or noble trees or smiling garden of roses to serve as a background for their metaphysical discussions or their wanton amorous play. What we have come to call the “magic” of Nature is never for a moment allowed to interrupt these self-possessed epicurean arguments of statesmen, politicians, amorists, theologians, philosophers and proconsuls.
Individual objects in Nature — a tree, a brook, the seashore, a bunch of flowers, a glade in the forest, a terrace in a garden, — are described in that clear, laconic, objective manner, which gives one the impression of being able to touch the thing in question with one’s bare hand.
The plastic and tactile value of things is always indicated in Anatole France’s writings with brief, clear cut, decisive touches, but “the murmurs and scents” of the great waters, the silences of the shadowy forests are not allowed to cross the threshold of his garden of Epicurus. Each single petal of a rose will have its curves, its colours, its tints; but the mysterious forces of subterranean life which bring the thing to birth are pushed back into the darkness. The marble-cold resistance of Anatole France’s classical mind offers a hard polished surface against which the vague elemental energies of the world beat in vain. He walks smilingly and pensively among the olive-trees of the Academia, plucking a rose here and an oleander there; but for the rest, the solemn wizardries of Nature are regarded with an urbane contempt.
His style is a thing over which the fastidious lovers of human language may ponder long and deep. The art of it is so restrained, so aristocratic, so exclusive, that even the smallest, simplest, most unimportant words take to themselves an emphatic significance.
Anatole France is able to tell us that Monsieur Bergeret made some naive remark, or the Abbé Jérôme Coignard uttered some unctuous sally, in so large and deliberate and courtly a way that the mere “he said” or “he began” falls upon us like a papal benediction or like the gesture of a benignant monarch.
There is no style in the world so deeply penetrated with the odour and savour of its author’s philosophy. And this philosophy, this atmosphere of mind, is so entirely French that every least idiomatic peculiarity in his native tongue seems willing to lend itself, to the last generous drop of the wine of its essential soul, to the tone and manner of his speech. All the refinements of the most consummate civilisation in the world, all its airy cynicism, all its laughing urbanity, all its whimsical friendliness, seem to concentrate themselves and reach their climax on every page of his books.
A delicate odour of incense and mockery, an odour of consecrated wine and a savour of heathen wit, rise up together from every sentence and disarm us with the insidiousness of their pleasant contrast. His style is so beautiful and characteristic that one cannot read the simplest passage of easy narration from his pen without becoming penetrated with his spirit, without feeling saner, wiser, kindlier, and more disenchanted and more humane.
I cannot resist quoting from the prologue to “Le Puits de Sainte Claire,” a certain passage which seems to me peculiarly adapted to the illustration of what I have just said. The writer is, or imagines himself to be, in the city of Siena.
“Sur la voie blanche, dans ces nuits transparentes, la seule recontre que je faisais était celle du R. P. Adone Doni, qui alors travaillait comme moi tout le jour dans l’ancienne académie degli Intronati. J’avais tout de suite aimé ce cordelier qui, blanchi dans l’étude, gardait l’humeur riante et facile d’un ignorant.
“Il causait volontiers. Je goûtais son parler suave, son beau langage, sa pensee docte et naïve, son air de vieux Silène purifié par les eaux baptismales, son instinct de mime accompli, le jeu de ses passions vives et fines, le génie étrange et charmant dont il etait possédé.
“Assidu à la bibliothèque, il fréquentait aussi le marché, s’arrêtant de préférence devant les contadines, qui vendent des pommes d’or, et prêtant l’oreille à leur libres propos.
Il apprenait d’elles, disait-il, la belle langue toscane. . . . Je crus m’aperçevoir en effet qu’il inclinait aux opinions singulières. Il avait de la religion et de la science, mais non sans bizarreries. . . . C’est sur le diable qu’il professait des opinions singulières. Il pensait que le diable était mauvais sans l’être absolument et que son imperfection naturelle l’empêcherait toujours d’atteindre à la perfection du mal. Il croyait aperçevoir quelques signes de bonté dans les actions obscures de Satan, et, sans trop l’oser dire, il en augurait la rédemption finale de l’archange méditatif, après la consommation des siècles. . . . Assis sur la margelle, les mains dans les manches de sa robe, il contemplait avec un paisible etonnement les choses de la nuit.
“Et l’ombre qui l’enveloppait laissait deviner encore dans ses yeux clairs et sur sa face camuse l’expressions d’audace craintive et de grâce moqueuse qui y etait profondement empreinte. Nous échangions d’abord des souhaits solennels de bonne santé, de paix et de contentement. . . .
“Tandis qu’il parlait, la lumiere de la lune coulait sur sa barbe en ruisseau d’argent. Le grillon accompagnait du bruissement de ses élytres la voix du conteur, et parfois, aux sons de cette bouche, d’où sortait le plus doux des langages humains, répondait la plainte flutée du crapaud, qui, de l’autre côté de la route, écoutait, amical et craintif.”
The beautiful delicacy of that single touch “sur la voie blanche, dans ces nuits transparentes” is characteristic of a thousand others of a similar kind sprinkled among his books, where gentle and whimsical spirits discourse upon God and the Universe.
He has a most exquisite genius for these little chance-accompaniments of such human scenes. “L’Orme du Mail” is full of them; and so is “Les Opinions de M. Jérôme Coignard.”
In “Sur la Pierre Blanche” the impish humour of accidental encounter brings forward nothing less than the death of Stephen the Proto-Martyr, as an irrelevant interruption to the amorous pleasures of one of his least attractive philosophers.
Full of malicious interest as he is in all the outward events of nations and societies, it is always evident that what Anatole France really regards as worthy of tender consideration is the conversation of quaint
minds and the “Humeur riante et facile” of wayward and fantastic souls.
His sense of the fundamental futility of the whole scheme of things is so absolute that what most modern writers would regard as the illogical dreams of superannuated eccentrics he is inclined to treat with smiling reverence and infinite sympathy. Where the whole terrestrial business is only a meaningless blur upon the face of nothingness, why should we not linger by the way, under elm trees, or upon broken fragments of old temples, or on sunny benches in cloistered gardens, and listen to the arbitrary fancies of unpractical and incompetent persons whose countenances express an “audace craintive” and a “grâce moqueuse,” and who look with mild wonder and peaceful astonishment at “les choses de la nuit”?
After perusing many volumes of Anatole France, one after another, we come to feel as though nothing in the world were important except the reading of unusual books, the conversation of unusual people, and the enjoyment of such philosophical pleasures as may be permitted by the gods and encouraged by the approbation of a friendly and tolerant conscience.
One always rises from the savouring of his excellent genius with a conviction that it is only the conversation of one’s friends, varied by such innocent pleasures of the senses as may be in harmony with the custom of one’s country, which renders in the last resort the madness of the world endurable.
He alone, of all modern writers, creates that leisurely atmosphere of noble and humorous dignity — familiar enough to lovers of the old masters — according to which every gesture and word of the most simple human being comes to be endowed with a kind of royal distinction. By the very presence in his thought of the essential meaninglessness of the world, he is enabled to throw into stronger relief the “quips and cranks and wanton wiles” of our pathetic humanity.
Human words — the words of the most crack-brained among us — take to themselves a weight and dignity from the presence behind them of this cosmic purposelessness. The less the universe matters, the more humanity matters. The less meaning there is in the macrocosm the more tenderly and humorously must every microcosm be treated.
Complete Works of Anatole France Page 479