Among the wise men whom they will surely most frequent will be Anatole France. His company is constant; his attitude durable. There is no undertone of anguish in his work like that which gives such poignant and haunting beauty to Tchehov. He has never suffered himself to be so involved in life as to be maimed by it. But the price he has paid for his safety has been a renunciation of experience. Only by being involved in life, perhaps only by being maimed by it, could he have gained that bitterness of knowledge which is the enemy of wisdom. Not that Anatole France made a deliberate renunciation: no man of his humanity would of his own will turn aside. It was instinct which guided him into a sequestered path, which ran equably by the side of the road of alternate exaltation and catastrophe which other men of equal genius must travel. Therefore he has seen men as it were in profile against the sky, but never face to face. Their runnings, their stumblings and their gesticulations are a tumultuous portion of the landscape rather than symbols of an intimate and personal possibility. They lend a baroque enchantment to the scene.
So it is that in all the characters of Anatole France’s work which are not closely modelled upon his own idiosyncrasy there is something of the marionette. They are not the less charming for that; nor do they lack a certain logic, but it is not the logic of personality. They are embodied comments upon life, but they do not live. And there is for Anatole France, while he creates them, and for us, while we read about them, no reason why they should live. For living, in the accepted sense, is an activity impossible without indulging many illusions; and fervently to sympathise with characters engaged in the activity demands that their author should participate in the illusions. He, too, must be surprised at the disaster which he himself has proved inevitable. It is not enough that he should pity them; he must share in their effort, and be discomfited at their discomfiture.
Such exercises of the soul are impossible to a real acquiescence, which cannot even permit itself the inspiration of the final illusion that the wreck of human hopes, being ordained, is beautiful. The man who acquiesces is condemned to stand apart and contemplate a puppet-show with which he can never really sympathise.
‘De toutes les définitions de l’homme la plus mauvaise me paraît celle qui en fait un animal raisonnable. Je ne me vante pas excessivement en me donnant pour doué de plus de raison que la plupart de ceux de mes semblables que j’ai vus de près ou dont j’ai connu l’histoire. La raison habite rarement les âmes communes, et bien plus rarement encore les grands esprits…. J’appelle raisonnable celui qui accorde sa raison particulière avec la raison universelle, de manière à n’être jamais trop surpris de ce qui arrive et à s’y accommoder tant bien que mal; j’appelle raisonnable celui qui, observant le désordre de la nature et la folie humaine, ne s’obstine point à y voir de l’ordre et de la sagesse; j’appelle raisonnable enfin celui qui ne s’efforce pas de l’être.’
The chasm between living and being wise (which is to be raisonnable) is manifest. The condition of living is to be perpetually surprised, incessantly indignant or exultant, at what happens. To bridge the chasm there is for the wise man only one way. He must cast back in his memory to the time when he, too, was surprised and indignant. No man is, after all, born wise, though he may be born with an instinct for wisdom. Thus Anatole France touches us most nearly when he describes his childhood. The innocent, wayward, positive, romantic little Pierre Nozière is a human being to a degree to which no other figures in the master’s comedy of unreason are. And it is evident that Anatole France himself finds him by far the most attractive of them all. He can almost persuade himself, at moments, that he still is the child he was, as in the exquisite story of how, when he had been to a truly royal chocolate shop, he attempted to reproduce its splendours in play. At one point his invention and his memory failed him, and he turned to his mother to ask: ‘Est-ce celui qui vend ou celui qui achète qui donne de l’argent?’
‘Je ne devais jamais connaître le prix de l’argent. Tel j’étais à trois ans ou trois ans et demi dans le cabinet tapissé de boutons de roses, tel je restai jusqu’à la vieillesse, qui m’est légère, comme elle l’est à toutes les âmes exemptes d’avarice et d’orgueil. Non, maman, je n’ai jamais connu le prix de l’argent. Je ne le connais pas encore, ou plutôt je le connais trop bien.’
[Footnote 4: Le Petit Pierre. Par Anatole France. (Paris:
Calmann-Lévy.)]
To know a thing too well is by worlds removed from not to know it at all, and Anatole France does not elsewhere similarly attempt to indulge the illusion of unbroken innocence. He who refused to put a mark of interrogation after ‘What is God,’ in defiance of his mother, because he knew, now has to restrain himself from putting one after everything he writes or thinks. ‘Ma pauvre mère, si elle vivait, me dirait peut-être que maintenant j’en mets trop.’ Yes, Anatole France is wise, and far removed from childish follies. And, perhaps, it is precisely because of his wisdom that he can so exactly discern the enchantment of his childhood. So few men grow up. The majority remain hobbledehoys throughout life; all the disabilities and none of the unique capacities of childhood remain. There are a few who, in spite of all experience, retain both; they are the poets and the grands esprits. There are fewer still who learn utterly to renounce childish things; and they are the wise men.
‘Je suis une autre personne que l’enfant dont je parle. Nous n’avons plus en commun, lui et moi, un atome de substance ni de pensée. Maintenant qu’il m’est devenu tout à fait étranger, je puis en sa compagnie me distraire de la mienne. Je l’aime, moi qui ne m’aime ni ne me haïs. Il m’est doux de vivre en pensée les jours qu’il vivait et je souffre de respirer l’air du temps où nous sommes.’
Not otherwise is it with us and Anatole France. We may have little in common with his thought — the community we often imagine comes of self-deception — but it is sweet for us to inhabit his mind for a while. His touch is potent to soothe our fitful fevers.
APRIL, 1919.
ANATOLE FRANCE by George Brandes
The true author is recognisable by the existence on every page of his works of at least one sentence or one phrase which none but he could have written.
Take the following sentence: “If we may believe this amiable shepherd of souls, it is impossible for us to elude divine mercy, and we shall all enter Paradise — unless, indeed, there be no Paradise, which is exceedingly probable.” It treats of Renan. It must be written by a disciple of Renan’s, whose humour perhaps allows itself a little more licence than the master’s. More we cannot say.
But take this: “She was the widow of four husbands, a dreadful woman, suspected of everything except of having loved — consequently honoured and respected.” There is only one man who can have written this. It jestingly indicates the fact that society forgives woman everything except a passion, and communicates this observation to the reader, as it were with a gentle nudge.
Or take the following: “We should not love nature, for she is not lovable; but neither should we hate her, for she is not deserving of hatred. She is everything. It is very difficult to be everything. It results in terrible heavy-handedness and awkwardness.”
There is only one man who would excuse Nature for her indifference to us human beings in these words: “It is very difficult to be everything.”
Read this passage: “It is a great infirmity to think. God preserve you from it, my son, as He has preserved His greatest saints and the souls whom He loves with especial tenderness and destines to eternal felicity.”
It is an Abbé who speaks thus, and who speaks without a trace of irony. One is conscious of the author’s smile behind the Abbe’s seriousness.
Few are so pithy in their irony as France. He says: “Cicero was in politics a Moderate of the most violent description.”
Few are so picturesque in their satire as he. Others have used the phrase: Equality before the law — that means equality before the laws which the well-to-do have made for the poor, and men for women. Others have maintained that
the ideal of justice would be an inequality before the law adjusted to the differences between individuals. Others have said: If there is inequality in law itself, where is equality to be found?
But there is only one man who can have written: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”
This one man is Anatole France. Most noticeable in this style is its irony; it stamps him as a spiritual descendant of Renan. But in spite of the relationship, France’s irony is of a very different description from Renan’s. Renan, as historian or critic, always speaks in his own name, and we are directly conscious of himself in the fictitious personages of his philosophic dramas, and even more so in those of his philosophic dialogues. France’s irony conceals itself beneath naïveté. Renan disguises himself, France transforms himself. He writes from standpoints which are directly the opposite of his own — primitive Christian, or mediæval Catholic — and through what is said we apprehend what he means. Other writers may be as witty, may be or appear as delicately ironical — they still do not resemble him. If we enter the dépôt of some famous china manufactory with a piece of china from some other factory, as faultless and as beautiful in colour as those by which we are surrounded, the saleswoman takes it into her hand, looks at it, and says: “The paste is different.”
In France’s case we may search long for paste of the same quality as that which he has succeeded in producing after thirty-six years of labour.
Anatole France is no longer young, but his celebrity is of comparatively recent date. On April 16, 1904, he completed his sixtieth year, but only for the last eleven years has he really been famous.
He began as quite a young man to write literary and historical essays and tasteful poems, but he was thirty-seven when he first attracted attention by his simple tale, Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard, and it was not until 1892-93 that he gave proof of his originality.
His remaining so long in the shade is attributable in the first place to the tardy development of his complete individuality. He had not the courage to be completely himself; encouragement from without was necessary to him.
Another reason for it was the occupation of the foreground by great novelists who have now disappeared, story-tellers like Maupassant, Daudet, Zola; and yet another, that men of talent such as Bourget and Huysmans had not yet gone over to clericalism, or Jules Lemaître to nationalism, or Hervieu to the theatre. More-over — and this of prime importance — the great artist in style whose heir he is, Ernest Renan, was still with us.
Not until the acute sceptic and enthusiastically pious thinker in whose footsteps he trod, and those luxuriantly fertile authors whose books excited most attention had passed away, was the space round that tree of knowledge which Anatole France had planted sufficiently cleared to allow the sunlight to fall upon it and the tree to become visible from every side.
Those other Frenchmen were all born in the provinces — Daudet and Zola in Provence, Maupassant in Normandy, Renan in Brittany, Hervieu at Neuilly, Bourget at Amiens; Huysmans is of Flemish descent. France, who is cast in softer mould, and from the very beginning showed himself to be less sturdy than the Provençals and Normans, is a Parisian born, and bears the genuine Parisian stamp.
His master, Renan, did not become a Parisian until towards the close of his life, until he had lost the Breton stamp, and ceased to be a pupil of the Germans. France was a Parisian from the beginning.
The light and air of Paris were his native atmosphere, the Luxembourg Gardens were to him French nature, and the street was his school. As a child he watched the dairy-girls carrying milk and the coal-heavers coals into all the houses of the Quartier Latin. He knows the Parisian artisan and small shopkeeper well.
The windows of the stationers’ shops riveted his attention with their pictures, and his first instruction was received in turning over the leaves of the books in the boxes of the poor salesmen on the Seine quays.
He himself was the son of a poor bookseller, or rather bookseller’s assistant. He was born in a book-shop, and brought up amongst old, wise books, mysterious reminders of a life which was no more. From them he learned how ephemeral existence is, how little of the work of any generation survives; and this has inspired him with a fund of sadness, gentleness, and compassion.
It is extraordinary how many small book-shops he has described, in Paris and elsewhere — their books, their frequenters, the conversations held in them. Again and ever again does he occupy himself with these worthy booksellers on the banks of the Seine (who now look upon him as their guardian spirit), with their wretched life, as they stand there in the cold and rain, seldom selling anything.
We, to whom not one of the Frenchmen of to-day seems so French as Anatole France — for he embodies in himself the whole national tradition, descending from the romance-writers of the Middle Ages through Montaigne to Voltaire — we are not surprised that he should have boldly assumed the name of his country in place of his own. France, however, was also the Christian name of his unassuming father — he was France Thibaut. But to the humble people of the street in which he lives, the little Allée Villa Said, the author is not France; they call him Monsieur Anatole.
The streets by the Seine are always in his mind. He says somewhere: “I was brought up on this Quai, amongst books, by humble, simple people, whom I alone remember. When I am no more it will be as if they had never existed.”
Elsewhere he calls these river-side streets the adopted country of all men of intellect and taste.
And in a third place he writes: “I was brought up on the quays, where the old books form part of the landscape. The Seine was my delight.... I admired the river, which by day mirrored the sky and bore boats on its breast, by night decked itself with jewels and sparkling flowers.”
A book-lover he was and is.
One of the first characteristics which strikes the reader of France’s works is this literary culture, unusual in a novelist and story-writer, and also its nature. Amongst French authors as a class we are accustomed to the unlearned, whose culture is restrictedly French, to the pupils of the Normal School, whose culture is one-sidedly classical, and to the learned, whose culture is European. But France’s is a wide, ample culture, gained in a Europe from which the Germanic nations are excluded. He knows neither English nor German. This is the chief difference between his culture and Renan’s. But the want is less felt in him than in others. Renan was the Oriental philologist. The Semitic languages were his field; his intellect had been nourished upon German science. What France is thoroughly at home in is Latin and Greek antiquity; but he is also well versed in the Latin and Italian literatures of the Middle Ages. Therefore he is, be it noted in passing, a keen supporter of classical school education. “I have,” he says somewhere, “a desperate attachment to Latin studies. Without them the beauty of the French genius would be gone. We are Latins. The milk of the she-wolf is the best part of our blood.”
He has made himself specially familiar with the age of ferment when Christianity was struggling with paganism in the ancient mind, with the Christian legends, which he retails with naïveté and well-concealed irony, and with Italian and even more particularly French history, from the days of Cæsar to the eighteenth century, the beginning of which lives in his Reine Pédauque.
His art occupies itself very frequently with religious feelings and situations. And here the contrast with Renan is strongest. For whereas Renan’s mind was always religiously disposed and his language often unctuous, France, in treating of religious subjects, in spite of apparent reverence, is as callous in his inmost soul as Voltaire.
To his pictures of the past have been added in the last stage of his development pictures drawn from the France of to-day, and portraits of personages who have as lately formed the subjects of conversation as Verlaine and Esterhazy.
It is not modern life, however, which he favours as author or man. One day, when a visitor to whom he was showing his bo
oks expressed surprise that there were so few, and apparently no modern works among them, France said: “I have no new books. I do not keep those which are sent me; I send them on to a friend in the country.” (The “friend in the country” was very probably a French euphemism for one of those booksellers on the Seine quays whom France knows so well.) “But do you not care to make acquaintance with them?” “My contemporaries No! What they can tell me I know quite as well myself. I learn more from Petronius than from Mendès.” It was, therefore, doubtless half unwillingly that France for several years undertook to discourse critically, in the feuilleton of the Temps, on the productions of his contemporaries. The four volumes in which he has collected his articles are, nevertheless, extremely interesting. In them, from beginning to end, he maintains that such a thing as pure, impersonal criticism is impossible, that the critic can never do anything but represent himself — that, consequently, when he speaks of Horace or Shakespeare it simply means that he is speaking, in connection with Horace or Shakespeare, of himself.
France, then, spoke always of himself. “I hope that when I speak of myself every one will think of himself.” As critic he communicated his personal impressions, and often related anecdotes, chiefly of occurrences during his own childhood and early youth, which elucidated and explained these impressions. A critic in the strict sense of the word he was not, and when his books began to sell better he gave up criticism. His utterances in the four volumes referred to are most characteristic of his personality, revealing, as they do, its spirit, its limitations, and its prejudices — prejudices which he has gradually outgrown.
The friend to whom France replied, “I have no modern books in my house,” asked, smiling: “Not even your own?” “No,” answered France; “what a man has built himself — even supposing it to be a palace — he knows so well that he cannot endure the sight of it. I could not bear to have my own books in my hands. Why should I look at them?”
Complete Works of Anatole France Page 481