"I die," said the king, "without knowing the history of mankind."
"Not so, sire," answered the aged man of learning; "I can compress it for you into three words: They were born, suffered, and died."
We see how it is that France, in spite of his great gifts as an investigator, has not become a historian, but a novelist and story-writer.
He is not, however, so pessimistic as we might conclude from the closing words of his fable. The human beings whom he describes have pleasures as well as pains, and he invariably advocates pleasure as superior to every kind of abnegation of nature, and combats the theory that there is good in suffering.
But this scepticism with regard to history is typical of his sceptical spirit generally.
The danger of extreme intellectual refinement is that it disposes to doubt. The interest in humanity of the man who sees the many-sidedness of everything is apt to be swallowed up in contempt for humanity. And once this has happened he is quite likely, from sheer pessimistic reasonableness, to become the supporter of high-handed tyranny.
France has run this danger. Ten years ago it seemed as if the course of his development were quite as likely to lead him, practically, to reaction as to Radicalism.
When Abel Herman's book, Le Cavalier Miserey, a military novel of some ability which criticised the army, was forbidden to soldiers, France wrote: "I know only a few lines of the famous order of the day published by the colonel of the Twelfth Regiment of Chasseurs at Rouen. They are as follows: 'Every copy of Le Cavalier Miserey which is confiscated shall be burned on the dunghill, and every soldier in whose possession a copy is found shall be punished with imprisonment.' It is not a particularly elegant sentence, and yet I would rather have written it than the four hundred pages of the novel."
It was a crime in those days to utter a word against the army. Those who know what France has written about it since, know what a change has taken place in his views.
When the crisis came, it showed that in this man dwelt not merely, as in certain others, intellect and ability, but a determined will, and that in his inmost soul he was not such a doubter but that he had preserved one belief and one enthusiasm—belief in the justification of the great spiritual revolt of the eighteenth century, and enthusiasm for it.