We writers of England are not so much a body of writers as a cloud; we have no Academy to represent us, and no acknowledged head, and so almost by chance it falls to me, as it might have fallen to others more distinguished and deserving, to tell you of your place in the hearts and minds of the English-speaking world. All of us who can do so read you in your inimitable French, but it may not be amiss to say a word or two of the readers you have outside the community of French readers, outside that great cosmopolitan France of the mind. You have been, I think, almost completely translated into English, and in England and America there are scores of thousands who know you only in your English guise. All translations are made at a loss, but most of your translators have served you honestly and some have served you well, and you are so rich that you can pay the high tariff between our languages and still carry over enough to entrance and win fine minds. All the cultured and successful people of the world know you by necessity, and send homage to you. But I think I understand you well enough to be assured that even more than such salutations you will value the fact that there are miner lads in Scotland, railway workers in England, London clerks, and provincial shopmen, who know no more than a few hundred words of French, and yet whose faces flush and brighten at your name, workers struggling against a thousand disadvantages to possess their souls, to whom you have brought the priceless gifts of happiness and release and inspiration. I wish I could steal and send you a well-thumbed copy of an English translation of Thaïs or L’Isle des Penguins from the shelves of some English public library in evidence of this outer empire of your mind.
As spokesman for your English-speaking readers, it is natural for me to dwell upon the ease with which you wear an English costume. In many respects you are intensely French: French after the manner of the greatness of France, the France of liberty, equality, and world fraternity. But you transcend all narrow and nationalist limitations. In the past, before the great wars of the Napoleonic period, the English and French had not that sense of difference, that disposition to antagonistic contrasts, too frequently evident to-day. Intellectually our communities were more closely interwoven. Men remembered then how the Normans linked us; how Burgundian and Englishman were sturdy allies; how Briton and Breton had a common past, and how close were Frank and Fleming to the Anglo-Saxon stock. We Normans and Saxons and Franks and Flemings and Scots and Burgundians and Gascons and Angevins built our Gothic cathedrals in brotherly competition, and our knights and bowmen and princes and bishops bickered and went to and fro. Our literatures sprang from common roots and intertwined, and were continually grafted and regrafted one upon the other. No Englishman finds anything essentially foreign in Rabelais and Montaigne; they are in the same company as Swift and Sterne, as to-day Voltaire almost lives again in Shaw. Such contemporary English writers as Belloc and Chesterton would be seen plainly for Frenchmen if they wrote in French. And we do not find in you anything foreign to our spirit and our humour. Our response to you is a kindred response. You probably have far more imitators in Britain and America than you have in all the Latin countries of the world. Some of the most promising of the newer American writers are clearly indebted to you. There are many of us writers of English—and some of these not the least among us—to whom it would be the sweetest praise to be likened to Anatole France. In the end it may be found that you have exerted an influence upon our English literature even greater than that influence upon your own. We are not intruders, therefore, not foreign admirers and outsiders, at these birthday celebrations. We English writers are here of right, and because we are akin to you and within the realm of your thought and power.
XXXIII
THE EUROPEAN KALEIDOSCOPE: THE GERMAN WILL IN DEFAULT
23.4.24
I was in Paris the other day when M. Poincaré reconstructed his Government, and I heard him make his declaration of policy to the Chamber of Deputies. I had never seen him before. It was a dramatic and amusing occasion, and I conceived for M. Poincaré the same sort of warm and hostile affection that I have for Mr. Winston Churchill and Mr. Lloyd George. He is an entirely delightful personality; he has all the charm—and much of the appearance—of a wiry-haired terrier. He even barks.
The Chamber of Deputies is in a semi-circle like a Roman theatre; there is none of the waste and confusion of effect one gets in the Gothic oblong at Westminster. The public was present by ticket; it sat in a semi-circle of little boxes within nodding distance of the deputies—and mostly it was ladies and very well dressed. High up over it all and facing it all sat M. François Arago, like a finite and protesting deity, with his recording angels behind him and a large bell convenient for his hand. Beneath him was the rostrum from which one addresses the house, and then a lower rank of reporters. But there was no beam of limelight. The political world has still to discover limelight. It is extraordinary how slow all legislative assemblies are in adopting modern conveniences. A beam of limelight would be excellent at Westminster to indicate the direction of the Speaker’s eye.
M. Poincaré read out his intentions in a hard, very audible voice. His opening sentences went to much applause and interruption. The chief scene came when, enumerating the ways in which France proposed to restore and preserve her solvency, he referred to an intensive exploitation of her colonies. “Our colonial policy,” said he. “Sarraut!” cried the Left—a fine, wolf-like sound. “Our colonial policy!” said M. Poincaré with increasing firmness. “Sarraut!” “Our colonial policy,” M. Poincaré repeated, in small capitals, so to speak. “Sarraut!” much louder—the Left enjoying itself. M. Poincaré brought up unexpected vocal resources. After five—or was it six?—repetitions, honour was satisfied and the statement went on.
In the horrible language of English political discussion, M. Poincaré is attempting to “dish” the Left. He was trying to make his policy look as “Left” as possible, while still remaining the same inflexible person as ever. He had thrown over various associates from the Right and brought in reasonable men from the Left Centre to liberalise the effect of his reconstituted Government. He was prepared to be generous to Germany provided she paid the uttermost farthing. He was prepared to seem to come out of the Ruhr, while in reality sticking there. He spoke hopefully and brightly and emptily of the League of Nations.
That is the quality of the new phase. M. Poincaré is talking as liberally as he can. He exchanges compliments and large liberal gestures with Mr. Ramsay MacDonald; neither of them meaning anything whatever, except a desire to pass the time and be in the fashion. It is the change in the fashion that should interest the student of affairs. M. Poincaré is getting ready for the elections in May, and his proceedings betray his consciousness of the deep strong movement of French thought and intention leftward, away from adventure and nationalism and militarism, towards—sanity. In spite of a systematically perverted news service and many provocations and natural fears, the mind of France is becoming powerfully reasonable. It thinks less and less of glory and more and more of solvency. It is more open to-day to ideas of reconciliation, disarmament, and organised international co-operation than it has been at any time since the war.
M. Poincaré has been superficially dexterous, his majority is beautifully restored, but France and all the world know him for an honest obdurate man. I doubt if he will come back after the elections. M. Millerand has seemed to threaten a dictatorship if the Poincaré policy is defeated. Is France so Latin as to stand that? I think M. Millerand will be better advised to try a resignation. For the recent credit given to France to support the franc is probably the end of French borrowing power, and a defeat of the Left by fraud or violence—a cessation of the movement towards reason and disarmament—means a withdrawal of foreign confidence and a swift and sure financial collapse.