Not-withstanding their loose construction, they are never inchoate. That the ideas put forth may astound by their perversity, their novelty, their nihilism, their note of cosmic pessimism, is not to be denied. Our earth, "a miserable small star," is a drop of mud swimming in space, its inhabitants mere specks, whose doings are not of importance in the larger curves of the universe's destiny. Every illustration, geological, astronomical, and mathematical, is brought to bear upon this thesis—the littleness of man and the uselessness of his existence. But France loves this harassed animal, man, and never fails to show his love. Interspersed with moralising are recitals of rare beauty, Gallion and Par la Porte de Corne ou par la Porte d'Ivoire. Here the classic scholar, that is the base of France's temperament, fairly shines.
In the four volumes of Histoire Contemporaine we meet a new Anatole France, one who has deserted his old attitude of Parnassian impassibility for a suave anarchism, one who enters the arena of contemporaneous life bent on slaughter, though his weapon is the keen blade, never the rude battle-axe of polemics. It is his first venture in the fiction of sociology; properly speaking, it is the psychology of the masses, not exactly as Paul Adam handles it in his striking and tempestuous Les Lions (a book Balzacian in its fury of execution), but with the graver temper of the philosopher. He paints for us a provincial university town with its intrigues, religious, political, and social. The first of the series is L'Orme du Mail; follow Le Mannequin d'Osier, L'Anneau d'Améthyste, and Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901). The loop that ensnares this quartet of novels is the simple motive of ecclesiastical ambition. Not since Ferdinand Fabre's L'Abbé Tigrane has French literature had such portraits of the priesthood; Zola's ecclesiastics are ill-natured caricatures. The Cardinal Archbishop, Abbé Lataigne, and the lifelike Abbé Guitrel, with the silent, though none the less desperate, fight for the vacant bishopric of Turcoing—these are the three men who with Bergeret carry the story on their shoulders. About them circle the entire diocese and the tepid life of a university town. Yet anything further from melodramatic machinations cannot be imagined. Even the clerics of Balzac seem exaggerated in comparison. The protagonist is a professor, a master of conference of the University Faculty, a worthy man and earnest, though by no means of an exalted talent. He has the misfortune of being married to a worldly woman who does not attempt to understand him, much less to love him. She deceives him. The discovery of this deceit is an episode the most curious in fiction. It would be diverting if it were not painful. It reveals in Bergeret the preponderance of the man of thought over the man of action. His pupil and false friend is a classical scholar, therefore the affair might have been worse! And he is given the scholar's excuse as a plea for forgiveness! But hesitating as appears Bergeret, he utilises his wife's treachery as a springboard from which to fly his miserable household. Henceforth, with his devoted sister and daughter, he philosophises at ease and becomes a Dreyfusard. His dog Riquet is the recipient of his deepest thoughts. His monologues in the presence of this animal are the best in the book.
There are many characters in this serene and bitter tragi-comedy. A contempt, almost monastic, peeps out in the treatment of his women. They are often detestable. They behave as if an empire was at stake, though it is only a conspiracy whereby Abbé Guitrel is made Bishop of Turcoing. France always displays more pity for the frankly sinful woman than for the frivolous woman of fashion. There is also a subplot, the effort of a young Hebrew snob, Bonmont by name (Guttenberg, originally), to get into the exclusive hunting set of the Duc de Brécé. This hunt-button wins for the diplomatic Abbé Guitrel his coveted see. M. France is unequalled in his portrayal of the modern French-Hebrew millionaire, the Wallsteins and Bonmonts. He draws them without parti-pris. His prefect, the easy-going, cynical Worms-Clavelin, with his secret contempt of Jews and Gentiles alike, and his wife who collects ecclesiastical bric-à-brac, are executed by a great painter of character. He exposes with merciless impartiality a mob of men and women in high life. But his aristocrats are no better than his ecclesiastics or bankers. There is a comic Orléanist conspiracy. There are happenings that set your hair on end, and a cynicism at times which forces one to regret that the author left his study to mingle with the world. Nor is the strain relieved when poor Bergeret goes to Paris; there he is enmeshed by the Dreyfus party. There he comes upon stormy days, though high ideals never desert him. He is as placid in the face of contemptuous epithets and opprobrious newspaper attacks as he was calm when stones were hurled at his windows in the provinces. A man obsessed by general ideas, he is lovable and never a bore, though M. Faguet and several other critics have cried him stupid. In the "fire of the footlights" M. Bergeret pales. For the drama M. France has no particular voice, though he has written several charming playlets. Even the superior acting of Guitry could not make of Crainquibille much more than a touching episode.
There is enough characterisation and incident in Histoire Contemporaine to ballast a half-dozen novelists with material. And there are treasures of humour and pathos. The success of the series has been awe-inspiring; indeed, awe-inspiring is the success of all the France books, and at a time when Parisian prophets of woe are lamenting the decline of literature. Nevertheless, here is a man who writes like an artist, whose work, web and woof, is literature, whose themes, with few exceptions, are not of the popular kind, whose politics are violently opposed to current superstition, whose very form is hybrid; yet he sells, and has sold, in the hundreds of thousands. Literature cannot be called moribund in the face of such a result. His is a case that sets one speculating without undue emphasis upon a certain superiority of French taste over English in the matter of fiction.
The Life of Jeanne d'Arc (1908), a work of scholarship and mixed prejudices, does not, I am forced to admit, unduly interest me. Whether the astonishing statements set forth therein are true is a question that may concern Mr. Lang, but hardly the lovers of the real Anatole. The Isle of Penguins (1908) gave him back to us in all his original glory.
An art, ironical, easy, fugitive, divinely untrammelled, divinely artificial, which, like a pure flame, blazes forth in an unclouded heaven ... la gay a scienza; light feet; wit; fire; grace; the dance of the stars; the tremor of southern light; the smooth sea—these Nietzschean phrases might serve as an epigraph for the work of that apostle of innocence and experience, Anatole France.