“How is that?” asked old Maël.
“By setting bounds to their fields. That is the origin of all government. Your penguins, O Master, are performing the most august of functions. Throughout the ages their work will be consecrated by lawyers, and magistrates will confirm it.”
“Penguin Island” was published in 1908; and then came the war, and this elderly antiquarian—he was seventy then—came forward and enlisted to fight for his country. But that did not mean, as with many others of lesser judgment, that he gave up his hopes for the working class, and surrendered to the propaganda of capitalist nationalism. We find him at the age of seventy-five, carrying a red flag in a procession of French radicals, protesting against the acquittal of the assassin of Jaurès. We find him ready to break an engagement to a literary banquet in order to address a working-class meeting in protest against capitalist church and state. He, the greatest of all the Immortals, sets himself against the other thirty-nine; he, the old man, sets himself against the cultured youth of his country, who have abandoned themselves to a mixture of Catholic mysticism with homosexuality, of Dadaist imbecility with athleticism having for its goal the turning of machine-guns upon the workers.
The books of Anatole France afford a curious study of struggle between the old pessimistic, cynical culture of capitalism and the new creative culture of the awakening proletariat. These cultures are absolutely irreconcilable, but Anatole France believed in both. He was a social revolutionist with his conscious mind and judgment, while he remained a fatalist and a scoffer with his hereditary culture, that ancient accumulation of despair and terror which he had breathed in with the dust in his father’s old book-shop.
So he writes “The Gods Are Athirst,” in which he portrays mankind as given up to endless misery and destruction; or “The Revolt of the Angels,” in which again the heavens are drowned in blood and there is no hope. After which he issues a manifesto upholding Russia, or calling upon the workers to rally to the Third International. He goes before a convention of the organized teachers of France, and delivers to them an address of such magnificent eloquence as to move the assemblage to tears. I have quoted from this address in “The Goslings”; I repeat one paragraph—because it is the duty of a writer to spread these words on every possible occasion, to bring to the great master the help upon which he relies:
Reason, wisdom, intelligence, forces of the mind and heart, whom I have always devoutly invoked, come to me, aid me, sustain my feeble voice; carry it, if that may be, to all the peoples of the world, and diffuse it everywhere where there are men of good will to hear the beneficent truth! A new order of things is born. The powers of evil die, poisoned by their crime. The greedy and the cruel, the devourers of peoples, are bursting with an indigestion of blood. However sorely stricken by the sins of their blind or corrupt masters, mutilated, decimated, the proletarians remain erect; they will unite to form one universal proletariat, and we shall see fulfilled the great Socialist prophecy: “The union of the workers will be the peace of the world.”
It was interesting to note, in the obituaries which the death of Anatole France brought forth, how almost universally this aspect of his life was glossed over. Our literary reviews told all about him as a master of French prose, a supreme ironist in the tradition of Rabelais, Voltaire, and Renan. But they left it for the radical papers to celebrate Anatole France, the crusader, the carrier of the red flag. I am urged to believe that our literary Tories are honest, but all this moves me to wonder.
I ask them, once for all, what is it they want? What proof will content our cultural stand-patters? Here is their crowned favorite, their revered master, the man who was as witty as it is possible for a human being to be; and he sets out to prove to them that it is just as easy to be witty in the service of Justice as in the service of Mammon. I ask you, gentlemen of letters, do you know how a sentence can be wittier than this: “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.”