V
THE CRAFTSMAN AND THE MAN
This may seem énorme and yet somehow it is not: Anatole France is not exactly a literary man. He is not a literary man in the sense of Flaubert or Turgenev, for he is not content with being the god in the machine, he is always allowing you to see him guiding it; indeed in most of his work he is the god in the car. That is probably why Anatole France has never adopted classical form. He appreciates it, and in the many critical articles he has written he has praised just those people whose form was perfect ... but it is the sick man, not the robust man admires health. There is not one of his novels properly holds together. I mean that there is not one that develops harmoniously the story of certain human beings in a given atmosphere. At times, for instance in the four volumes of Contemporary History, you have the sense of developing lives, and then Anatole France puts on somebody else’s coat, like Maître Jacques, transforms himself from coachman into cook, calls himself Bergeret or Bonnard, or, more audaciously, takes on the shape of Vence, the genial worldling, or of Dechartre, the passionate sculptor, and talks. As soon as that happens the novel is forgotten; Anatole France takes the reader by the hand and draws him away to pick intellectual primroses. A delightful exercise; only when hundreds of these primroses are picked you have forgotten the novel you deserted. I have mentioned already the incoherence of The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard. Then there is the famous Red Lily, which is supposed to be a love story; it is a love story of the most passionate kind, only it is so inextricably mixed up with mystical excursions by a vagabond, ragged poet, evidently modelled on Verlaine, with views on pictorial art by Vence and Dechartre, that, interested as one is all the time, one loses one’s sense of proportion. When the lovers meet in the beautiful Florentine pavilion one is never sure that theirs is a love feast: at any moment it may turn into an essay on the glazes of Botticelli. Anatole France must at one time have been conscious of this, for in one of his books, Histoire Comique, he made a great effort to tell the story of a little actress who threw over her actor lover for a young diplomat, and found after the suicide of the actor that never more could she come together with her new lover because in their tenderest moments she was haunted by the bloody spectre of the dead man. Histoire Comique is finely written, and in the best French literary style; it eloquently evokes the life of the French actress, so much on the edge of the demi-monde and now and then over the edge. It is almost as good as Les Petites Cardinal ... and then Anatole France spoils it. In comes Doctor Trublet, in other words Anatole France himself, talking about medicine, about morality, about faith, talking, everlastingly talking. Trublet talks delightfully, but while he talks one thinks of the pretty little actress in whom one had grown interested, and thinks: “Oh, dear old doctor, do stop talking; kisses, not words, shall win the prize.” But then Anatole France has never cared whether his ideas were relevant to the story; it has always been enough for him that they should be relevant to the temperament he sketches.
Perhaps for this reason, and it is an important observation if one is to judge Anatole France fairly, his characters are unusually living. People like Captain Victor, Tudesco, bombastic, ebullient, Falstaffian people, move in our midst. Their creator is always poking fun at them; persistently he erects Aunt Sallies and then throws bouquets at them. He teases them because he loves them. It should be observed, however, and I do not want to be ill-natured about it, that Anatole France never pokes fun at the characters that embody his own personality. Bergeret, the other nice old gentlemen, Vence, Dechartre, are never absurd; they are amiable, scholarly, tender, generous, and have a strong sense of humour. I do not say that Anatole France ought to see his ridiculous side; I do not see it myself, but it must be there. Only, and you must take my word for this without asking for evidence, it is not in the nature of any human being, save the Englishman, to “take himself off.” I have known a good many Frenchmen, Germans, Austrians, Spaniards, and have never found in any one of them a glimmer of self-deprecation: they were all supermen, and I expect were much the same before the birth of Nietzsche. Still, and I repeat that I do not want to be ill-natured about it, in spite of that little failing, it must be owned that this little band of incarnations of Anatole France is very human; after all, Anatole France is probably human himself, so far as a man can be human when he is sane. Their humanity resides in their passion for life. Every one of them holds the creed which is ideally stated in the preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin. As I believe Anatole France admires Gautier, I will venture to quote from it:
“Pleasure seems to me to be the object of life, and the only useful thing in the world. God has so willed it, who made women, perfume, light, beautiful flowers, good wines, spirited horses, greyhounds and Persian cats. He has not said to his angels: ‘Have virtue,’ but ‘Have love,’ and has given us lips more sensitive than the rest of our skin so that we may caress women, eyes raised on high to see the light, subtle scent to breathe the soul of flowers, sinewy thighs to grip the flanks of stallions and to fly swift as thought without railway or engine, delicate hands to draw over the long heads of greyhounds, the velvet lines of cats, and the gleaming shoulders of creatures without virtue; he has given to us alone the treble and glorious privilege of drinking without being thirsty, of lighting tinder and of making love at all times, which distinguishes us from the brutes much more than the habits of reading newspapers and manufacturing maps.”
In this preface lives much of Anatole France, his pure hedonism, his pagan love of the beautiful, his entire lack of moral purpose, counteracted by his consciousness of the decent, the elegant thing. If he believes, as I think he does, in honour, in truth, courtesy, pity, service, it is not owing to any harsh Protestant moral impulse, but to a feeling that there are fine, clean things revealed to us by some obscure Kantian, categorical imperative; if he has a morality at all it is the Ingersollian morality, that is to say obligation perceived by a fine soul. It is this inflames his style and links him with his forbears, with Voltaire, with Renan, with Molière, with the Italians of the sixteenth century, with the amiable Latins, with all the dead who loved the sunshine, with the gay gods, and the warriors who, on the way to the Elysian fields, did not turn their backs upon wine, woman and song. Not for him the sombre fates of duty, fear, retribution; not for him malignant Jove any more than malignant Jehovah. In the trenches in 1870 he read, not Sophocles, not Æschylus, but Virgil. As Brotteaux went to the guillotine he read Lucretius. For him flowers and honey to lay upon the little altars in Ausonian glades, and not the rapes and arguments of ancient Greece.
A Latin by heredity, it follows that Anatole France wields a style of singular purity. His work is very polished and very condensed. He uses as few words as possible to embody his idea, and when he has made his point, as, for instance, in stories such as The Procurator of Judæa, he stops. His desire is to knock out his reader, but he does not, like Zola, then proceed to kneel and to roll upon the prostrate figure, smothering it and flattening it out under a vast bulk. Anatole France never flounders; he does not follow the man who did so much damage to the literature of the nineteenth century by piling up seventeen unessential details, crowned, often by accident, with the essential one. Selection is with him a habit, and that is why Anatole France will never be confounded with the Zolas, the Sudermanns, the William de Morgans. Without selection he never could have achieved his delicate little pictures of men and women, of their passions stated in a paragraph; and still less could he have built those strange animals that he so loves. They are not always philosophical animals like Riquet, the dog, praying to man, his god; sometimes like Miragoane, they are just intelligent, doggy dogs, tail-wagging, greedy, apologetic, fulsome dogs; at other times they are just decorative beasts, especially the cats. For Anatole France, like Théophile Gautier, like Baudelaire, like Edgar Allan Poe, like almost every artist who really is an artist, loves cats. In his eyes the cat is as beautiful as woman. Here is a scrap, which I feel I render inadequately, devoted to sumptuous Hamilcar, the Persian cat in the library:
“Hamilcar, somnolent prince in the city of books, watcher in the night! Thou dost defend against vile rodents those things, manuscript and printed, bought for the old student by his modest hoard and his tireless zeal. In this silent library which thy military virtues protect, Hamilcar, sleep languid as a sultana. For thou dost unite in thy person the formidable air of a Tartar warrior and the indolent grace of an Eastern maid. Heroic and voluptuous Hamilcar, sleep until the mice shall dance in the moonlight before the Acta Sanctorum of the learned Bollandists.”
That is poetry, though, as I have suggested before now, Anatole France, in spite of his great love of the beautiful, is too critical, too humorous, has too much detachment to be written down a poet. He loves the poets, notably Racine, and one does not quite see why. But he is not a poet because, I think, he is too remote; the blood of the earth does not flow in his veins, and it may be that if he were closely questioned he would confess that he thinks life very useful to literature. That is perhaps why he tolerates it so well, why he can smile at it, be serious and yet poke fun at it. What a Fabian he would have made!
One word as to his short stories. He is in these more purely literary than in his novels, presumably because in short stories he has not space enough to get out of hand. A few of them, such as The Procurator of Judæa, and one or two of the revolutionary tales in Mother of Pearl, are as good as any French short stories, while Crainquebille and Putois reach the highest standard of de Maupassant. Still, there is nothing to say about them here: there is only one thing to do, and that is to read them. There are others, though, worth mentioning because, together with their fine literary facture, they carry the author’s ideas. For instance, in Les Sept Femmes de la Barbe Bleue, Anatole France sets to work to rehabilitate Bluebeard, who, he contends, was henpecked and deceived, though a very good fellow. This is Anatole France’s little fling at rumour and misrepresentation. It amuses him to trace rumour to its sources, and I can imagine as good a story as Putois, the gardener who was invented and in the end nearly managed to exist, being written round the story of the bombs in the German governess’s bedroom that floated about during the early part of the war. This is half mystical and Anatole France is not a mystic, but he has written several stories, to which I refer a little later on, starting from which it might be contended that if humanity believed strongly enough in the bomb under the bed the House of Commons might eventually be blown up. Most of the short stories, however, are merely novels in petto; some are mediæval, many Italian, and, every now and then, they are modern and ironic. Most of them, such as La Chemise, where operations become fashionable among the Smart Set and where the professor asks Society, “together a crowd and an élite,” to his five-o’clock operation, “a charming bit of ovariotomy,” to the accompaniment of flowers, pretty frocks, music and ices, are a criticism of life. This story recalls a kind of life we know, for we are told that “the professor’s elegance and grace were marvellous. The operation was taken for the cinema.”
All through these stories runs his philosophy: