“I love life which is earthy life, life as it is, this dog’s life. I love it brutal, vile and gross. I love it sordid, dirty, spoilt; I love it stupid, imbecile and cruel; I love it in its obscenity, in its infamy, with its violence, its stinks, its corruptions and its infections.... On Sundays I go among the people, I mix with the crowd that flows in the streets, I plunge into groups of men, women and children, which form round street-singers or before the booths at fairs; I touch dirty coats and greasy bodices; I breathe the strong, warm scents of sweat, of hair, of breaths. In this well of life I feel further from death. Death: nothingness, that is an infinite naught, and this naught envelops us. Thence we come and hence we go; we are always two nothingnesses as a shell upon the waters. Nothingness is the impossible and the assured; it is inconceivable and it is.”
A quotation such as this, taken in conjunction with the earlier quotation from the preface of Mademoiselle de Maupin, outlines the man within the writer, and I need not labour that the faith of Anatole France is the faith of Epicurus, of Petronius Arbiter, of Villon, of Rabelais, of Fielding. The whole basis of him is sensuality, and I hate to say this in a country such as England, where the maypole has been cut down and Calvinism reigns supreme, where sensuality, that once whispered melodies into the ears of Pan and hung garlands about the birch-trees, has been hated and hunted until it had to take refuge in the dirty talk of the public-house.
The sensuality of Anatole France is like sap arising in the trees, like the moth circling about the candle; it is joyous, frank, unashamed; the world and all that is in it is its toy. In this country it has become disgusting to like good food; you must not even talk of food, it is not done (and the result is English food, the laughing-stock of the universe). But listen to Anatole France on food in Histoire Comique:
“The Castelnaudary stew contains the preserved thighs of geese, whitened beans, bacon and a little sausage. To be good it must have been cooked lengthily upon a gentle fire. Clémence’s stew has been cooking for twenty years. She puts into the pan sometimes goose or bacon, sometimes sausage or beans, but it is always the same stew. The foundation endures; this ancient and precious foundation gives the stew the quality that in the pictures of old Venetian masters you find in the women’s amber flesh....”
Here speaks the old Gaul who feasted on roast meats, drank much hydromel, and as he caressed the long droop of his fair moustache cast a negligent, amiable glance over his white-skinned, blue-eyed, black-haired women. For the Gaul never forgot women; he had anticipated Nietzsche by two thousand years or so, and decided that man was for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior. This offends some of us moderns, for the sensuality of the Frenchman, so strong in Anatole France, the sensuality of eating and drinking, of burlesque, of gross stories, some of them concerned with an apartment ignored in the English household since the days of William IV., lies thick over love.
It seems a pity to us that, in spite of all his æstheticism, of his sense of beauty, it should look as if Anatole France’s view of love were contained in the famous phrase of Alphonse Karr, or Gustave Droz, I forget which:
“Love? A matter of skin.”
Well, love is not a matter of skin, at least for us, and one would wish that Anatole France should have found something ethereal, symbolic in the union of man and woman. I cannot explain what I mean: I detest the word “spirituality,” and I hardly know what I miss in this French view of love that Anatole France holds, but I miss it. This view is not exactly: “One woman is as good as another,” but it certainly is: “One woman is as good as another if she is good-looking.” It is all flesh, and æsthetics, which do redeem the flesh, do not redeem it fully. The French heroine, beloved of Anatole France’s heroes, is merely Galatea animate; she is just the beautiful woman descended from her pedestal at the call of her chosen lover. Nothing calls to him save the warm body that once was beautiful marble, and he is content. The Red Lily illustrates that idea. Here we have two people, an unfaithful wife and her lover. We are convinced by the suggestion of extreme passion that these people have reached the apogee of love. It is an unhappy, tormented love, unrolling near the Arno. It develops among a curious society of literary people, is coloured by the usual literary and artistic ideas of Anatole France. Dechartre, the lover, is tormented because his mistress had before him another lover; he is not tormented by the existence of her husband. His distress grows so intense when he begins to suspect, quite wrongly, that she is unfaithful to him with her first lover, produces a strain so great, that their alliance breaks. Well, that is natural enough, for, as Anatole France himself remarks, man is possessive and woman is not, because she has had to get used to sharing, but it is difficult to understand at first sight why Dechartre should be jealous of another lover, and not jealous of a husband. The answer, which is not evident to everybody, is that the act of love is symbolic and that a husband, taken as a social base, is not comparable with a lover taken for love.[6] That is true enough, but where fault must be found with the Gallic view is that there is not a single phrase in the book to show that Dechartre, represented as in the throes of extreme love, wishes to detach his mistress from her husband. He never suggests that he wants her to live with him always, that he wants her society, her presence, the subtle delight of hearing her walk in the room above. He wants nothing but her body from four to six, twice a week: he is honourable, he is an artist, but he is vile, he is a beast. Big words these, but I have come to think that if we differ at all from the brute it is by the courage with which we face the consequences of our deeds, by delicacies of feeling in which caresses have no place, by something that is more than elegance, that can maintain love when sickness, ugliness appear and æsthetics fall to the ground. There is not in the works of Anatole France a line devoted to love. Whether in The Red Lily or in The Merrie Tales of Jacques Tournebroche, or in any of the episodes, “love” is either light and false and lying, or coarse and brutal, or limited by the passing efflorescence of a beauty that must die. He seems, like every other Frenchman I can think of, unable to understand what the Anglo-Saxon means by idealism in love, by that idealism so often made absurd by sentiment, but yet delightful, and distinguished from the impulse of a stag in rut.
[6]Relations between husband and wife may have ceased, but this does not touch the argument.
And yet, strange to say, Anatole France has written a few stories in which there is a hint of mysticism. Histoire Comique is a story of a haunting; in Adrienne Buquet there is telepathy; in The Graven Stone a fatal influence. There is Putois too, that famous tale of a metaphysical conception in virtue of which a man who was originally a joke ends “like a mythological deity, in becoming actual.” There is A Daughter of Lilith, a tale of an immortal and fatal descendant of the pre-Adamites. But those, I feel, are intellectual exercises, and I suspect that they spring from a passing idea of the author: “I think I’ll write a mystical story; it would be rather fun.”