I do not apologise for the egotism which is already invading this monograph, and I suppose I shall remain egotistic as I go on. For the works of Anatole France are too bulky, too many to be appraised one by one; they raise so many issues that a fat quarto volume would hardly suffice to analyse all, and it would be rather dull. Believing that criticism is “the adventures of the soul among masterpieces,” I am much more inclined to give the adventures of my intellect (claiming no soul) among the works of Anatole France. I have read very little about him, indeed but one book, by Mr Georg Brandes, and in the early part of 1914 a number of articles when Anatole France paid us a visit. They are very distressing, those articles, as they appear to have been written mainly by men who do not know what they are talking about, but can talk about it exactly to the extent of a column. I refer to the alleged evolution of Anatole France, of which something must be said a little further on.
The temptation to translate long quotations was very great, for translation is a challenging exercise and an uneasy, but, so far as possible, I have resisted it. I think it only fair to say that, as a rule, I have not translated very closely, but attempted to render selected passages, fitting the style to the matter; that is, for philosophic or descriptive passages I have, as much as possible, used Latinised English; for the more familiar portions I have drawn upon our slender stock of Anglo-Saxon.[1] As for the classifications, Anatole France satirist, critic, politician, philosopher, etc., they are necessarily rather rough; they overlap because not one of his books is one thing, and one thing only. In that direction too I must claim the reader’s indulgence.
[1]I should like to say in this respect that I am greatly indebted to Mr John Lane, who owns the British copyright of most of the works of Anatole France, for leave not only to quote portions of his translations, but also to retranslate and condense the French text. A full list of the English titles of the works will be found at the end of this volume.
Yet another word: I come neither to bury Anatole France nor to praise him; there is in one-man criticism a danger that it should be too favourable, for the critic tends to choose as a subject an author whom he whole-heartedly worships. Now I do not worship Anatole France; I have had to read every one of his works over again in the last few weeks, and if there is anything calculated to make one hate a writer for evermore it is to read all his works one after the other. People are afraid to criticise Anatole France adversely; he seems to have attained the position now accorded to Galileo (who was tortured), to Joan of Arc (who was burned), to Wagner (who was hooted), to everybody, in fact, who ever did anything worth while. In his early years, when de Maupassant, Zola, Daudet, were alive, he was ignored; everything was done to keep him down: the Académie Française went so far as to give him a prize. But times have changed; Anatole France is acclaimed all over the world; everybody quotes him, and those who cannot quote him quote his name; he is above criticism. This would be very bad for him if he were not also above adulation. People dare not say the things which should be obvious: that he repeats himself; that he is sentimental; that his novels are, from the point of view of French technique, incoherent; that, as expressed by his characters, his conception of love is rather disgusting; in fact, they take all the humanity out of him by endowing him with all the graces; they erect to him a statue which represents him just about as much as the sort of statue they occasionally put up to some highly respectable politician whom they depict stark naked, and beautiful as a young discobolus.
The reason probably is that it is not enough to understand Anatole France; one also has to understand the French, the gay, sensual, garrulous French of the Middle Ages, the gay, sensual, courteous French of the seventeenth century, the gay, sensual, cynical French of Voltairian times, and the sensual, cynical French of to-day. Anatole France is all these, a sort of historical congress of French epochs, a retrospective exhibition of French mentalities. That perhaps explains the confusion which reigns in the minds of a great many people as to his alleged evolution from reaction to red socialism, a confusion so great that it seems to have touched even Mr Georg Brandes.
It is not wonderful that Anatole France should be so representative, for he is a provincial by extraction, a Parisian by birth and environment. The whole of his biography is revealed in his books, so it is enough to say that he was born in 1844, in the Quarter (that was inevitable), that he grew up in his father’s old bookshop near the quays of the Seine, listening, as he grew up, sometimes to the talk of republicans, for those were the days of the Second Empire, much more often to that of elegant half-worldling abbés and aristocrats, for his father was a pronounced Royalist and Catholic, as was also his mother.... Old books, good talk, and the Seine lazily flowing under the plane-trees before there were steam trams. It is all very like Anatole France, like the four volumes of Contemporary History where the bookshop is the centre, like Pierre Nozière and My Friend’s Book. Then little France (whose real name is Thibault) went to the Collège Stanislas to be brought up as a good Royalist child. But he did not do particularly well there, thus bearing out the legend of the prize boy. Notably he loafed. Anatole France in life has always loafed, which is natural enough in one who was born near bridges. Who would not loaf who has a flowing river to watch? It might be said that Anatole France has loafed through thirty-five volumes.
As he grew up he accomplished desultory tasks, he taught, he wrote articles for the papers; in 1868 he published his study of Alfred de Vigny; in 1873 and 1876 he gave us two volumes of verse, Poèmes Dorés and Les Noces Corinthiennes. Not very startling or attractive verse; however deep Anatole France’s poetic feeling, he has never approached greatness as a poet, perhaps because he was always too calm, too detached, because so seldom did his eye in fine frenzy roll. Only when at last, in 1879, he published his first work of creative prose, two longish stories, Jocasta and The Famished Cat, followed, two years later, by The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard, and in 1882 by Les Désirs de Jean Servien,[2] was born the Anatole France we know to-day.
[2]The title is given in English if the work has been translated, in French if it has not.
I cannot lay too much stress upon that. Anatole France was potentially in 1881 what he is now. It has continually been suggested that, up to 1898 and the revival of the Dreyfus case, Anatole France was a reactionary, a clerical, an anti-democrat; that, somehow, in an unexplained manner, he underwent a change of heart and suddenly turned into a humanitarian socialist; and a few bold folk hinted, when The Gods are Athirst appeared in 1913, that Anatole France, because he painted a dreadful and therefore not over-kind picture of the French Revolution, had reacted again. Briefly: the genius as weathercock. It has even been suggested that Anatole France wrote this reactionary book to make his peace with the respectable classes and to get into the Académie Française: the answer is that Anatole France was a member of that august body seventeen years before the publication of the book.
An examination of Anatole France’s early works is vital to this question, notably of Jocasta, which has very little to do with the myth, for there is no Œdipus to murder his father and marry his mother; Anatole France is too modern for that. It is a queer, horrible story of the daughter of a shady middleman who, instead of marrying the young doctor she loves, weds a wealthy and sinister old Englishman, whom, to her knowledge, his valet murders. Fearing discovery and haunted by remorse (the Furies), emulating Jocasta, she hangs herself. This story would hardly be worth mentioning save for its fine literary style and its high characterisation of Fellaire, the solemn, kindly, bumptious, sentimental middleman, of Haviland, the dry and methodical collector, if already here Anatole France were not at the age of thirty-five indicating what he would become. For he makes a journalist say in conclusion, after discussing the immortality of the soul and deciding that it is really a very complicated question: “Fortunately the Almighty is not a subject for an up-to-date par.”