In the second story, The Famished Cat, where again we have the quite magical picture of Godet-Laterasse, the seedy revolutionary, and of the absurd people concerned with absurd arts at the Famished Cat tavern, we find another incarnation of the future Anatole France: the sculptor Labanne, lazy, ironic, who moralises on art rather as will Choulette in The Red Lily, fifteen years later. But it is in The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard that Anatole France most clearly indicates his own future. This is just the straggling story of Bonnard, the old professor, who observes the world, interested in women, Benedictine chronicles, the Arc de Triomphe, cats and the love affairs of fourteenth-century queens. The old gentleman watches over the granddaughter of one whom he loved but never married. He behaves quite quixotically, protects her against a schoolmistress who ill treats her; at last he kidnaps her to make her happy, and all ends well in spite of a little tragedy when the girl marries and old Bonnard sells his books to give her a dowry. It is all most incoherent, and one never quite knows what Sylvestre Bonnard’s crime was; it may be the abduction (for old Bonnard, learned in the law of the sixth century, knows nothing of the Code Napoleon), or it may be, which is much more likely, that when he sells his books there are some he cannot bear to part with, even to afford his ward a dowry, and that he goes by night now and then to steal a few of them from the pile. The whole story is full of charm, and Mr Georg Brandes is unjust when he describes it as a simple tale. It is much more than that: it singularly reveals Anatole France himself, for here we have a man aged thirty-six writing as a kindly, rather cynical, faintly ironic old gentleman, fond of the classics and of humanity. Children make him sentimental; he lectures his cat on immortal truth. He says: “I have always preferred the folly of passion to the wisdom of indifference.” And that is true, only one feels that he loves best the folly of passion when it afflicts others. The book ends on a melancholic note, which is perhaps not so melancholic as it seems, for it brings out life passing by, all golden and bloody, as an old, old ship with a sumptuous figurehead, with ragged silken sails, carrying the embalmed corpses of those who first signed on, and their own sons growing up, full of sap, their thick hair streaming in the wind. Already in this book Anatole France is gentle. He is remorseful because “he has made fun of an unhappy man”; he is full of pity for a beggar-boy who will not accept a bit of gingerbread, and says: “He dares not touch it: in virtue of precocious experience he does not believe in happiness.” He states a general theory: the time that God gives each one of us is as a precious fabric which we embroider as well as we may. This man of thirty-six is already old; he has laid his hand on the head of man as if he were a little child, and said: “Creature that thinkest to find eternity in the intensity of thy sufferings, in their permanence, in the impossibility of thy loves, and the greatness of thy charms; oh, little creature on this blind world, I, old man, old God, who have seen so many worlds like this one busily spinning, let me beg thee be not so urgent, so hot, so young. For I am old, old as truth, and I know the shortness of thy pains.”
Who is Sylvestre Bonnard? Sylvestre Bonnard is Bergeret, is Coignard, is Brotteaux, he is the first of all those nice old gentlemen who pass through the pages of Anatole France. He has never changed; he was born like a young rat in a book-case, and so he remained. Those old gentlemen believe in service, resignation; they are tolerant and indulgent, and are always ready to say when the time comes, to any God you prefer, for they don’t mind: “Et nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine.”
The philosophical humanitarian who was to defend Dreyfus existed, then, in 1881; the subsidiary motives existed too in those years. For instance, in My Friend’s Book (1885) the small boy says: “I saw my father, my mother and the maid as very gentle giants who had witnessed the birth of the world, immutable, everlasting, unique of their kind.” That is exactly what the little dog, Riquet, thinks of man in general and what Anatole France perfidiously allows us to conclude man has always thought of God. Already he is cynical, and yet smiling, for he says: “I have faith no longer in my old friend, life: yet I still love it.” But there is in this book a more important indication of the man to come; it is not only the alleged Socialist of 1898 that already exists, but the passionate pagan of 1914. In My Friend’s Book he takes a little girl to a Punch and Judy show. Punch kills the devil, and Pierre Nozière (Anatole France) remarks: “The devil dead, good-bye sin. Maybe beauty, this ally of the devil, will vanish with him. Maybe we shall not again see the flowers that intoxicate and the eyes that slay.” Any student of Anatole France will realise that in 1885 the author was already expressing what he would state more fully in 1914 in The Revolt of the Angels—namely, his fear and hatred of ascetic, beauty-hating, death-desirous Christianity.
And there is more: forgive me if I paint the lily a little, but others have painted it and in colours which displease me. The alleged reactionary of The Gods are Athirst, the man who was supposed to have gone back in 1914 upon the humanitarian and republican sentiments of the Dreyfus period, that man was, in 1882, in Les Désirs de Jean Servien (a thoroughly second-rate novelette), painting an absurd revolutionary. The Commune reigns; he shows the hero the people rioting in the Luxembourg Gardens, and says: “M. Servien, look upon this scene and never forget it: here is a free people. Indeed the citizens were walking upon the grass, plucking flowers in the beds, and breaking off the branches of the trees.” Anatole France had in those days few illusions as to the behaviour of free peoples! And again in the short stories which make up Mother of Pearl (1892) one is oppressed by Anatole France’s hatred of the revolutionaries, their brute ignorance, vanity, stupidity, their mean revengefulness, and their silly imitation of Roman attitudes.
Anatole France is what he was, and if he seems to have changed now and then, or to have been inconsistent, it is because he is a developed human being, a rare bird. He has not cut out his views as with a stencil; they are fluid, they overlap, and he can hold simultaneously two entirely divergent views. I submit that any man of high intellectual development tends to hold two views upon one topic. One view is that of his instinct, the other is that of his reason. In the case of Anatole France the instinct is always hedonistic; he is a pagan; he loves Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, and even the Catholic Church, for their beauty; he is fond of all the good things of the world, beautiful women, flowers, sweetmeats; of all the fine, disdainful aristocratic ideas of the artists and the philosophers.... But there is what may be called his social conscience, which is utilitarian and Socialistic. That conscience tells him that however much beauty he may extract from it, this world, filled with wars, with cruelties, with factories, with ugly houses and ugly clothes, with mean prejudices, is a world for which he is responsible because he is a man. The dream of that ugly world will not let him sleep easily upon his rose-decked couch. There is the conflict which has puzzled so many of his readers; sometimes an Epicurean, at other times a sort of Lloyd Georgeite is apparent. This does not mean that Anatole France is throwing over any ideas; he is merely being more or less influenced by one side of his own self. His love of humanity has always made it difficult for him to enjoy the fruit he raised to his mouth if it occurred to him just then that other mouths might go hungry.
II
SATIRIST AND CRITIC
If Anatole France is to be remembered—that is, for a while, which is perhaps all a man can hope—it will be as a critic and as a satirist. Whether he will be remembered longer than his contemporaries, Tolstoy or Mr Shaw, I do not know. Though he has delighted us, the race of delights is short and pleasures have mutable faces; he may share the fate of Flaubert, who is menaced; of de Maupassant, who is going; or of Schiller, forgotten; of Walter Scott, reduced to a juvenile circulation; of Thackeray, staking all upon one novel; of Dickens, surviving by the picturesque; of Tolstoy, convicted as a moralist; of Greeks uneasily staggering under the burden of illogical murder and absurd incest ... I do not think that he will join the glorious band: Homer, Shakespeare, Molière. For Anatole France has understood all things, but mainly in their details. He has made a mosaic, not a marble court; seated on Olympus, his eyes have been too keen, and he has seen men too clearly, man not enough. But still he is, I suppose, assured of his line in any biographical dictionary that may be printed in the year 3000, and that is a good deal. I like to think of that entry in the Cyclopædia of Literature (published by the International Government Press; price, seven days labour bonds, net). It runs something like this:
France (Anatole). Pen-name of Jacques Anatole Thibault. French writer, b. 1844. d. . Satirist and critic. Some of his work has merit as reflecting the faintly enlightened views of an observer living in barbarous times.
Anatole France is the only living satirist. He has actually no rivals; there are men such as Messrs Max Beerbohm, Hansi, Mirbeau, Hector Munro, F. P. Dunne, who have a glimmering of what satire means; Mr Wells would have more than a glimmering if, unfortunately, he did not hold deep convictions about right and wrong, a weakness to which, in spite of all appearances, Mr Shaw also succumbs; but Anatole France alone upholds the ancient tradition of Voltaire, of Defoe and Swift. His satire is always effective because it is always light, always pointed and always smiling. He has none of the bitterness of Swift and therefore he is the truer cynic, for true cynicism is not fierce; it is always genial. He never labours a point; he states, presents the contrasts between, for instance, what a rich man may do as opposed to a poor one, and then passes on, laughing, Pan-like dancing, with perhaps a tear or two in his laughter.