It all sounds rather cruel, and there are touches, such as Lacrisse coaching Generals in the evidence they will deliver against Dreyfus, such as the description of M. de la Barge trying to get his son out of military service after proclaiming that the army is the ideal of his soul, which provoke in the reader just what Anatole France wants: not laughter, but an ironic, lingering, vinegary smile. Time after time, in every one of his books he obtains this effect; it is the effect of sharp contrast, of suddenness; it recalls a page of Machiavelli who, after describing how an Italian tyrant had one of his ministers sawn in half, alive, in the market-place, goes on: “But to return to more important things....”
That produces a shock, and when applied to irony this is an effect still more powerful than when it is applied to fiction, as, for instance, in Ambrose Bierce’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. But the irony is not artificial: it is the sort of irony given to those who walk the world with their eyes open. It inspires the feeling of amusement which invaded a few of us during the great European War, when we read in the newspapers articles about Russian culture, and remembered what the same newspapers used to say about the Bear. I could not help smiling at our attitude to the sausage-eaters when recalling how completely we had forgotten the frog-eaters and candle-eaters of times gone by. Very likely, though the war roused him to action in defence of ancient French culture, Anatole France chuckled over the intimate friendship between France and England, which, in 1898, at the time of Fashoda, and in 1899, at the time of the Boer War, was such an intimate hatred. He would have chuckled still more had he known that a patriotic English inn-keeper had changed the name of his tavern from “The King of Prussia” to “The Czar’s Head.” For history has staying power, and one wonders a little whether, as generations pass, “The Czar’s Head” may not have to turn into “The Roosevelt Arms,” “The Garibaldi,” or perhaps one day into “The Chung Ling Soo....”
But ironic as it all is, it is very living. This should strike nobody as extraordinary, for life is most ironic: it would be quite intolerable to some of us if it were not. But this is worth saying because a great many other satirists—Swift, Rabelais, Cervantes—obtain most of their effects by distortion. Anatole France obtains his by bringing out the essential incongruity of life: funerals passing under the windows of the Ritz where there is a smart luncheon-party, sermons bidding us love our enemies while newsboys shout casualty lists; life is full of it. That is why the archdeacon and another cleric hold, in the midst of a theological crisis, that earnest argument about omelettes. Life and people are like that, and there is nothing at all distorted in the diplomatic, furry, soft-spoken priests who ... well, let us say, do not discourage their fair penitents from committing adultery with powerful republicans, provided this serves a good cause. After all Judith ... and Jael, and all that. And it does not seem monstrous that the new bishop should be selected while Madame de Gromance does up her suspenders, for it is quite conceivable that lovers should now and then, at intervals, talk politics.
And he is fair. He is not fair like Byron, who hated most people and disliked the others, but because he can see oddity and occasionally beastliness in the people of whom he approves. He is for the Jews in this Dreyfus quarrel, but that does not make him anti-Christian; he is as impartial in his attacks as a mosquito. Indeed a great many Jews wish they had been saved from their friend, for pictures such as that of Madame Worms-Clavelin and her husband, of Madame de Bonmont, that most Christian of Jewesses, anxious to forget the tent of hides, remembering in the most sacred (and even most amorous) moments that there is such a thing as a Stock Exchange, are not always kind.
But, kind or unkind, the satire is never laid on thickly. Not once does Anatole France suggest that Mademoiselle Deniseau is a sham prophetess: no, that would be clumsy; she merely cannot give the logarithm of nine....
In those four books modern French society stands forth quite stark, with a rather decayed charm, a naïveté born from an excess of complexity. Anatole France strips it of all its gewgaws, patriotism, faith, morality: of all its little affectations; ... and then, having exposed it, he consents to love it because his satire rests on his philosophy. That philosophy, with which I deal further on, is enunciated in every volume by the nice old gentlemen who embody him, Bonnard, Bergeret and the others: irony and pity; despise man but love him, see his weakness and yet hope; he may not be immortal, yet he is eternal, indestructible as all matter; and though he be no more than a mite in cheese yet he is the expression of life, the soul of beauty, the one thing in the world which is holy. For Anatole France is sweet and pitiful. All through his work we feel that, and in none so much as in a little story, Crainquebille. This is the simple tale of an old hawker who was run in for not moving on, just because he was waiting for sixpence owed to him for vegetables. The policeman trumped up against him a charge of having shouted “Down with the Peelers!” When he comes out of gaol Crainquebille is ostracised; that makes him quarrelsome; then, having no friends, he drinks; becoming drunken, he loses his customers and sinks deeper and deeper into poverty. And the terrible indictment of the law that makes criminals by listening to the strong and flouting the poor, ends on the picture of old Crainquebille, forlorn, degraded and starving, going up to a policeman and shouting: “Down with the Peelers!” so as to get a night’s lodging in the cells. But, irony of ironies, this policeman shrugs his shoulders, and walks away.
It would not be right to end this chapter without saying a few words about Anatole France in his more literal rôle of critic. He has done an immense amount of literary criticism in Le Temps and in scattered articles, most of which have been collected in the four volumes of On Life and Letters and in Le Génie Latin. He is sympathetic and kindly in the extreme when dealing with the work of young men, particularly if they are scholars, if they are interested in the things he loves, mediævalism, sculpture, history, etc., and he will forgive a great deal to good intentions, but when he does not like a book Anatole France is a terrible reviewer, so terrible a reviewer that I trust this little monograph will not fall into his hands. Ignoring then the gentler side of him, I will reproduce two extracts from his criticisms. The first is from a review of Georges Ohnet’s book, entitled Will. Mr Georges Ohnet, as I suppose everybody knows, has for a long time enjoyed great vogue in France for, have no illusions about it, the French are no more literary than we are and have a passion for stories of moated granges, immaculate officers (comparatively chaste), remorseful women who sacrifice their beauty for the ideal, and all that sort of thing; with a little arrangement, the sentimental-heroic novels of Mrs Barclay, and the sentimental-religious novels of Mr Hall Caine would have in France a good circulation. In fact, the sensuous religiosity of Mr Hall Caine enjoys in France quite adequate popularity. And here is what Anatole France says of this kind of novel, Will, as published by Mr Georges Ohnet:
“The title is a whole philosophy. Will, that is what speaks to the heart and mind. Will by Georges Ohnet! How one feels the man of principle who has never doubted! Will by Georges Ohnet, 73rd edition! What a proof of the power of the will! Locke did not believe that the world was free. But his Essay on the Human Understanding did not reach seventy-three editions in a single morning. Here we have Locke victoriously refuted! The will is not an illusion, for Mr Georges Ohnet has willed to have seventy-three editions, and he has achieved them.”
Anatole France, after this amiable beginning, remarks that Mr Georges Ohnet’s notions are displeasing, that his style is ungraceful; he quotes him, and the result is quite ghastly. And he ends on words which rescue the reader from doubt:
“There is not a page, not a line, not a word, not a syllable of that book which has not shocked, saddened, and offended me. I was disposed to weep over it with all the muses for company.”