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ANATOLE FRANCE

BY

GEORGE BRANDES


MEN OF CONTEMPORARY LETTERS SERIES


LONDON

WILLIAM HEINEMANN

MCMVIII


[Illustration: ANATOLE FRANCE--Bust by Lavergne]



The true author is recognisable by the existence on every page of his
works of at least one sentence or one phrase which none but he could
have written.

Take the following sentence: "If we may believe this amiable shepherd
of souls, it is impossible for us to elude divine mercy, and we shall
all enter Paradise--unless, indeed, there be no Paradise, which is
exceedingly probable." It treats of Renan. It must be written by a
disciple of Renan's, whose humour perhaps allows itself a little more
licence than the master's. More we cannot say.

But take this: "She was the widow of four husbands, a dreadful woman,
suspected of everything except of having loved--consequently honoured
and respected." There is only one man who can have written this. It
jestingly indicates the fact that society forgives woman everything
except a passion, and communicates this observation to the reader, as
it were with a gentle nudge.

Or take the following: "We should not love nature, for she is not
lovable; but neither should we hate her, for she is not deserving of
hatred. She is everything. It is very difficult to be everything. It
results in terrible heavy-handedness and awkwardness."

There is only one man who would excuse Nature for her indifference to
us human beings in these words: "It is very difficult to be everything."

Read this passage: "It is a great infirmity to think. God preserve
you from it, my son, as He has preserved His greatest saints and the
souls whom He loves with especial tenderness and destines to eternal
felicity."

It is an Abbé who speaks thus, and who speaks without a trace of irony.
One is conscious of the author's smile behind the Abbe's seriousness.

Few are so pithy in their irony as France. He says: "Cicero was in
politics a Moderate of the most violent description."

Few are so picturesque in their satire as he. Others have used the
phrase: Equality before the law--that means equality before the laws
which the well-to-do have made for the poor, and men for women. Others
have maintained that the ideal of justice would be an inequality before
the law adjusted to the differences between individuals. Others have
said: If there is inequality in law itself, where is equality to be
found?

But there is only one man who can have written: "The law, in its
majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under
bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

This one man is Anatole France. Most noticeable in this style is its
irony; it stamps him as a spiritual descendant of Renan. But in spite
of the relationship, France's irony is of a very different description
from Renan's. Renan, as historian or critic, always speaks in his
own name, and we are directly conscious of himself in the fictitious
personages of his philosophic dramas, and even more so in those of his
philosophic dialogues. France's irony conceals itself beneath naïveté.
Renan disguises himself, France transforms himself. He writes from
standpoints which are directly the opposite of his own--primitive
Christian, or mediæval Catholic--and through what is said we apprehend
what he means. Other writers may be as witty, may be or appear as
delicately ironical--they still do not resemble him. If we enter the
dépôt of some famous china manufactory with a piece of china from some
other factory, as faultless and as beautiful in colour as those by
which we are surrounded, the saleswoman takes it into her hand, looks
at it, and says: "The paste is different."

In France's case we may search long for paste of the same quality as
that which he has succeeded in producing after thirty