Chapter I

In the first part of that great, human Book, dear to all good Pantagruelists, is this picture: "From the Tower Anatole to the Messembrine were faire spacious galleries, all coloured over and painted with the ancient prowesses, histories and descriptions of the world." The Tower Anatole is part of the architecture of the Abbey of Thélème, in common with the other towers named, Artick, Calaer, Hesperia, and Caiere.

For lovers of the exquisite and whimsical artist, Anatole France, a comparison to Rabelais may not appear strained. Anatole, the man, has written much that contains, as did the gracious Tower Anatole, "faire spacious galleries ... painted with ancient ... histories." He has in his veins some infusion of the literary blood of that "bon gros libertin," Rabelais, a figure in French literature who refuses to be budged from his commanding position, notwithstanding the combined prestige of Pascal, Voltaire, Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Hugo, and Balzac. And the gentle Anatole has a pinch of Rabelais's _esprit gaulois_, which may be found in both Balzac and Maupassant.

To call France a sceptic is to state a common-place. But he is so many other things that he bewilders. The spiritual stepson of Renan, a partial inheritor of his gifts of irony and pity, and a continuator of the elder master's diverse and undulating style, France displays affinities to Heine, Aristophanes, Charles Lamb, Epicurus, Sterne, and Voltaire. The "glue of unanimity"--to use an expression of the old pedantic Budæus--has united the widely disparate qualities of his personality. His outlook upon life is the outlook of Anatole France. His vast learning is worn with an air almost mocking. After the bricks and mortar of the realists, after the lyric pessimism of the morally and politically disillusioned generation following the Franco-German war, his genius comes in the nature of a consoling apparition. Like his own Dr. Trublet, in Histoire Comique, he can say: "_Je tiens boutique de mensonges. Je soulage, je console. Peut-il consoler et soulager sans mentir?_" And he does deceive us with the resources of his art, with the waving of his lithe wand which transforms whales into weasels, mosques into cathedrals.

Perhaps too much stress has been set upon his irony. Ironic he is with a sinuosity that yields only to Renan. It is irony rather in the shape of the idea, than in its presentation; atmospheric is it rather than surface antithesis, or the witty inversion of a moral order; he is a man of sentiment, Shandeàn sentiment as it is at times. But the note we always hear, if distantly reverberant, is the note of pity. To be all irony is to mask one's humanity; and to accuse Anatole France of the lack of humanity is to convict oneself of critical colour-blindness. His writings abound in sympathetic overtones. His pity is without Olympian condescension. He is a most lovable man in the presence of the eternal spectacle of human stupidity and guile. It is not alone that he pardons, but also that he seeks to comprehend. Not emulating the cold surgeon's eye of a Flaubert, it is with the kindly vision of a priest he studies the maladies of our soul. In him there is an ecclesiastical _fond_. He forgives because he understands. And after his tenderest benediction he sometimes smiles; it may be a smile of irony; yet it is seldom cruel. He is an adroit determinist, yet sets no store by the logical faculties. Man is not a reasoning animal, he says, and human reason is often a mirage.

But to label him with sentimentalism _à la russe_--the Russian pity that stems from Dickens--would shock him into an outburst. Conceive him, then, as a man to whom all emotional extravagance is foreign; as a detester of rhetoric, of declamation, of the phrase facile; as a thinker who assembles within the temple of his creations every extreme in thought, manners, sentiment, and belief, yet contrives to fuse this chaos by the force of his sober style. His is a style more linear than coloured, more for the eye than the ear; a style so pellucid that one views it suspiciously--it may conceal in its clear, profound depths strange secrets, as does some mountain lake in the shine of the sun. Even the simplest art may have its veils.

In the matter of clarity, Anatole France is the equal of Renan and John Henry Newman, and if this same clarity was at one time a conventional quality of French prose, it is rarer in these days. Never syncopated, moving at a moderate _tempo_, smooth in his transitions, replete with sensitive rejections, crystalline in his diction, a lover and a master of large luminous words, limpid and delicate and felicitous, the very marrow of the man is in his unique style. Few writers swim so easily under such a heavy burden of erudition. A loving student of books, his knowledge is precise, his range wide in many literatures. He is a true humanist. He loves learning for itself, loves words, treasures them, fondles them, burnishes them anew to their old meanings--though he has never tarried in the half-way house of epigram. But, over all, his love of humanity sheds a steady glow. Without marked dramatic sense, he nevertheless surprises mankind at its minute daily acts. And these he renders for us as candidly "as snow in the sunshine"; as the old Dutch painters stir our nerves by a simple shaft of light passing through a half-open door, upon an old woman polishing her spectacles. M. France sees and notes many gestures, inutile or tragic, notes them with the enthralling simplicity of a complicated artist. He deals with ideas so vitally that they become human; yet his characters are never abstractions, nor serve as pallid allegories; they are all alive, from Sylvestre Bonnard to the group that meets to chat in the Foro Romano of Sur la Pierre Blanche. He can depict a cat or a dog with fidelity; his dog Riquet bids fair to live in French literature. He is an interpreter of life, not after the manner of the novelist, but of life viewed through the temperament of a tolerant poet and philosopher.

This modern thinker, who has shed the despotism of the positivist dogma, boasts the soul of a chameleon. He understands, he loves, Christianity with a knowledge and a fervour that surprise until one measures the depth of his affection for the antique world. To further confuse our perceptions, he exhibits a sympathy for Hebraic lore that can only be set down to a remote lineage. He has rifled the Talmud for its forgotten stories; he delights in juxtaposing the cultured Greek and the strenuous Paul; he adores the contrast of Mary Magdalen with the pampered Roman matron. Add to this a familiarity with the proceeds of latter-day science, astronomy in particular, with the scholastic speculation of the Renaissance, mediæval piety, and the Pyrrhonism of a boulevard philosopher. So commingled are these contradictory elements, so many angles are there exposed to numerous cultures, so many surfaces avid for impressions, that we end in admiring the exercise of a magic which blends into a happy synthesis such a variety of moral dissonances, such moral preciosity. It is magic--though there are moments when we regard the operation as intellectual legerdemain of a superior kind. We suspect dupery. But the humour of France is not the least of his miraculous solvents; it is his humour that often transforms a doubtful campaign into a radiant victory. We see him, the protagonist of his own psychical drama, dancing on a tight rope in the airiest manner, capering deliciously in the void, and quite like a prestidigitator bidding us doubt the existence of his rope.

His life long, Renan, despite his famous phrase, "the mania of certitude," was pursued by the idea of an absolute. He cried for proofs. To Berthelot he wrote: "I am eager for mathematics." It promised finality. As he aged, he was contented to seek an atmosphere of moral feeling; though he declared that "the real is a vast outrage on the ideal." He tremulously participated in the ritual of social life, and in the worship of the unknown god. He at last felt that Nature abhorred an absolute; that Being was ever a Becoming; that religion and philosophy are the result of a partial misunderstanding. All is relative, and the soul of man must ever feed upon chimeras! The Breton harp of Renan became sadly unstrung amid the shallow thunders of agnostic Paris.

But France, his eyes quite open and smiling, gayly Pagan Anatole, does not demand proofs. He rejoices in a philosophic indifference, he has the gift of paradox. To Renan's plea for the rigid realities of mathematics, he might ask, with Ibsen, whether two and two do not make five on the planet Jupiter! To Montaigne's "What Know I?" he opposes Rabelais's "Do What Thou Wilt!" And then he adorns the wheel of Ixion with garlands.

He believes in the belief of God. He swears by the gods of all times and climes. His is the cosmical soul. A man who unites in his tales something of the Mimes of Herondas, La Bruyère's Characters, and the Lucian Dialogues, with faint flavours of Racine and La Fontaine, may be pardoned his polygraphic faiths. With Baudelaire he knows the tremours of the believing atheist; with Baudelaire he would restrain any show of irreverence before an idol, be it wooden or bronze. It might be the unknown god!--as Baudelaire once cried.

This pleasing chromatism in beliefs, a belief in all and none, is not a new phenomenon. The classical world of thought has several matches for Anatole France, from the followers of Aristippus to the Sophists. But there is a specific note of individuality, a _roulade_ quite Anatolian in the Frenchman's writings. No one but this accomplished Parisian sceptic could have framed The Opinions of Jérôme Coignard and his wholly delightful scheme for a Bureau of Vanity; "man is an animal with a musket," he declares; Sylvestre Bonnard and M. Bergeret are new with a dynamic novelty.

As Walter Pater was accused of a silky dilettanteism, so France, as much a Cyrenaic as the English writer, was nevertheless forced to step down from his ivory tower to the dusty streets and there demonstrate his sincerity by battling for his convictions. After the imbecile Dreyfus affair had rolled away, there was little talk in Paris of Anatole France, Epicurean. He was saluted with every variety of abuse, but this amateur of fine sensations had forever settled the charge of morose aloofness, of voluptuous cynicism. (Though to-day he is regarded with a certain suspicion by all camps.) At a similar point where the endurance of Ernest Renan had failed him, Anatole France proved his own faith. Renan during the black days of the Commune retired to Versailles, there to meditate upon the shamelessness of the brute, Caliban, with his lowest instincts unleashed. But France believes in the people, he has said that the future belongs to Caliban, and he would scout his master's conception of the Tyrant-Sage, a conception that Nietzsche partially transposed later to the ecstatic key of the Superman. M. France would probably advocate the head-chopping of such wise monster-despots. An aristocrat by culture and fastidiousness, he is without an _arrière-pensée_ of the snobbery of the intellect, of the cerebral exaltation displayed by Hugo, Baudelaire, and the Goncourts.

When France published his early verse--his début was as a poet and Parnassian poet--Catulle Mendès divined the man. He wrote, "I can never think of Anatole France ... without fancying I see a young Alexandrian poet of the second century, a Christian, doubtless, who is more than half Jew, above all a neoplatonist, and further a pure theist deeply imbued with the teachings of Basilides and Valentinus, and the Perfumes of the Orphic poems of some recent rhetorician, in whom subtlety was pushed to mysticism and philosophy to the threshold of the Kabbalah."

Some critics have accused him of not being able to build a book. He knows the rhythms of poems, but he "does not know" the harmony of essences, said the late Bernard Lazare; he is an excellent Parnassian but a mediocre philosopher: he is a charming _raconteur_, but he cannot compose a book. Precise in details, diffuse in ensembles, clear and confused, neat and ambiguous, continued M. Lazare, he searches his object in concentric circles. Furthermore, he has the soul of a Greek in the decadence, and the voice of a Sistine Chapel singer--pure and irresolute. To all this admission may be made without fear of decomposing the picture which France has set up before us of his own personality--a picture, however, he does not himself hesitate to efface from the canvas whenever his perversity prompts. He is all that his critic asserts and much more. It is this moral eclecticism, this jumble of opposites, this violent contrast of traits, and these apparently irreconcilable elements of his character, which appal, interest, yet make him so human. But his art never swerves; it records invariably the fluctuations of his spirit, a spirit at once desultory, savant, and subtle, records all in a style, concrete and clairvoyant.

His books are not so much novels as chronicles of designedly simple structure; his essays are confessions; his confessions, a blending of the naïve and the corrupt, for there are corroding properties in these novel persuasive disenchantments. Upon the robust of faith Anatole France makes no more impression than do Augustine, Saint Teresa, the Imitation of Christ, or the Provincial Letters. Such _nuances_ of scepticism as his are for those who love the comedies of belief and disbelief. Not possessing the Huysmans intensity of temperament, France will never be betrayed into such affirmations; Huysmans, who dropped like a ripe plum into the basket of the ecclesiastical fruit-gatherer. France will never lose his balance in the fumes of a personal conversion. Of Plato himself he would ask: "What is Truth?" and if Pilate posed the same question, France would reply by handing him his Jardin d'Epicure--a veritable breviary of scepticism. In Socrates he would discover a congenial companion; yet he might mischievously allude to Montaigne "concerning cats," or quote Aristotle on the form of hats. A wilful child of philosophy and _belles-lettres_, he may be always expected to say the startling.

Be humble! he exhorts. Be without intellectual pride! for the days of man, who is naught but a bit of animated pottery, are brief, and he vanishes like a spark. Thus Job--Anatole. Be humble! Even virtue may be unduly praised: "Since it is overcoming which constitutes merit, we must recognise that it is concupiscence which makes saints. Without it there is no repentance, and it is repentance which makes saints." To become a saint one must have been first a sinner. He quotes, as an example, the conduct of the blessed Pelagia, who accomplished her pilgrimage to Rome by rather unconventional means. Here, too, we recognise the amiable casuistry of Anatole--Voltaire. And there is something of Baudelaire and Barbey d'Aurevilly's piety of imagination with impiety of thought, in France's pronouncement. He is a Chrysostom reversed; from his golden mouth issue spiritual blasphemies.

Mr. Henry James has said that the province of art is "all life, all feeling, all observation, all vision." According to this rubric, France is a profound artist. He plays with the appearances of life, occasionally lifting the edge of the curtain to curdle the blood of his spectators by the sight of Buddha's shadow in some grim cavern beyond. He has the Gallic tact of adorning the blank spaces of theory and the ugly spots of reality. A student of Kant in his denial of the objective, we can never picture him as following Königsberg's sage in his admiration of the starry heavens and the moral law. Both are relative, would be the report of the Frenchman. But, if he is sceptical about things tangible, he is apt to dash off at a tangent and proclaim the existence of that "school of drums kept by the angels," which the hallucinated Arthur Rimbaud heard and beheld. His method of surprising life, despite his ingenuous manner, is sometimes as oblique as that of Jules Laforgue. And, in the words of Pater, his is "one of the happiest temperaments coming to an understanding with the most depressing of theories."

For faith he yearns. He humbles himself beneath the humblest. He excels in picturing the splendours of the simple soul; yet faith has not anointed his intellect with its chrism. He admires the golden filigree of the ciborium; its spiritual essence escapes him. He stands at the portals of Paradise; there he lingers. He stoops to some rare and richly coloured feather. He eloquently vaunts its fabulous beauty, but he will not listen to the whirring of the wings from which it has fallen. Pagan in his irony, his pity wholly Christian, Anatole France has in him something of Petronius and not a little of Saint Francis.