ANATOLE FRANCE
BY
GEORGE BRANDES
MEN OF CONTEMPORARY LETTERS SERIES
LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
MCMVIII
ANATOLE FRANCE — Bust by Lavergne
The true author is recognisable by the existence on every page of hisworks of at least one sentence or one phrase which none but he couldhave written.
Take the following sentence: "If we may believe this amiable shepherdof souls, it is impossible for us to elude divine mercy, and we shallall enter Paradise—unless, indeed, there be no Paradise, which isexceedingly probable." It treats of Renan. It must be written by adisciple of Renan's, whose humour perhaps allows itself a little morelicence 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 honouredand respected." There is only one man who can have written this. Itjestingly indicates the fact that society forgives woman everythingexcept a passion, and communicates this observation to the reader, asit were with a gentle nudge.
Or take the following: "We should not love nature, for she is notlovable; but neither should we hate her, for she is not deserving ofhatred. She is everything. It is very difficult to be everything. Itresults in terrible heavy-handedness and awkwardness."
There is only one man who would excuse Nature for her indifference tous human beings in these words: "It is very difficult to be everything."
Read this passage: "It is a great infirmity to think. God preserveyou from it, my son, as He has preserved His greatest saints and thesouls whom He loves with especial tenderness and destines to eternalfelicity."
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 inpolitics a Moderate of the most violent description."
Few are so picturesque in their satire as he. Others have used thephrase: Equality before the law—that means equality before the lawswhich the well-to-do have made for the poor, and men for women. Othershave maintained that the ideal of justice would be an inequality beforethe law adjusted to the differences between individuals. Others havesaid: If there is inequality in law itself, where is equality to befound?
But there is only one man who can have written: "The law, in itsmajestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep underbridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
This one man is Anatole France. Most noticeable in this style is itsirony; it stamps him as a spiritual descendant of Renan. But in spiteof the relationship, France's irony is of a very different descriptionfrom Renan's. Renan, as historian or critic, always speaks in hisown name, and we are directly conscious of himself in the fictitiouspersonages of his philosophic dramas, and even more so in those of hisphilosophic dialogues. France's irony conceals itself beneath naïveté.Renan disguises himself, France transforms himself. He writes fromstandpoints which are directly the opposite of his own—primitiveChristian, or mediæval Catholic—and through what is said we apprehendwhat he means. Other writers may be as