CHAPTER CX

THE REBEL IMMORTAL

Henry James remarks somewhere that an American has to study for fifty years of his life in order to attain, culturally speaking, the point from which a European starts at birth. Just what does he mean by this unpatriotic utterance? I am reminded of it when I think of Anatole France, and recall his characteristic sayings. Consider the following:

’Tis 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.

Now it is possible to conceive of a Catholic bishop or a Methodist missionary or a Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan who might be too stupid to understand that remark; but it is difficult to conceive how, understanding it, he could withhold the tribute of a smile. Into this remark a great master of words has distilled the essence of a civilization, the precious flavor of centuries of culture. There are only thirty-four words in it, and yet you can afford to meditate upon it for a long time. The writer of such a paragraph possesses a mind emancipated from the shams and delusions of the ages; he is skeptical, realistic, and as witty as it is possible for a man to be; yet also he is urbane--he does not seize you by the shoulders and shake you, for he has learned that there are all kinds of strange people in the world, and he asks merely that you consent to smile with him.

How is such a man brought into existence? His father was a book-seller, and so he breathed culture in his childhood; he read everything from every part of the world, especially things written by men long since dead; things full of that beauty mingled with sadness which is one of the gifts of time. Anatole France learned to be at home in strange cultures, and at the same time he studied the masters of his own country, whose specialties are precision and lucidity and charm of phrase. At the age of twenty-seven he published a story, “The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard,” a sentimental pretty tale about an elderly, kind-hearted French antiquarian, who rescues a little girl from cruel mistreatment, and then discovers that under the French law he is guilty of abduction. It might have been written by any of our magazine writers of the cheer-up, God’s-in-His-Heaven school--provided only that these writers had possessed a thousand years of culture.

It was just what the Academy of Richelieu loved, and they crowned it. The young writer was taken up by an exquisite French lady, who became his mistress, and set up a salon for him, and helped him to meet all the editors and critics--which is how you make fame and fortune in Paris, and sometimes in America, I am told. This Frenchman was clever and witty, sensual, cynical, but not too much so for his elegant free-thinking tradition. He wrote other novels and a great quantity of miscellaneous writings, and in 1896, at the age of fifty-two, his labors were rewarded by the great French honor, he became one of Richelieu’s forty Immortals. In the ordinary course of events there was nothing more for him to do, save to sink back in his comfortable arm-chair and listen to the plaudits of Paris.

But a strange and alarming thing happened. The struggle over the Dreyfus case arose, and Anatole France leaped into the arena, joining Zola, whom he had previously denounced as a beastly writer. Here was something absolutely without precedent--that an Academician should turn into a Socialist, and take to attending meetings of workingmen, and addressing to them remarks unfit to be quoted in respectable newspapers. Worse even yet, he, the pride and glory of art-for-art’s-sake culture, took to putting radical propaganda into novels! They had let him in among the Immortals, and there was no way to get him out; so here was one of the pillars of literary authority, portraying his country as an island of penguins, and the pillars of his church and state as grotesque, wingless birds, dressing themselves in frock-coats and silk hats and hopping about upon obscene errands. Have a glimpse of them:

“Do you see, my son,” he exclaimed, “that madman who with his teeth is biting the nose of the adversary he has overthrown, and that other one who is pounding a woman’s head with a huge stone?”

“I see them,” said Bulloch. “They are creating law; they are founding property; they are establishing the principles of civilization, the basis of society, the foundations of the State.”

“How is that?” asked old Maël.

“By setting bounds to their fields. That is the origin of all government. Your penguins, O Master, are performing the most august of functions. Throughout the ages their work will be consecrated by lawyers, and magistrates will confirm it.”

“Penguin Island” was published in 1908; and then came the war, and this elderly antiquarian--he was seventy then--came forward and enlisted to fight for his country. But that did not mean, as with many others of lesser judgment, that he gave up his hopes for the working class, and surrendered to the propaganda of capitalist nationalism. We find him at the age of seventy-five, carrying a red flag in a procession of French radicals, protesting against the acquittal of the assassin of Jaurès. We find him ready to break an engagement to a literary banquet in order to address a working-class meeting in protest against capitalist church and state. He, the greatest of all the Immortals, sets himself against the other thirty-nine; he, the old man, sets himself against the cultured youth of his country, who have abandoned themselves to a mixture of Catholic mysticism with homosexuality, of Dadaist imbecility with athleticism having for its goal the turning of machine-guns upon the workers.

The books of Anatole France afford a curious study of struggle between the old pessimistic, cynical culture of capitalism and the new creative culture of the awakening proletariat. These cultures are absolutely irreconcilable, but Anatole France believed in both. He was a social revolutionist with his conscious mind and judgment, while he remained a fatalist and a scoffer with his hereditary culture, that ancient accumulation of despair and terror which he had breathed in with the dust in his father’s old book-shop.

So he writes “The Gods Are Athirst,” in which he portrays mankind as given up to endless misery and destruction; or “The Revolt of the Angels,” in which again the heavens are drowned in blood and there is no hope. After which he issues a manifesto upholding Russia, or calling upon the workers to rally to the Third International. He goes before a convention of the organized teachers of France, and delivers to them an address of such magnificent eloquence as to move the assemblage to tears. I have quoted from this address in “The Goslings”; I repeat one paragraph--because it is the duty of a writer to spread these words on every possible occasion, to bring to the great master the help upon which he relies:

Reason, wisdom, intelligence, forces of the mind and heart, whom I have always devoutly invoked, come to me, aid me, sustain my feeble voice; carry it, if that may be, to all the peoples of the world, and diffuse it everywhere where there are men of good will to hear the beneficent truth! A new order of things is born. The powers of evil die, poisoned by their crime. The greedy and the cruel, the devourers of peoples, are bursting with an indigestion of blood. However sorely stricken by the sins of their blind or corrupt masters, mutilated, decimated, the proletarians remain erect; they will unite to form one universal proletariat, and we shall see fulfilled the great Socialist prophecy: “The union of the workers will be the peace of the world.”

It was interesting to note, in the obituaries which the death of Anatole France brought forth, how almost universally this aspect of his life was glossed over. Our literary reviews told all about him as a master of French prose, a supreme ironist in the tradition of Rabelais, Voltaire, and Renan. But they left it for the radical papers to celebrate Anatole France, the crusader, the carrier of the red flag. I am urged to believe that our literary Tories are honest, but all this moves me to wonder.

I ask them, once for all, what is it they want? What proof will content our cultural stand-patters? Here is their crowned favorite, their revered master, the man who was as witty as it is possible for a human being to be; and he sets out to prove to them that it is just as easy to be witty in the service of Justice as in the service of Mammon. I ask you, gentlemen of letters, do you know how a sentence can be wittier than this: “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.”

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