1904
I.--"CRAINQUEBILLE"
The latest volume of M. Anatole France purports, by the declaration of
its title-page, to contain several profitable narratives. The story of
Crainquebille's encounter with human justice stands at the head of them;
a tale of a well-bestowed charity closes the book with the touch of
playful irony characteristic of the writer on whom the most distinguished
amongst his literary countrymen have conferred the rank of Prince of
Prose.
Never has a dignity been better borne. M. Anatole France is a good
prince. He knows nothing of tyranny but much of compassion. The
detachment of his mind from common errors and current superstitions
befits the exalted rank he holds in the Commonwealth of Literature. It
is just to suppose that the clamour of the tribes in the forum had little
to do with his elevation. Their elect are of another stamp. They are
such as their need of precipitate action requires. He is the Elect of
the Senate--the Senate of Letters--whose Conscript Fathers have
recognised him as _primus inter pares_; a post of pure honour and of no
privilege.
It is a good choice. First, because it is just, and next, because it is
safe. The dignity will suffer no diminution in M. Anatole France's
hands. He is worthy of a great tradition, learned in the lessons of the
past, concerned with the present, and as earnest as to the future as a
good prince should be in his public action. It is a Republican dignity.
And M. Anatole France, with his sceptical insight into an forms of
government, is a good Republican. He is indulgent to the weaknesses of
the people, and perceives that political institutions, whether contrived
by the wisdom of the few or the ignorance of the many, are incapable of
securing the happiness of mankind. He perceives this truth in the
serenity of his soul and in the elevation of his mind. He expresses his
convictions with measure, restraint and harmony, which are indeed
princely qualities. He is a great analyst of illusions. He searches and
probes their innermost recesses as if they were realities made of an
eternal substance. And therein consists his humanity; this is the
expression of his profound and unalterable compassion. He will flatter
no tribe no section in the forum or in the market-place. His lucid
thought is not beguiled into false pity or into the common weakness of
affection. He feels that men born in ignorance as in the house of an
enemy, and condemned to struggle with error and passions through endless
centuries, should be spared the supreme cruelty of a hope for ever
deferred. He knows that our best hopes are irrealisable; that it is the
almost incredible misfortune of mankind, but also its highest privilege,
to aspire towards the impossible; that men have never failed to defeat
their highest aims by the very strength of their humanity which can
conceive the most gigantic tasks but leaves them disarmed before their
irremediable littleness. He knows this well because he is an artist and
a master; but he knows, too, that only in the continuity of effort there
is a refuge from despair for minds less clear-seeing and philosophic than
his own. Therefore he wishes us to believe and to hope, preserving in
our activity the consoling illusion of power and intelligent purpose. He
is a good and politic prince.
"The majesty of justice is contained entire in each sentence pronounced
by the judge in the name of the sovereign people. Jerome Crainquebille,
hawker of vegetables, became aware of the august aspect of the law as he
stood indicted before the tribunal of the higher Police Court on a charge
of insulting a constable of the force." With this exposition begins the
first tale of M. Anatole France's latest volume.
The bust of the Republic and the image of the Crucified Christ appear
side by side above the bench occupied by the President Bourriche and his
two Assessors; all the laws divine and human are suspended over the head
of Crainquebille.
From the first visual impression of the accused and of the court the
author passes by a characteristic and natural turn to the historical and
moral significance of those two emblems of State and Religion whose
accord is only possible to the confused reasoning of an average man. But
the reasoning of M. Anatole France is never confused. His reasoning is
clear and informed by a profound erudition. Such is not the case of
Crainquebille, a street hawker, charged with insulting the constituted
power of society in the person of a policeman. The charge is not true,
nothing was further from his thoughts; but, amazed by the novelty of his
position, he does not reflect that the Cross on the wall perpetuates the
memory of a sentence which for nineteen hundred years all the Christian
peoples have looked upon as a grave miscarriage of justice. He might
well have challenged the President to pronounce any sort of sentence, if
it were merely to forty-eight hours of simple imprisonment, in the name
of the Crucified Redeemer.
He might have done so. But Crainquebille, who has lived pushing every
day for half a century his hand-barrow loaded with vegetables through the
streets of Paris, has not a philosophic mind. Truth to say he has
nothing. He is one of the disinherited. Properly speaking, he has no
existence at all, or, to be strictly truthful, he had no existence till
M. Anatole France's philosophic mind and human sympathy have called him
up from his nothingness for our pleasure, and, as the title-page of the
book has it, no doubt for our profit also.
Therefore we behold him in the dock, a stranger to all historical,
political or social considerations which can be brought to bear upon his
case. He remains lost in astonishment. Penetrated with respect,
overwhelmed with awe, he is ready to trust the judge upon the question of
his transgression. In his conscience he does not think himself culpable;
but M. Anatole France's philosophical mind discovers for us that he feels
all the insignificance of such a thing as the conscience of a mere street-
hawker in the face of the symbols of the law and before the ministers of
social repression. Crainquebille is innocent; but already the young
advocate, his defender, has half persuaded him of his guilt.
On this phrase practically ends the introductory chapter of the story
which, as the author's dedication states, has inspired an admirable
draughtsman and a skilful dramatist, each in his art, to a vision of
tragic grandeur. And this opening chapter without a name--consisting of
two and a half pages, some four hundred words at most--is a masterpiece
of insight and simplicity, resumed in M. Anatole France's distinction of
thought and in his princely command of words.
It is followed by six more short chapters, concise and full, delicate and
complete like the petals of a flower, presenting to us the Adventure of
Crainquebille--Crainquebille before the justice--An Apology for the
President of the Tribunal--Of the Submission of Crainquebille to the Laws
of the Republic--Of his Attitude before the Public Opinion, and so on to
the chapter of the Last Consequences. We see, created for us in his
outward form and innermost perplexity, the old man degraded from his high
estate of a law-abiding street-hawker and driven to insult, really this
time, the majesty of the social order in the person of another police-
constable. It is not an act of revolt, and still less of revenge.
Crainquebille is too old, too resigned, too weary, too guileless to raise
the black standard of insurrection. He is cold and homeless and
starving. He remembers the warmth and the food of the prison. He
perceives the means to get back there. Since he has been locked up, he
argues with himself, for uttering words which, as a matter of fact he did
not say, he will go forth now, and to the first policeman he meets will
say those very words in order to be imprisoned again. Thus reasons
Crainquebille with simplicity and confidence. He accepts facts. Nothing
surprises him. But all the phenomena of social organisation and of his
own life remain for him mysterious to the end. The description of the
policeman in his short cape and hood, who stands quite still, under the
light of a street lamp at the edge of the pavement shining with the wet
of a rainy autumn evening along the whole extent of a long and deserted
thoroughfare, is a perfect piece of imaginative precision. From under
the edge of the hood his eyes look upon Crainquebille, who has just
uttered in an uncertain voice the sacramental, insulting phrase of the
popular slang--_Mort aux vaches_! They look upon him shining in the deep
shadow of the hood with an expression of sadness, vigilance, and
contempt.
He does not move. Crainquebille, in a feeble and hesitating voice,
repeats once more the insulting words. But this policeman is full of
philosophic superiority, disdain, and indulgence. He refuses to take in
charge the old and miserable vagabond who stands before him shivering and
ragged in the drizzle. And the ruined Crainquebille, victim of a
ridiculous miscarriage of justice, appalled at this magnanimity, passes
on hopelessly down the street full of shadows where the lamps gleam each
in a ruddy halo of falling mist.
M. Anatole France can speak for the people. This prince of the Senate is
invested with the tribunitian power. M. Anatole France is something of a
Socialist; and in that respect he seems to depart from his sceptical
philosophy. But as an illustrious statesman, now no more, a great prince
too, with an ironic mind and a literary gift, has sarcastically remarked
in one of his public speeches: "We are all Socialists now." And in the
sense in which it may be said that we all in Europe are Christians that
is true enough. To many of us Socialism is merely an emotion. An
emotion is much and is also less than nothing. It is the initial
impulse. The real Socialism of to-day is a religion. It has its dogmas.
The value of the dogma does not consist in its truthfulness, and M.
Anatole France, who loves truth, does not love dogma. Only, unlike
religion, the cohesive strength of Socialism lies not in its dogmas but
in its ideal. It is perhaps a too materialistic ideal, and the mind of
M. Anatole France may not find in it either comfort or consolation. It
is not to be doubted that he suspects this himself; but there is
something reposeful in the finality of popular conceptions. M. Anatole
France, a good prince and a good Republican, will succeed no doubt in
being a good Socialist. He will disregard the stupidity of the dogma and
the unlovely form of the ideal. His art will find its own beauty in the
imaginative presentation of wrongs, of errors, and miseries that call
aloud for redress. M. Anatole France is humane. He is also human. He
may be able to discard his philosophy; to forget that the evils are many
and the remedies are few, that there is no universal panacea, that
fatality is invincible, that there is an implacable menace of death in
the triumph of the humanitarian idea. He may forget all that because
love is stronger than truth.
Besides "Crainquebille" this volume contains sixteen other stories and
sketches. To define them it is enough to say that they are written in M.
Anatole France's prose. One sketch entitled "Riquet" may be found
incorporated in the volume of _Monsieur Bergeret a Paris_. "Putois" is a
remarkable little tale, significant, humorous, amusing, and symbolic. It
concerns the career of a man born in the utterance of a hasty and
untruthful excuse made by a lady at a loss how to decline without offence
a very pressing invitation to dinner from a very tyrannical aunt. This
happens in a provincial town, and the lady says in effect: "Impossible,
my dear aunt. To-morrow I am expecting the gardener." And the garden
she glances at is a poor garden; it is a wild garden; its extent is
insignificant and its neglect seems beyond remedy. "A gardener! What
for?" asks the aunt. "To work in the garden." And the poor lady is
abashed at the transparence of her evasion. But the lie is told, it is
believed, and she sticks to it. When the masterful old aunt inquires,
"What is the man's name, my dear?" she answers brazenly, "His name is
Putois." "Where does he live?" "Oh, I don't know; anywhere. He won't
give his address. One leaves a message for him here and there." "Oh! I
see," says the other; "he is a sort of ne'er do well, an idler, a
vagabond. I advise you, my dear, to be careful how you let such a
creature into your grounds; but I have a large garden, and when you do
not want his services I shall find him some work to do, and see he does
it too. Tell your Putois to come and see me." And thereupon Putois is
born; he stalks abroad, invisible, upon his career of vagabondage and
crime, stealing melons from gardens and tea-spoons from pantries,
indulging his licentious proclivities; becoming the talk of the town and
of the countryside; seen simultaneously in far-distant places; pursued by
gendarmes, whose brigadier assures the uneasy householders that he "knows
that scamp very well, and won't be long in laying his hands upon him." A
detailed description of his person collected from the information
furnished by various people appears in the columns of a local newspaper.
Putois lives in his strength and malevolence. He lives after the manner
of legendary heroes, of the gods of Olympus. He is the creation of the
popular mind. There comes a time when even the innocent originator of
that mysterious and potent evil-doer is induced to believe for a moment
that he may have a real and tangible presence. All this is told with the
wit and the art and the philosophy which is familiar to M. Anatole
France's readers and admirers. For it is difficult to read M. Anatole
France without admiring him. He has the princely gift of arousing a
spontaneous loyalty, but with this difference, that the consent of our
reason has its place by the side of our enthusiasm. He is an artist. As
an artist he awakens emotion. The quality of his art remains, as an
inspiration, fascinating and inscrutable; but the proceedings of his
thought compel our intellectual admiration.
In this volume the trifle called "The Military Manoeuvres at Montil,"
apart from its far-reaching irony, embodies incidentally the very spirit
of automobilism. Somehow or other, how you cannot tell, the flight over
the country in a motor-car, its sensations, its fatigue, its vast
topographical range, its incidents down to the bursting of a tyre, are
brought home to you with all the force of high imaginative perception. It
would be out of place to analyse here the means by which the true
impression is conveyed so that the absurd rushing about of General
Decuir, in a 30-horse-power car, in search of his cavalry brigade,
becomes to you a more real experience than any day-and-night run you may
ever have taken yourself. Suffice it to say that M. Anatole France had
thought the thing worth doing and that it becomes, in virtue of his art,
a distinct achievement. And there are other sketches in this book, more
or less slight, but all worthy of regard--the childhood's recollections
of Professor Bergeret and his sister Zoe; the dialogue of the two upright
judges and the conversation of their horses; the dream of M. Jean
Marteau, aimless, extravagant, apocalyptic, and of all the dreams one
ever dreamt, the most essentially dreamlike. The vision of M. Anatole
France, the Prince of Prose, ranges over all the extent of his realm,
indulgent and penetrating, disillusioned and curious, finding treasures
of truth and beauty concealed from less gifted magicians. Contemplating
the exactness of his images and the justice of his judgment, the freedom
of his fancy and the fidelity of his purpose, one becomes aware of the
futility of literary watchwords and the vanity of all the schools of
fiction. Not that M. Anatole France is a wild and untrammelled genius.
He is not that. Issued legitimately from the past, he is mindful of his
high descent. He has a critical temperament joined to creative power. He
surveys his vast domain in a spirit of princely moderation that knows
nothing of excesses but much of restraint.
II.--"L'ILE DES PINGOUINS"
M. Anatole France, historian and adventurer, has given us many profitable
histories of saints and sinners, of Roman procurators and of officials of
the Third Republic, of _grandes dames_ and of dames not so very grand, of
ornate Latinists and of inarticulate street hawkers, of priests and
generals--in fact, the history of all humanity as it appears to his
penetrating eye, serving a mind marvellously incisive in its scepticism,
and a heart that, of all contemporary hearts gifted with a voice,
contains the greatest treasure of charitable irony. As to M. Anatole
France's adventures, these are well-known. They lie open to this
prodigal world in the four volumes of the _Vie Litteraire_, describing
the adventures of a choice soul amongst masterpieces. For such is the
romantic view M. Anatole France takes of the life of a literary critic.
History and adventure, then, seem to be the chosen fields for the
magnificent evolutions of M. Anatole France's prose; but no material
limits can stand in the way of a genius. The latest book from his
pen--which may be called golden, as the lips of an eloquent saint once
upon a time were acclaimed golden by the faithful--this latest book is,
up to a certain point, a book of travel.
I would not mislead a public whose confidence I court. The book is not a
record of globe-trotting. I regret it. It would have been a joy to
watch M. Anatole France pouring the clear elixir compounded of his
Pyrrhonic philosophy, his Benedictine erudition, his gentle wit and most
humane irony into such an unpromising and opaque vessel. He would have
attempted it in a spirit of benevolence towards his fellow men and of
compassion for that life of the earth which is but a vain and transitory
illusion. M. Anatole France is a great magician, yet there seem to be
tasks which he dare not face. For he is also a sage.
It is a book of ocean travel--not, however, as understood by Herr Ballin
of Hamburg, the Machiavel of the Atlantic. It is a book of exploration
and discovery--not, however, as conceived by an enterprising journal and
a shrewdly philanthropic king of the nineteenth century. It is nothing
so recent as that. It dates much further back; long, long before the
dark age when Krupp of Essen wrought at his steel plates and a German
Emperor condescendingly suggested the last improvements in ships' dining-
tables. The best idea of the inconceivable antiquity of that enterprise
I can give you is by stating the nature of the explorer's ship. It was a
trough of stone, a vessel of hollowed granite.
The explorer was St. Mael, a saint of Armorica. I had never heard of him
before, but I believe now in his arduous existence with a faith which is
a tribute to M. Anatole France's pious earnestness and delicate irony.
St. Mael existed. It is distinctly stated of him that his life was a
progress in virtue. Thus it seems that there may be saints that are not
progressively virtuous. St. Mael was not of that kind. He was
industrious. He evangelised the heathen. He erected two hundred and
eighteen chapels and seventy-four abbeys. Indefatigable navigator of the
faith, he drifted casually in the miraculous trough of stone from coast
to coast and from island to island along the northern seas. At the age
of eighty-four his high stature was bowed by his long labours, but his
sinewy arms preserved their vigour and his rude eloquence had lost
nothing of its force.
A nautical devil tempting him by the worldly suggestion of fitting out
his desultory, miraculous trough with mast, sail, and rudder for swifter
progression (the idea of haste has sprung from the pride of Satan), the
simple old saint lent his ear to the subtle arguments of the progressive
enemy of mankind.
The venerable St. Mael fell away from grace by not perceiving at once
that a gift of heaven cannot be improved by the contrivances of human
ingenuity. His punishment was adequate. A terrific tempest snatched the
rigged ship of stone in its whirlwinds, and, to be brief, the dazed St.
Mael was stranded violently on the Island of Penguins.
The saint wandered away from the shore. It was a flat, round island
whence rose in the centre a conical mountain capped with clouds. The
rain was falling incessantly--a gentle, soft rain which caused the simple
saint to exclaim in great delight: "This is the island of tears, the
island of contrition!"
Meantime the inhabitants had flocked in their tens of thousands to an
amphitheatre of rocks; they were penguins; but the holy man, rendered
deaf and purblind by his years, mistook excusably the multitude of silly,
erect, and self-important birds for a human crowd. At once he began to
preach to them the doctrine of salvation. Having finished his discourse
he lost no time in administering to his interesting congregation the
sacrament of baptism.
If you are at all a theologian you will see that it was no mean adventure
to happen to a well-meaning and zealous saint. Pray reflect on the
magnitude of the issues! It is easy to believe what M. Anatole France
says, that, when the baptism of the Penguins became known in Paradise, it
caused there neither joy nor sorrow, but a profound sensation.
M. Anatole France is no mean theologian himself. He reports with great
casuistical erudition the debates in the saintly council assembled in
Heaven for the consideration of an event so disturbing to the economy of
religious mysteries. Ultimately the baptised Penguins had to be turned
into human beings; and together with the privilege of sublime hopes these
innocent birds received the curse of original sin, with the labours, the
miseries, the passions, and the weaknesses attached to the fallen
condition of humanity.
At this point M. Anatole France is again an historian. From being the
Hakluyt of a saintly adventurer he turns (but more concisely) into the
Gibbon of Imperial Penguins. Tracing the development of their
civilisation, the absurdity of their desires, the pathos of their folly
and the ridiculous littleness of their quarrels, his golden pen lightens
by relevant but unpuritanical anecdotes the austerity of a work devoted
to a subject so grave as the Polity of Penguins. It is a very admirable
treatment, and I hasten to congratulate all men of receptive mind on the
feast of wisdom which is theirs for the mere plucking of a book from a
shelf.