The week
before last Tribune printed a centenary article on Gerard Manley Hopkins, and it was
only after this that the chance of running across an April number of the American Nation
reminded me that 1944 is also the centenary of a much better-known writer Anatole France. When Anatole France
died, twenty years ago, his reputation suffered one of those sudden slumps to which
highbrow writers who have lived long enough to become popular are especially liable. In
France, according to the charming French custom, vicious personal attacks were made upon
him while he lay dying and when he was freshly dead. A particularly venomous one was
written by Pierre Drieu la
Rochelle, afterwards to become a collaborator of the Nazis. In England, also, it
was discovered that Anatole France was no good. A few years later than this a young man
attached to a weekly paper (I met him afterwards in Paris and found that he could not buy
a tram ticket without assistance) solemnly assured me that Anatole France wrote very
bad French. France was, it seemed, a vulgar, spurious and derivative writer whom
everyone could now see through. Round about the same time, similar discoveries
were being made about Bernard Shaw
and Lytton Strachey: but
curiously enough all three writers have remained very readable, while most of their
detractors are forgotten.
How far the revulsion against Anatole France was genuinely literary I
do not know. Certainly he had been overpraised, and one must at times get tired of a
writer so mannered and so indefatigably pornographic. But it is unquestionable that he was
attacked partly from political motives. He may or may not have been a great writer, but he
was one of the symbolic figures in the politico-literary dogfight which has been raging
for a hundred years or more. The clericals and reactionaries hated him in just the same
way as they hated Zola. Anatole France had championed Dreyfus, which needed considerable
courage, he had debunked Joan of Arc,
he had written a comic history of France; above all, he had lost no opportunity of poking
fun at the Church. He was everything that the clericals and revanchistes, the
people who first preached that the Boche must never be allowed to recover and afterwards
sucked the blacking off Hitlers
boots, most detested.
I do not know whether Anatole Frances most characteristic books,
for instance, La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque, are worth rereading at this
date. Whatever is in them is really in Voltaire. But it is a different
story with the four novels dealing with Monsieur Bergeret. Besides being extremely amusing
these give a most valuable picture of French society in the nineties and the background of
the Dreyfus case. There is also Crainquebille, one of the best short stories I
have ever read, and incidentally a devastating attack on law and order.
But though Anatole France could speak up for the working class in a
story like Crainquebille, and though cheap editions of his works were
advertised in Communist papers,
one ought not really to class him as a Socialist. He was willing to work
for Socialism, even to deliver lectures on it in draughty halls, and he knew that it was
both necessary and inevitable, but it is doubtful whether he subjectively wanted it. The
world, he once said, would get about as much relief from the coming of Socialism as a sick
man gets from turning over in bed. In a crisis he was ready to identify himself with the
working class, but the thought of a Utopian future depressed him, as can be seen from his
book, La Pierre Blanche. There is an even deeper pessimism on Les Dieux Ont Soif,
his novel about the French
Revolution. Temperamentally he was not a Socialist but a Radical. At this date that is
probably the rarer animal of the two, and it is his Radicalism, his passion for liberty
and intellectual honesty, that give their special colour to the four novels about Monsieur
Bergeret.
I have never understood why the News Chronicle, whose politics are certainly a
very pale pink about the colour of shrimp paste, I should say, but still pink
allows the professional Roman Catholic Timothy Shy (D. B. Wyndham Lewis) to do daily
sabotage in his comic column. In Lord
Beaverbrooks Express his fellow-Catholic Beachcomber (J. B.
Morton) is, of course, more at home. Looking back over the twenty years or so that these
two have been on the job, it would be difficult to find a reactionary cause that they have
not championed Pilsudski,
Mussolini, appeasement,
flogging, Franco, literary
censorship; between them they have found good words for everything that any decent person
instinctively objects to. They have conducted endless propaganda against Socialism, the League of Nations and scientific
research. They have kept up a campaign of abuse against every writer worth reading, from
Joyce onwards. They were viciously anti-German until Hitler appeared, when their
anti-Germanism cooled off in a remarkable manner. At this moment, needless to say, the
especial target of their hatred is Beveridge.
It is a mistake to regard these two as comics pure and simple. Every
word they write is intended as Catholic propaganda, and some at least of their
co-religionists think very highly of their work in this direction. Their general
line will be familiar to anyone who has read Chesterton and kindred writers. Its
essential note is denigration of England and of the Protestant countries generally. From
the Catholic point of view this is necessary. A Catholic, at least an apologist, feels
that he must claim superiority for the Catholic countries, and for the Middle Ages
as against the present, just as a Communist feels that he must in all circumstances
support the U.S.S.R. Hence the endless jibing of Beachcomber and Timothy
Shy at every English institution tea, cricket, Wordsworth, Charlie Chaplin, kindness to
animals, Nelson, Cromwell and what-not. Hence also
Timothy Shys attempts to rewrite English history and the snarls of hatred that
escape him when he thinks of the defeat of the Spanish Armada. (How it sticks in
his gizzard, that Spanish Armada! As though anyone cared, at this date!) Hence, even, the
endless jeering at novelists, the novel being essentially a post-Reformation form of literature at
which on the whole Catholics have not excelled.
From either a literary or a political point of view these two are
simply the leavings on Chestertons plate. Chestertons vision of life was false
in some ways, and he was hampered by enormous ignorance, but at least he had courage. He
was ready to attack the rich and powerful, and he damaged his career by doing so. But it
is the peculiarity of both Beachcomber and Timothy Shy that they
take no risks with their own popularity. Their strategy is always indirect. Thus, if you
want to attack the principle of freedom of speech, do it by sneering at the Brains Trust,
as if it were a typical example. Dr Joad wont retaliate! Even their deepest
convictions go into cold storage when they become dangerous. Earlier in the war, when it
was safe to do so, Beachcomber wrote viciously anti-Russian pamphlets, but no
anti-Russian remarks appear in his column these days. They will again, however, if popular
pro-Russian feeling dies down. I shall be interested to see whether either
Beachcomber or Timothy Shy reacts to these remarks of mine. If so,
it will be the first recorded instance of either of them attacking anyone likely to hit
back.