THE BOOKMAN

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 9, 1 April 1927, Page 10

THE BOOKMAN

Reviews Sc Notes

Anatole France

THE WRITER AND THE MAN (Written for THE SUN.) pROFESSOR SAINTSBURY has called Jacques Anatole Thibault, better known as Anatole France, “the Master of the Laugh.” While we dislike the phrase as having about it a certain artificiality, a tang of the lec ture-room, we are compelled to admit its underlying truth. We can recall no writer, living or dead, who has that same power of w r aking satanic laughter in the hearts of men. There is little satisfaction and no comfort in a full appreciation of the wit and philosophy of Anatole France, but there is a deep wisdom, an unholy joy, to be found in him. He is like some sour but potent wine which has mastered the appetite, and which, fascinated, we continue to sip, though we know it cannot ease our spirits. Despite the lightness of his touch he appeals deeply and unerringly to all that is wicked and wise in the mind of man. If he were more bitter we should call him cynical; if his wit were blunter we should call him shallow. As it is, he is none of these things. To be sure, he is often written down as a cynic, but there is too much of the epicure and the sensualist in him for him to be considered really cynical. His irony is like a rapier, swift and piercing; but for all that there is no danger of his being mistaken for a mere dabbler in life, one who takes divine philosophy and makes of it pellets for his peashooter. The Fabric of His Creations We are inclined to agree with Mr. Middleton Murry w'hen he says that Anatole France’s characters are for the most part m’arionettes, lacking

ife. They are not cut after the Shavian pattern, of course, but for ill that there is about them none of he vitality and warmth which charicterise, for example, the men and vomen who people Mr. Thomas -lardy’s books. This, after all, does lot constitute a serious defect in the ivorks, for though they lack the ac:ual quality of living, they touch life it every point. If one wished to be •eally enthusiastic, one might say that if anything this adds to the value of ihe stories, if we consider them as ■ommentaries on life, since it clears iway the emotional filaments and allows the intellect fuller play. The ippeal is undoubtedly to the intellect. If comparisons are permissible, it is ;afe to say that Anatole France’s itories are stories of ideas, just as Shaw's plays are dramas of ideas. The difference is that whereas Shaw ;onsiders the intellectual faculty the >nly one to be catered for, and any.hing else to be of no importance vhatever, Anatole France dresses his rieas up as people, and takes care hat they are at least the semblances •f living souls. The misfortune with vhich his people meet touch our leads but not our hearts. When lean Servieu comes to grief as a remit of bad luck and bad managenent. we feel little of the compassion ve have for Tess Durbeyfield or Jude. Ke are too taken up with the purely ihilosophical aspect of the story to hink very deeply about the human ;ide of it. His Popularity It is curious that Anatole France hould be more popular outside his *wn country than inside it. Such a •osition is not unique. Byron was, nd I believe still is, more widely ead on the Continent than in Engand; Frank Harris, whea he went to Vmerica, began a series of violent ittacks upon English manners and norals, and to his own surprise and hat of everybody else was condemned n America and mildly apotheosised »y the English. This sort of thing las happened time and again. It eems hardly understandable, howiver, that a man so typically Gallic n his style and outlook should be onsidered a back number in France. In his own country, strange as it nay sound,” writes M. Ernest Dimtet in “France Herself Again,” “M. Anatole France is a fossil.” Political and Religious Views M. Dimnet gives us, in our opinion, i clue to the explanation. In his look, mentioned above, which was jublished in the early days of the var, he says also ‘‘as to M. Anatole France, he has lived long enough to jecome a sort of conundrum. It is lisconcerting to find that the same nan may have distilled the wisdom .here is in such books as the Bergeret rolumes or *Les Dieux Ont Soif,’ and ranted in a turgid manner at Socialist neetings; that a man who intellectuilly is so unmistakably French should >ut his name to anti-militarist posters >r prefix it with ‘Salut et Fraternite.' ” Anatole France was an advanced Socialist—“ Socialism is the conscience if the world,” he said. In this fact we find the explanation of the reactionary M. Dimnet’s inability to unterstand him, and of the comparative lack of enthusiasm for M. Fiance his own land. Previous to 1904 French political thought had been iwinging heavily towards Socialism, lut at some point, roughly about the ;ime of the Morocco trouble and the tnglo-French military “conversations” >f 1906, there was a sudden and violent re-action, and from then up till

| in the hands of the Militarists. That iis why M. Dimnet calls his book “France Herself Again.” That is also to some extent the reason w T hy, in writing a work which “is offered to the public as an explanation of the warlike France with which it is in sucn deep sympathy,” he calls Anatole France a “fossil.” M. Dimnet was further rattled, no doubt, by his anti-clericalism. “How can one really believe religion to have a moralising effect when one reads the history of the Christian Nations, and realises it to be a succession of wars, massacres and tortures” This sort of thing is not likely to prove soothing to the ear of a man with the political and religious view’s of M. Dimnet. As a matter of absolute fact, we suspect strongly that it is this disagreement between the beliefs of the author and his critic that leads to M. Dimnet’s use of the word “fossil:” A better way of stating the case w’ould be to say that during the last twenty years the opinions held by Anatole France on religious and social questions, though once popular, have become unfashionable among the majority of Frenchmen. Which leaves us free to take the broad outlook, discounting fashion, and form a judgment of our own. We who are not in France have the advantage ir this matter of being able to use perspective, and to think of him as a writer purely &nd simply. If the man Thibault w r ere more familiar to those who read his books outside of his native country, it is conceivable that he would not be as popular as he is. For instance, how many who now read him with enjoyment know how extremely rabid a Socialist he was? And would a knowledge of this increase their appreciation of him? As for M. Dimnet, w r e may be sure that if he found Anatole France a “living contradiction” and a “conundrum,” it was only because he omitted to clear the cobw r ebs out of his brain before forming an opinion. For our own part, it would be the easier course to foist this task on to posterity, in the usual manner of reviewers. At the same time, knowing his gifts of irony and satire for what they are, w’e feel disposed to agree with Robert Blatchford when he wrote before France’s death: “Anatole France is a great man, and there is no living celebrity for whom I have so much reverence and regard.” A. R. D. FAIRBURN. Grey Lynn. BOOKS REVIEWED OPOTIKI’S NOVEL NOVEL by a Nek Zealander, “Solemn Boy” is the novel; Mr. Hector Bolitho is the New Zealander. Timothy Shrove, the solemn boy, was born in Opotiki, where his ancestors had come, in Mr. Bolitho’s curious phrase, “to wrest the land from the clouds of native ignorance.” His early adventures there are described with laborious attention to detail, but with little insight. Timothy’s literary ambitions draw him first to Auckland and then to Sydney; but not even in the ampler ether, the diviner air of Sydney, where he meets a sausage-seller, a harlot, and an actress, does he grow into any sort of significance. He marries the actress, who talks nonsense, but makes up for that by “decorating her personality with food.” They become estranged. Timothy rushes off to delirium in Suva, returns comforted by a French priest, and “The Gathering of Brother Hilarius,” and finds himself a father. We leave him immediately after, a widower, but not yet a novelist.

Mr. Bolitho, whose book is not without occasional touches of shrewd observation, makes many annoying blunders of an elementary kind and follows a perverse system of punctuation. Mr. Luken’s whisky and his wife’s frocks always became the pulse about which an admiring circle would gather. Then she made a small bag. into which she put cotton and needles. This, with a small bottle of iodine, some cotton w’ool, and a New Testament, were packed into the trunk. She devised luxuries and extravagances to fight the hardness of her life and she looked at the frocks worn by women in the illustrated English papers with a strange greed. She had read romances of England, where love was a delicate, intimate thing staged in beautiful rooms. Excepting church, Timothy's aunts wearing lace collars, held high with whalebone, the Sundays were long and quiet. They sat on the deck at night and watched the ribbon of land being drawn past them; it seemed. Timothy looked up and saw a pipe, clutched firmly between unaccustomed teeth and immense whiffs of smoke coming out of the grinning mouth. Timothy looked across the room at Mrs. Luken. She had decorated herself into a comfortable chair. The almost unhealthy morbidity . . . It was the fall of the last picket in her fence of revolt. She watched the bombastic soda pouring into the glass. And so on. And so on. And so on. Still, it is very nice for Opotiki to get into a book. “Solemn Boy.” Hector Bolitho. Chatto and Windus.

BEAUTIFUL AND FOOLISH

Nathaniel Winkle, the central figure of an “Old Man’s Folly,” appears as a spineless, forlorn creature leading a drab life in a prosaic home. But two msmciries forever cling to him, Christopher with his poet’s soul and Ada ■with the golden head. A dying Christopher entreats him, in a last message, to do something “beautiful and fqolish.” In vain he ponders. He loses Ada, words failing him to declare his love. So he seeks diversion by drifting into the ranks of malcontents, anarchists and pacifists. Suddenly he sees, the very image of his lost love in Ann Elizabeth, the charming girl-leader of the pacifists. When in Joe Ford he also discovers a rcemblance to Christopher, light at last dawns upon him. Happiness is yet to spring from the dead ashes of his life. To mate these two is surely his mission. And so it happens; they join in an unconventional union, "beautiful and foolish.” Long uiscursions on American attitudes, before and during the war, absorb too much space, but Floyd Dell’s book contains a well-written and ingenious romance of original design. "An Old Man’s Folly.” Floyd Dell. Cassell and Co. ADVENTURE—CALIFORNIA BRAND Blood, a mysterious and beautiful woman who ruled men with a rod of iron, two American officers as spies, and California in the romantic days just before the American occupation —what more for a novel of love and hairbreadth ’scapes? “Star of the Hills,” by Wilder Anthony, is full of shootings, stabbings and love scenes; and from the start of the adventures of its heroes, in a calaboose, it swings along at a gait that gives no opportunity of putting it down for a treatise on comparative theology. .It has as much action as a man who has found a frog in his best Sunday pants. A good average Western. “Star of the Hills.” Wilder Anthony. Wm. Collins, Sons and Co., Ltd. AS ELUSIVE AS EVER The latest Scarlet Pimpernel romance, “Sir Percy Hits Back,” offers thrills and wholesome entertainment in plenty. From the prolific pen of Baroness Orczy this story comes as a successor to a long line of excellent fiction. Sir Percy in several disguises proceeds from exploit to exploit ably abetted by his adventuresome comrades. The rescue of the piquant Fleurette is Sir Percy’s chief concern; its achievement in the face of hazardous undertaking is delightfully told in an eminently readable story. “Sir Percy Hits Back.” Baroness Orczy. Ilodder and Stoughton, Ltd., London. Our copy from the publishers. THIRTEEN MONTHS OF THRILLS Octavus Roy Cohen has written many amusing stories of the chocolate folk of “Bummagem, Alabammy,” naive darkies full of comic artfulness. They are what his readers best know him by; but he has left his Afro-American friends altogether in his latest novel, “The Iron Chalice,” a thriller romance, written, it seems, for the serial-story market. The young and handsome Alan Beckwith is trifling, not very convincingly, with the idea of suicide; but he trades the reversion of an insurance policy for 13 months’ luxurious living and a wife. The charm of that lady rather endears to him the idea of living a little longer. Obviously he doesn’t die in accordance with the bargain, for that would spoil the story. But he has plenty of thrills before the bargain is otherwise honourably discharged.

“The Iron Chalice.” Octavus Roy Cohen. Cassell and Co.