“There is not a page, not a line, not a word, not a syllable of that book which has not shocked, saddened, and offended me. I was disposed to weep over it with all the muses for company.”
Another review, that of Zola’s book, _The Dream_, I cannot resist mentioning. The book is not very well known in England, which is a pity, as it might please the worshippers of the latter-day Swan of Avon. It is pure. Anatole France is aware of that, for he wickedly heads his review: “Mr Zola’s Purity.” As it certainly was not Zola’s habit to be pure, surprise at the accident was legitimate. And so Anatole France writes:
“If in order to be poetic, graceful, and touching, it were enough to resolve, Mr Zola would certainly be at the present moment the most graceful, the most poetic, the most winged, and the most uplifted among novelists ... he espouses chastity and thus affords us the most edifying example. One can only regret that he celebrates this mystic alliance with too much noise and uproar....”
Anatole France analyses the tale of the beautiful heroine, in her saintly cathedral town, and adds: “Zinc factories and flat irons occupy too much space in Mr Zola’s soul.” He then convicts Zola of gross ignorance of the period he describes, remarks casually: “Saint Joseph’s lily becomes in his hand an instrument for advertisement,” and, alluding to his previous works, sums up: “I prefer Mr Zola on all fours to Mr Zola winged.”
Like many agnostics, Anatole France is more interested in religion than is many a believer. Like those old encyclopædists of the eighteenth century, he is always crushing the infamous one, which the faithful generally support because assured that the so-called infamous one cannot be crushed. And that infamous one is not only the Catholic religion but religion itself. I do not want to raise an argument as to what is religion: in the sense in which Anatole France attacks it it is a precise faith in some creative and conscious spirit which manifests itself, not only in this world, but in some conceptive other world. Of that Anatole France will hear nothing. He can do without it; he is strong enough to stand alone, and to meet death “as one about to seek a great perhaps.” He needs no prop, and he would smile at a letter I received a little while ago from a devout Catholic who urged me to draw on “the strength and consolation which streamed from that little hill near Jerusalem, two thousand years ago, and now flows from the slope that rises by the side of the yellow waters of the Tiber.” Anatole France sees the poetry of this conception, but though he sees the idea as poetic he does not see the statement as true. For him religion or faith is cowardice; it is the cry of man who dares not die, and in every one of his books he has used the most cunning methods to express his feeling.