Communications
September 2, 1925 THE COMMONWEAL 399 ANATOLE FRANCE Paris, France. TO the Editor:—As I was reading the three very interesting articles on Anatole France which Jules Bois contributed to...
...He feels himself invaded and overpowered by . something he does not know and does not like...
...this paradox is clearly explained by an examination of Anatole France's personal history...
...He enlisted his talent with that of others who up to that time had not dared to profess themselves openly the enemies of tradition...
...Can one explain that further paradox of a man who, having first ridiculed our civilization, and given his support to those who wanted to replace it by another, is yet, in the eyes of the world, the most authorized representative of that very civilization...
...Outwardly, he has exactly what America has given him...
...He concedes nothing to the earlier settler...
...TO the Editor:—There is something tragic in the Klan outlook on life, almost the outlook of a dying race...
...The rest of the world, especially Europe, has always looked upon America as its own, a refuge when conditions at home became intolerable, a haven to remain in permanently or to leave at will and resume a relinquished nationality under more favorable conditions...
...Foreigners who read Anatole France might do the same thing...
...it is not his customs that he dislikes, for everything the negro has is essentially American, with no admixture...
...The Dreyfus affair encouraged him to suppose that there were greater roles which he might assume...
...The position is quite intelligible, from both sides, no matter to which concept of America one adheres, and there is tragedy in the Klan distress—tragedy of invaded nationalism, tragedy of religious breakdown, the tragedy voiced unconsciously by the Reverend John E. Gulledge of Ohio in his address to the Klan gathering at Washington— "The difficulty with the world is that it is cursed with too many religions and lacks the faith of the religion of Jesus Christ...
...Then, he met with Bolshevism...
...He was obliged to remain faithful to that party to the end, nominally their leader, but in reality their prisoner...
...the land was his as fairly as any part of it belonged to any earlier arrival...
...TO the Editor:—As I was reading the three very interesting articles on Anatole France which Jules Bois contributed to The Commonweal, I recalled an incident that occurred in 1918...
...A. Le Grand...
...He soon saw that this particular attitude which he had chosen to adopt in his writing was highly productive of literary success, and thus he formed a "habit" that was to last a lifetime...
...The Klan spirit is a manifestation of distress, of dawning fear that in the clash of two concepts of America—the one of America belonging to the first settlers and their children, the other of America belonging to all the world for all time— it is the second that is about to prevail...
...Anatole France," they told them, "is not France...
...The Klansman does dislike the rise of the negro to equality with himself...
...he resents him as harshly as he is himself resented...
...It is not the negro's religion that he dislikes, for that is the Klansman's own...
...The seemingly inexplicable paradox presented here of a man who, possessing all the gifts endowed by his nationality, environment and opportunity—ancient traditions at which he sneered, but covertly admired—an advanced culture, an orderly and euphonious languages—took these precious possessions, welded and molded them to a high standard of perfection, only to employ them to destroy the very fountain from which they sprang...
...True, he often lived in segregated communities of his own kind, his own customs, his own language, and the politics of his old country remained passionately his, but to his mind the "100 percent" idea was an incongruity...
...Before the interview, these officers had thought of Anatole France as the foremost representative of French feeling and sentiment...
...BIGOTRY'S LAST CALL Wawa, Pa...
...that is, he is of the stock which hewed America out of the wilderness, which brought on the war of the Revolution and fought the war of the Union, which has no tie with, or interest in, any other country but the United States of America...
...desperately he resents everything "alien...
...He dislikes the negro in the same way that he dislikes the Jew and the Catholic, not primarily on religious grounds (though that does enter with the Catholic) but simply because he does not like that particular human breed, and does not wish to mix it in his blood...
...However, as he is already considered dull by many of the younger generation of readers, the future will decide whether the perfection of his style is great enough to ensure him a lasting place among the immortal classics of our country, or whether he will finally attain immortality only among that class to whom Crebillon fils appeals nowadays—the libertine reader...
...He came to us from African jungles...
...he was just as good an American as any who came before him...
...In his earlier days, he amused himself by ridiculing the various laws or restraints which tradition had imposed upon his youth...
...He and his fellow orators call upon their hearers to "rally around the Cross"—and they burn the Cross...
...The Klansman is, to his way of thinking, truly the 100 percent American...
...William Franklin Sands...
...They went to him, like so many pilgrims, in a spirit of eager admiration, but left him in a mood of embarrassed surprise...
...he resented deeply the colloquial implication of "immigrant" condition...
...Some foreign readers are apt to find in Anatole France's books ground for their supposition that France is a country, cultivated it is true, but hopelessly narrow and licentious...
...The answer is given by a modern playwright who remarked that he wrote a play, the actors interpreted another, and the public saw a third—each endowing it with his own individual meaning...
...Some American officers, passing through Tours, were very desirous of being introduced to the famous French writer...
...It is this point which Jules Bois so rightly stresses...
...In order not to seem a renegade, he was compelled to walk ahead of his most advanced "followers...
...He had spent half an hour trying to impress upon them the fact that the war was utterly wicked and criminal, and should be ended immediately...
...His own religious beliefs are disintegrating...
...New and "alien" faces, ideas, manners and, above all, new religion of which the "100 percent" nationalist has never heard anything good and much that horrifies him, have filled him with foreboding...
...that a new mixture of races of unknown potentiality is about to displace the one which had begun to show full assimilation, homogeneity and a definite trend...
...Clear-flowing, finely chiseled, Anatole France's style makes all the more accessible the rather ambiguous pleasure which they seek...
...It has always been an annoyance to the newcomer to be treated as an alien...
...he dislikes the alien strain which may some day appear in the blood of his descendants...
...But the French officers with whom they were stationed and to whom they reported his amazing statements, promptly put them right...
Vol. 2 • September 1925 • No. 17
