RONY is for the ironic. He has shown himself military at the last, but I believe Anatole France would have smiled, a little wistfully, if told that a young man had sentenced himself to read every one of his works and to write a book about them while ... Read more

RONY is for the ironic. He has shown himself military at the last, but I believe Anatole France would have smiled, a little wistfully, if told that a young man had sentenced himself to read every one of his works and to write a book about them while there raged round him a European War. Such an atmosphere may seem unpropitious, but it was not really so; it was an atmosphere of paradox; it was odd to analyse the great pacifist while Europe writhed in conflict; still odder to think of him as throwing aside his pen and at the age of seventy taking up his forsworn sword. But in the case of Anatole France the work is as great as the man and it afforded me a contrast with patriotism. This background of patriotism, so queerly compounded of beer, sweat, fine courage, self-sacrifice, self-interest, of insane prejudices, heavy ignorances and melting heroisms, was so exactly what I needed to bring out the dapper quality of the great Frenchman’s thought. No muddled impulses here, but a clear, cold light which reveals, together with all that is beautiful, all that is ugly; here a brain that is without illusions, and yet without bitterness; that is not taken in by flags, and priests, and frontiers, yet at the same time can love priests for their faith, flags for their symbolism, frontiers for the contrasts they create in man. In On Life and Letters, Anatole France tells us that during the war of 1870 he sat practically under the fire of the German guns, with M. F. Calmette, reading Virgil. I did not write these lines under the fire of the German guns but, in the hectic atmosphere of war-time, to write about Anatole France created in me no doubt much the same kind of feeling as was his that day. Less