A year of prophesying

(Written as the English Contribution to a Booklet of Congratulation)

19.5.24

Cher Maître,—You write for the whole world, and the whole world salutes you on this happy occasion of your eightieth birthday. You are eighty years old, and yet it seemed to me a little time ago, when I paid my personal homage to you and found you, as ever, smiling, friendly, interested, and amused, that you were still untouched by age. And indeed what has age to do with you, who are already immortal, staying on here in the pleasant land of France for a time, but having made for yourself a sure habitation among that great company of writers already in Elysium who talk to youth with the freshness of youth, and to all with a living wisdom, now and for centuries to come? Millions of readers yet unborn will grow up to find in you a liberator, a choice companion, a very dear friend. We your contemporaries are only the first-comers of your following, and of those who will love and honour your name.

We writers of England are not so much a body of writers as a cloud; we have no Academy to represent us, and no acknowledged head, and so almost by chance it falls to me, as it might have fallen to others more distinguished and deserving, to tell you of your place in the hearts and minds of the English-speaking world. All of us who can do so read you in your inimitable French, but it may not be amiss to say a word or two of the readers you have outside the community of French readers, outside that great cosmopolitan France of the mind. You have been, I think, almost completely translated into English, and in England and America there are scores of thousands who know you only in your English guise. All translations are made at a loss, but most of your translators have served you honestly and some have served you well, and you are so rich that you can pay the high tariff between our languages and still carry over enough to entrance and win fine minds. All the cultured and successful people of the world know you by necessity, and send homage to you. But I think I understand you well enough to be assured that even more than such salutations you will value the fact that there are miner lads in Scotland, railway workers in England, London clerks, and provincial shopmen, who know no more than a few hundred words of French, and yet whose faces flush and brighten at your name, workers struggling against a thousand disadvantages to possess their souls, to whom you have brought the priceless gifts of happiness and release and inspiration. I wish I could steal and send you a well-thumbed copy of an English translation of Thaïs or L’Isle des Penguins from the shelves of some English public library in evidence of this outer empire of your mind.

As spokesman for your English-speaking readers, it is natural for me to dwell upon the ease with which you wear an English costume. In many respects you are intensely French: French after the manner of the greatness of France, the France of liberty, equality, and world fraternity. But you transcend all narrow and nationalist limitations. In the past, before the great wars of the Napoleonic period, the English and French had not that sense of difference, that disposition to antagonistic contrasts, too frequently evident to-day. Intellectually our communities were more closely interwoven. Men remembered then how the Normans linked us; how Burgundian and Englishman were sturdy allies; how Briton and Breton had a common past, and how close were Frank and Fleming to the Anglo-Saxon stock. We Normans and Saxons and Franks and Flemings and Scots and Burgundians and Gascons and Angevins built our Gothic cathedrals in brotherly competition, and our knights and bowmen and princes and bishops bickered and went to and fro. Our literatures sprang from common roots and intertwined, and were continually grafted and regrafted one upon the other. No Englishman finds anything essentially foreign in Rabelais and Montaigne; they are in the same company as Swift and Sterne, as to-day Voltaire almost lives again in Shaw. Such contemporary English writers as Belloc and Chesterton would be seen plainly for Frenchmen if they wrote in French. And we do not find in you anything foreign to our spirit and our humour. Our response to you is a kindred response. You probably have far more imitators in Britain and America than you have in all the Latin countries of the world. Some of the most promising of the newer American writers are clearly indebted to you. There are many of us writers of English—and some of these not the least among us—to whom it would be the sweetest praise to be likened to Anatole France. In the end it may be found that you have exerted an influence upon our English literature even greater than that influence upon your own. We are not intruders, therefore, not foreign admirers and outsiders, at these birthday celebrations. We English writers are here of right, and because we are akin to you and within the realm of your thought and power.