It is hard to realise that men follow shopgirls while empires fall, but it is most likely, and I suspect that Anatole France thinks it more important.
As it is the fate of Anatole France to be unpopular whatever he does, it is not surprising that _The Gods are Athirst_ should have annoyed the advanced people as much as _The Life of Joan of Arc_ did the reactionaries. That is because he loves truth and is one of the few people in the world who realise that truth is neither blue nor buff. He has been charged with having fouled the noblest work of man; that is untrue, only he is determined not to be taken in and will not see the Red Virgin as spotless. Great things can be done by little men, done clumsily, cruelly, and yet somehow done. That is more or less what Anatole France shows in this book; the verdict of the people is not for him the voice of God, but this does not imply that the voice of the aristocrat is any more divine. He cannot help seeing that the democracy is ignorant, prejudiced, greedy, coarse-minded, and yet at the same time he finds in it the seeds of generosity and of that justice so much more costly than the mercy now and then vouchsafed with a fine gesture by those who dominate man. Irony and pity, pity and hope, it is always the same gospel.
In _The Gods are Athirst_ Anatole France seemed to have receded from the pronounced socialism which colours his views. That is all on the surface, and in _The Revolt of the Angels_, published a year later, it was obvious that he had denied none of his views; only, and it is so difficult to make people understand this, Anatole France is a Socialist and he is also sane. He will not have it that a Socialist is necessarily a saint; that the democracy is immaculate; and it is because he finds the human being behind the tribune, while the followers of the tribune insist upon seeing him as a sort of historical hero, a county Achilles, that in their quite honest stupidity they are annoyed. If Anatole France had been born in England and entered politics there, his influence would not have been large, because, in this country, what we like is a good, stodgy, immovable view; if at the age of twenty you believed in Mr Gladstone, at the age of sixty you have to believe in Mr Asquith, and there you are. Doggedness, never say die, the bulldog breed, all that sort of stuff. The idea is that one should run one’s head against a brick wall in the hope of knocking it over: one does sometimes, if one’s head is hard enough, but that successful kind of head does not readily admit a new idea. Being a Frenchman, Anatole France has been more fortunate; he is not a bit more original than Mr. Shaw, though infinitely more _sympatique_, for his smile is honeyed, not vinegary; still, if Mr Shaw had been a Frenchman his countrymen would have taken him seriously. And we, too, perhaps, once he was translated.