garlic in the salad, the salt in the porridge. This being so, you might be tempted to say of Lamb that one must have at least a tincture of Latin to enjoy him. And you would be quite wrong, for Lamb is beloved of hosts of people as ignorant of Virgil or Horace as of Bimetallism or the Binomial Theorem.

If then one can discover what there is in common between these two writers, the arch-Londoner and the arch-Parisian, of whom one had his Latin drummed into him at the Bluecoat School and the other at the Collège Stanislas, the riddle will perhaps be answered. There is indeed a great deal in Anatole France at least in some of Anatole France-that reminds one of Charles Lamb. Both were spectators of life; both were gifted with the power of conjuring up, in their habit as they lived, the quaint or striking figures with whom they had been brought into familiar contact in their earlier years. Both were inveterate bouquinistes; both were men of learning, though not of formal academic distinction. It would be easy to find passages in Lamb that would have stirred a responsive chord in the heart of Anatole France. Here, for example, is one. Speaking of a London Sunday, Elia says :

I miss the cheerful cries of London, the music, and the balladsingers the buzz and stirring murmur of the streets. . . . The closed shops repel me. Prints, pictures, all the glittering and endless succession of knacks and gewgaws, and ostentatiously displayed wares of tradesmen, which make a week-day saunter through the less busy parts of the metropolis so delightful-are shut out. No book-stalls deliciously to idle over; no busy faces to recreate the idle man who contemplates them ever passing by. . . .

With that we may compare this passage from "Le Livre de Mon Ami " :

Ye old rapacious Jews of the Rue du Cherche-Midi, ye artless book vendors of the Quays, my masters all, how greatly I am beholden to you! . . . It was you, good folk, who displayed to my enchanted gaze the mysterious tokens of a bygone age, and all manner of precious memorials of the pilgrimage of the human mind. Even as I turned over the old tomes in your boxes or gazed within your dusty stalls laden with the sad relics of our sires and their golden thoughts, I became insensibly imbued with the most wholesome of philosophies. Yes, my friends, it was when rummaging about among those musty books, those scraps of tarnished metal-work, those fragments of old, worm-eaten carvings which you used to barter for your daily bread, that I recognised how frail and fleeting are all the things of this world.

I divined that we living beings were but ever-changing figures in the world's great Shadow Show, and even then my heart inclined to sadness, gentleness and pity.

It would, did space permit, be interesting to give at length other examples of this similarity of outlook between Anatole France and Charles Lamb, as for example Elia's essay On the Decay of Beggars" and Anatole France's description of the beggars of Brittany, which is to be found in the volume entitled "Pierre Nozière ; or Lamb's essay "In Praise of Chimney Sweepers" and Anatole France's vignette of the little smuttyfaced Savoyard who came to sweep the chimneys of the house on the Quai Voltaire, and whom, to his mother's dismay, he insisted on adopting as a brother.

But this is a digression. We have to ask what it is that gives Anatole France and Charles Lamb, who in the ordinary sense are not popular writers, their enduring power over the human heart. The answer is their humanity; or, if you will, their humour. They are both men with the weaknesses common to their kind. They are both conscious of the lacrimae rerum—“the sense of tears in mortal things." Their counsellors are irony and pity-an irony that is always melting into pity. Pity-it is in this word that we find the index to Anatole France's character, the key to his power over the hearts and minds of men of all countries, of all conditions, and of all ages.

It is through pity (he has written) that we remain truly men. Let us not change into stone, like the defiers of the gods in the old myths. Let us commiserate the weak because they suffer persecution, and the fortunate of this world because it is written: "Woe unto you that laugh." Let us choose the good part, which is to suffer with them that suffer, and let us say with lips and hearts to the victims of calamity what the good Christian said to Mary: Fac me tecum plangere (“Make me to lament with thee ").

His heart is the home of lost causes and of forsaken beliefs. Victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni. At the end of "La Révolte des Anges," Satan dreams that he has triumphed over Ialdabaoth, and that with conquest and victory he is developing that very vice of over-weening pride, which power and dominion had engendered in his adversary; while through suffering and misfortune Ialdabaoth is growing unselfish and heroic.

This union of irony and pity, what is it but humour, and humour implies a sense of mesure, of proportion, of perspective.

It was this quality that made Anatole France so prompt to see the other side of a question. The fact is that almost anyone, be he conservative or anarchist, revolutionary or reactionary, sceptic or believer, may seek and find comfortable doctrine in the writings of Anatole France; and if we cannot label him, we can perhaps explain him. The key to his character is, as we have said, the compassion with which he was filled at the sight, nay, at the thought of another's suffering; and so the smug, the successful, the self-sufficient, the grandiose, the pompous-these and all other forms of triumphant vulgarity were abhorrent to him. But the defeated, the suffering, the meek, the lowly, the downtrodden, never failed to excite his sympathy. And as with persons and things, so it was with ideas and arguments. No sooner did a point of view or an opinion seem likely to crystallise into dogma then he must needs set about undermining it. To this his own opinions, his own arguments were no exception, and what he advances on one page he will retract or half retract on the next. He will paint you a saint-that old pioneer-monk, Saint Valery, for example-with such sympathy and insight that you will wonder how in the world such a man could have found his way on to the Index.

Religieux et colons, ils ont pétri de leurs rudes mains et la terre où nous vivons, et les âmes de ses anciens habitants; ils ont creusé dans le sol de la France une indestructible empreinte. Il n'est pas indifférent pour nous que ces hommes apostoliques aient existé. Nous leur devons quelque chose. Il reste dans le patrimoine de chacun de nous quelques parcelles des biens qu'ils ont légués à nos pères. Ils ont lutte contre la barbarie avec une énergie féroce. Ils ont défriché la terre; ils ont apporté à nos aieux sauvages les premiers arts de la vie et de hautes espérances.

Then you turn the page, and as if he thought he had said too much for the monks, he adds this :

Mais, hélas ! direz-vous, ils ont tué les petits génies des bois et des montagnes. Le bon saint Valery a fait mourir la nymphe de la fontaine. C'est pitié.

Oui, ce serait une grande pitié. Mais cessez de vous attrister. Je vous le dis tout bas: ces pieux personnages n'ont pas fait périr le moindre petit dieu. Saint Valery n'a pas tué de nymphe, et les doux démons qu'il chassait d'un arbre entraient dans un autre. Les génies, les nymphes et les fées se cachent quelquefois, mais ils ne meurent jamais. Ils défient le goupillon des saints.

It was his sense of pity that brought him from his Tower of Ivory to champion the cause of Dreyfus. It was pity, pity for the sufferings borne in silence by the under-dogs of the social system, that kept him from permanently returning to it. A milder, or perhaps less experienced Prospero, he had a soft spot in his heart for Caliban; rather than threaten and punish he would soothe and persuade him. And so he became, in name at least, a Socialist. And yet, in reality, in essence, he was as M. Jacques Roujon says, "l'homme le plus réactionnaire du monde." A reactionary, according to M. Roujon, may be recognised by certain signs that never mislead, to wit:

A patriotism that goes farther back than the Revolution and that draws its inspiration from a reasoned predilection for everything that recalls old France; a certain manner of reading and understanding history, and a disinclination to look upon the Jeu de Paume and the night of August 4th, for example, as prodigious events ushering in a new era; a catholic, aristocratic and classical turn of mind; a deeprooted scepticism for anything resembling the religion of progress; a respect for the army; the conviction that universal suffrage is a sort of bad practical joke, and that Jean Jacques Rousseau was a dangerous lunatic.

Taking this view of Anatole France's socialism, M. Roujon would make him a socialist with his tongue in his cheek, playing off on his friends of the Extreme Left the same sort of trick as the Evil One practised on the anchorites of the desert, when he came to them in the guise of a saint and persuaded them to follow his specious but fallacious counsels. Anatole France, however, must be acquitted of anything quite so Machiavellian. He was sincere. He played the socialist game loyally, however much he might despair of the victory of the cause. There could, he held, be no victory so long as men remained what they were. What is needed, he said, is not a social revolution but a moral one: a change of heart, almost a change of species :

Espérons, non point en l'humanité qui, malgré d'augustes efforts n'a pas détruit le mal en ce monde, espérons dans ces êtres inconcevables qui sortiront un jour de l'homme comme l'homme est sorti de la brute. Saluons ces génies futurs. Espérons en cette universelle angoisse dont le transformisme est la loi matérielle. Cette angoisse féconde, nous la sentons croître en nous; elle nous fait marcher vers un but inévitable et divin.

In the meantime, while waiting for this "one far-off divine event," he allied himself with Jaurès and his friends, he took the

chair at socialist dinners and re-unions, he inaugurated cooperative restaurants, communist printing presses. Yet, despite these dreams of an international Utopia, there was never a more ardent patriot than Anatole France. His love for his country was the passionate veneration of a child for its mother. "Honour," he wrote, " honour and reverence the land of your fathers. Never pick up a handful of its soil without remembering that that soil is sacred."

By the younger generation of French littérateurs, Anatole France is already regarded as vieux jeu. They speak of him as belonging to a bygone generation. Says M. Henri Massis: " Sur la vie intellectuelle de plusieurs générations cette homme et cette oeuvre furent au tout premier rang; il jouit, à peu près, de ce prestige qu'eut un Voltaire sur ses contemporains." But that, it seems, is all over and done with now. The young men, “still nursing the unconquerable hope,” are again setting out on the everlasting quest and Pyrrhonism is for the moment out of fashion. They would "track with fresh feet the ancient mazes and renew the world-old desire." What then, should they have to do with one who holds philosophers and their systems in such scant esteem, who says: "Philosophies are interesting only as psychical documents, well adapted to enlighten the student on the different conditions which the human mind has passed through. Valuable for the study of man, they afford us no information about anything that is not man." Or of one who speaks thus of metaphysicians: "The very metaphysicians who think to escape the world of appearances are constrained to think in allegory. A sorry sort of poets, they dim the colours of the ancient fables and are themselves but gatherers of fables. Their harvest is mythology, without body or blood." Or, finally, of one who asks: "What has science done for man but make visible the circumambient darkness, enabling him to discern a few fixed relationships in the infinite complexity of the phenomena by which he is encompassed ? "

Thus Anatole France brings us no constructive philosophy, no system, no creed, no unfaltering answer to the riddle of life. And so the young seekers after truth are impatient with him. In the words of the retort that Thaïs flung at Nicias, they cry: "We despise such people as you, people without hope and without fear. We want to know! We want to know!"