That Anatole France brings nothing new to the stock of knowledge is true. He comes with no mission to set the crooked straight. He is, as Professor Brandin said the other day, more of a méditateur than a penseur. He has garnered within him the accumulated wisdom of the past. He is an interpreter rather than a discoverer. He is a critic of life.

Doubtless it is a rash thing to predict what will be the verdict of posterity regarding the works of any writer, however secure his position may appear to his contemporaries. Few things in this world are more liable to vicissitude than literary reputations, and who shall foretell with confidence what will be the tastes, the thoughts, the habits of the generations that are to come? Beauty is, I believe, a word that has been banished from the vocabulary of the latest school of artists, and form, that "golden vase wherein thought, that fleeting essence, is preserved to posterity," is not in favour with our younger poets. I read in some newspaper the other day that enlightened mothers no longer talk baby-language to their little ones, and nourish them no longer on the ancient fairy tales, because such things, they say, must inevitably give the children a false idea of life. In a world which has set its face sternly against the cult of beauty and will have nothing to do with fables and dreams, there would seem to be but little room for one who thought that, of all things, the most requisite for mankind were the "illusions that encourage and console," and said that if he had to choose between the pursuit of truth and the pursuit of beauty he would choose the latter, "because there is nothing true in the world save beauty." It may be then that posterity will refuse to give Anatole France a niche in the temple of the elect. But I do not think it will be so. I think the "dread voice " will pass, and that if not the Golden Age, at least the longing for it, will return-indeed is returning.

Jam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna.

If, however, I were invited to say-and it is an invitation which any critic must be prepared to meet-what part of Anatole France's work will survive when his vogue has subsided-for, despite the reaction which appears to have set in among his own compatriots, he is still enjoying an almost unprecedented vogue in England and America-I should make answer: those books which are most distinguished by the qualities of humanity and sincerity and simplicity; those books in which the poetic and

meditative qualities, rather than the satiric and ironic are chiefly manifested. In the forefront of these I would place the Nozière tetralogy. "Rarement (says Anatole France) un écrivain est si bien inspiré que lorsqu'il se raconte," and it is certainly true that nowhere is he more completely himself, nowhere are his qualities of gentle irony, of large-hearted, compassionate humour, more happily and perfectly blended than when he is recalling the incidents of his childhood and adolescence, and portraying, in the light of imaginative memory, the divers folk, learned or simple, exalted or humble, grave or gay, with whom in those far-off days he was brought into familiar contact.

The books which comprise these mémoires d'outre tombe are four in number, and almost every one of the essays, stories, méditations they contain is a chef d'oeuvre, wrought with cameo-like perfection, a miracle of delicacy and insight. To predict that these volumes which, taken together, are perhaps three times as long as the Essays of Elia, will sooner or later come to be regarded as the fine flower of Anatole France's achievement, is not to underestimate the almost lyrical beauty of "Thaïs," the Voltairean irony, the Rabelaisian humour of the " Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque ; nor is it to forget the claims of the four volumes of "Histoire Contemporaine" and the inimitable Monsieur Bergeret, though these, alas, are too deeply encumbered with political events which have long since sunk below the horizon. It is certainly not to forget the "lean and flashy" satire of "l'Ile des Pingouins." Finally, it is not to forget" La Révolte des Anges," which Anatole France himself told me he considered the best thing he had done. Writing of "La Révolte des Anges," which Professor Saintsbury has somewhere called "that hit-and-miss " production, Monsieur Albert Thibaudet says:

C'est là, je crois, qu'il faut chercher de France l'amplitude la plus puissante, et la plus aisée, une manière de traiter la poésie miltonienne comme Boileau a traité dans le Lutrin celle de Virgile, une miraculeuse moyenne classique entre Homère, Flaubert et Voltaire, le testament clair et profond d'une pensée et d'un art. Oui, si l'œuvre entière d'Anatole France est menacée un jour de sombrer dans le cataclysme qu'il appelle pour l'humanité, si, la mer ayant tout recouvert, il ne m'est possible, en nageant d'une main de ne sauver de lui qu'un livre, c'est bien la Révolte des Anges qu'audessus du flot vous me verrez lever. . . .

It would ill become an Englishman to contradict, or even to call in question the opinion of so learned and accomplished a

critic as M. Thibaudet, who possesses, in addition to an innate critical instinct of the first order, a profound and intimate knowledge of the literatures of England and France. He may be right, at least so far as France is concerned, in his estimate of " La Révolte des Anges." He may indeed be universally and entirely right, yet I cannot help thinking that in this country, at least in some quarters, the success, the vogue of " La Révolte des Anges is to some extent a succès de scandale. I am not saying that the standard of French taste is higher or lower than the standard of English taste. I submit that it is different, and that there is occasionally something in the atmosphere of this book which is a little at variance with our national temperament. But tastes alter as well as differ, and it may be that, in the course of time, when we have disembarrassed ourselves of the last remaining relics of Puritan prejudice, M. Thibaudet's view will appear as wholly and entirely right. Even now, if he had said that this book contains passages that exhibit a classic grace, a harmonious beauty unsurpassed in any other of Anatole France's works, who could have said him nay?

Next to the Nozière tetralogy, or perhaps bracketed with it, I should place the four volumes of literary causeries which Anatole France contributed week by week to Le Temps from 1888 to 1892. In these essays, which assuredly have no drowning mark upon them," Anatole France talks of himself" se raconte "--à propos of books and life. "Criticism (he says) is, like philosophy and history, a sort of romance designed for those who have sagacious and curious minds, and every romance is, rightly taken, an autobiography. Criticism is admirably adapted to a highly civilised society whose memories are rich and whose traditions are already age-long. . . . It replaces theology, and if we look for the universal doctor, the St. Thomas Aquinas of the nineteenth century, is it not of Sainte-Beuve that we must think?" Of Sainte Beuve, yes, and of his successor, Anatole France. When in these causeries Anatole France sets out to tell us of the adventures of his soul among the masterpieces, he makes a book the occasion of entertaining us with intimate reflections upon life. "In the case of Anatole France," if I may be permitted to quote my own words, "knowledge of literature and knowledge of life have united and taken root in a singularly gifted mind and from their union has been born a series of meditations on Life and

Letters, so wise, so gracious, so informing and withal so friendly and so human that, for all their seemingly ephemeral character, they are likely to endure long after works more expressly designed for immortality have sunk into oblivion." But," I can hear my objectors saying, "suppose we grant all the excellences you claim for Le Livre de Mon Ami ' and its sequels ; suppose we grant that these volumes of criticism have all the virtues which you would attribute to them; suppose we allow that 'L'Ile des Pingouins,' for all its popularity, recalls too vividly the arguments and style of the open-air Bible smasher, and is but the grating of scrannel pipes,' how can you disregard the claims of that exquisite romance, Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard ?'" In answer to that I beg leave to quote once more from my own book:

Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard is an imaginary portrait of the author as an old man, drawn by himself in early manhood; a picture of himself as he was fain to be when his labours in the field of scholarship and the passage of the years should have brought him a sufficient competence, wisdom, the respect of his colleagues, academic honours and a European reputation for learning. But Pierre Nozière has this advantage over Sylvestre Bonnard: he is an authentic person, illumined indeed by the imagination, softened and idealised by the magic touch of memory, but in essence, unmistakably real and true; whereas Monsieur Bonnard, being an artificial projection of the author's self into a wholly imaginary future, resembles one of those terrifying forms which travellers sometimes see outlined upon the clouds in lands of mists and mountains, and which are in reality but the magnified and distorted image of themselves. For Sylvestre Bonnard is a monster, a monster not indeed of vice, but of virtue. . . . This dear old gentleman is so kindly, so gentle, so unselfish and so unreal, that we are led to wonder whether or not we are contemplating some product of the fertile but sentimental imagination of Sir J. M. Barrie, one of those beneficent beings endowed with supernatural naïveté and wisdom who come to set things right for the naughty wayward little people who inhabit this imperfect world. To speak quite plainly, Sylvestre Bonnard would be a great deal better if he were not quite so good. Though we may deplore that Clémentine elected to marry Noel Alexandre, the bank-clerk, rather than the blameless young student, Sylvestre Bonnard, we confess we can understand it.

Having written this and having been, I confess, a little alarmed at my temerity, I was considerably fortified to read the following words of Professor Saintsbury :

The "Crime," delightful as it is, has been something of what the French themselves call a berquinade, something written with-oh! call

it not squinting, but double vision on the young person and the academy. It had been charming; but a tolerably catholic amateur in literature, without in the least wishing for anything naughty, might wish for something in which the author gave himself freer play.

I began this article by saying that Anatole France was the most French of Frenchmen, the the consummate flower of Parisianisme, yet he belongs to a school that is rapidly disappearing. He belongs to the race that was moulded by the methods of those whom he calls the old-fashioned French humanists. These methods did not, so far as I can see, differ much from those of our old-fashioned English humanists. They were good methods, and in both countries they bore noble fruit; but if we are to give credence to the misgivings expressed by Anatole France, they will soon be cast aside by the newer generation as so much out-worn lumber

I tremble (he says) for our humanities. They form men; they teach them how to think. Some have wished them to do more, to have a direct and immediate utility. They have wished education to remain liberal, and yet to become practical. Syllabuses have been loaded like guns for some ferocious combat. They have been stuffed with facts, facts, facts. . . . Latin has departed from the world; it tends to depart from the schools. . . . The fine name humanities which was for a long time given to secondary education enlightens us about its true mission. It is intended to form men, and not any one type of man. Its mission is to teach us how to think. . . . I have a desperate love for Latin studies. I firmly believe that without them there is an end of the beauty of the French genius. Latin is not for us a foreign language-it is a mother tongue. We are Latins. The milk of the Roman wolf forms the best part of our blood.

Such then is the lament of this great humanist over the decay of classical studies. To readers of Newman in whom, as in Anatole France, those essentially Latin qualities of urbanitas and humanitas flourished with so rare a grace, it will recall the passage, almost identical in thought and expression, which concludes the seventh discourse of "The Idea of a University," a passage in which, summing up the real aim of a University education, he says:

If then a practical end must be assigned to a University course, I say it is that of training good members of society. Its art is the art of social life, and its end is fitness for the world. It neither confines its views to particular professions on the one hand, nor creates heroes or inspires genius on the other. A University training is the great ordinary means to a great but ordinary end: it aims at raising the