decent story--as though he knelt down to pray
and found himself addressing God in a series of blasphemies. This is
the contradiction in his nature which makes him so ineffectual as a
propagandist, so effectual as an artist. Ineffectual, one ought to
say, perhaps, not as a propagandist so much as a partisan. For he does
propagate with the most infectious charm his view of the animal called
man, and the need for being tender and not too serious in dealing with
him. If he has not preached the brotherhood of man with the missionary
fervour of the idealists, he has at least, in accordance with an
idealism of his own, preached a brotherhood of the beasts. He never
lets himself savagely loose upon his brother-beasts as Swift does.
Even in _Penguin Island_, with all its bitterness, he shakes his head
rather than his stick at the vicious kennels of men. The truth is,
Epicureanism is in his blood. If he could, he would watch the stream
of circumstance, as it went by, with the appreciative indifference of
the gods. It is only the preacher in his heart that prevents this.
Like his own Abbe Coignard, he shares his loyalty between Epicurus and
Christ. Henley once described Stevenson as something of the
sensualist, and something of the Shorter Catechist. Translated into
French, that might serve as a character-sketch of Anatole France.

Originality has been denied to him in some quarters, but, it seems to
me, unjustly. One may find something very like this or that aspect of
him in Sterne, or Voltaire, or Heine. But in none of them does one
find the complete Anatole France, ironist, fabulist, critic,
theologian, artist, connoisseur, politician, philosopher, and creator
of character. As artist, he is at many points comparable to Sterne. He
has the same sentimental background to his wit, the same tenderness in
his ridicule, the same incapacity for keeping his jests from
scrambling about the very altar, the same almost Christian sensuality.
Sterne, of course, is the more innocent writer, because his intellect
was not nearly so covetous of experience. Sterne, though in his
humanitarianism he occasionally stood in a pulpit above his time, was
content for the most part to work as an artist. He could do all the
preaching he wanted on Sundays. On week-days my Uncle Toby and
Corporal Trim were the only minor prophets he troubled about. Anatole
France, on the other hand, is not a preacher by trade. He has no
safety-valve of that kind for his mora