self to the
angularities of life or to make provision beforehand for its
catastrophes is, indeed, folly; but it may be a divine folly. It is, at
all events, a folly to which poets incline. But poets are not wise;
indeed, the poetry of true wisdom is a creation which can, at the best,
be but dimly imagined. Perhaps, of them all, Lucretius had the largest
inkling of what such poetry might be; but he disqualified himself by an
aptitude for ecstasy, which made his poetry superb and his wisdom of no
account. To acquiesce is wise; to be ecstatic in acquiescence is not to
have acquiesced at all. It is to have identified oneself with an
imagined power against whose manifestations, in those moments when no
ecstasy remains, one rebels. It is a megalomania, a sublime
self-deception, a heroic attempt to project the soul on to the side of
destiny, and to believe ourselves the masters of those very powers which
have overwhelmed us.

Whether the present generation will produce great poetry, we do not
know. We are tolerably certain that it will not produce wise men. It is
too conscious of defeat and too embittered to be wise. Some may seek
that ecstasy of seeming acquiescence of which we have spoken; others,
who do not endeavour to escape the pain by plunging the barb deeper, may
try to shake the dust of life from off their feet. Neither will be wise.
But precisely because they are not wise, they will seek the company of
wise men. Their own attitude will not wear. The ecstasy will fail, the
will to renunciation falter; the gray reality which permits no one to
escape it altogether will filter like a mist into the vision and the
cell. Then they will turn to the wise men. They will find comfort in the
smile to which they could not frame their own lips, and discover in it
more sympathy than they could hope for.

Among the wise men whom they will surely most frequent will be Anatole
France. His company is constant; his attitude durable. There is no
undertone of anguish in his work like that which gives such poignant and
haunting beauty to Tchehov. He has never suffered himself to be so
involved in life as to be maimed by it. But the price he has paid for
his safety has been a renunciation of experience. Only by being involved
in life, perhaps only by being maimed by it, could he have gained that
bitterness of knowledge which is the enemy of wisdom. Not that Anatole
France made a deliberate renunciation: no man of his humanity would of
his