ings with a certain
spacious reservation. It is interested in them simply because they are
there, simply because they illustrate so ironically the weaknesses
and caprices of human nature and the dramatic chances of
ineluctable fate. It is not interested in them because they are
inherently and absolutely important, but because they are important
relatively and humorously as indicative of the absurd lengths to
which human folly will go. It is interested in these things, as I have
said, with an ample reservation, but it must emphatically be noted
that it is a great deal more interested in them than in any works of art
or letters or in any achievement of philosophy.

Anatole France seems indeed to take a certain delight in putting
human thought into its place as essentially secondary and
subordinate to human will. He delights to indicate, just as
Montaigne used to do, the pathetic and laughable discrepancies
between human thoughts and human actions.

He is more concerned with men and women as they actually live and
move in the commerce of the world than in the wayward play of
their speculative fancies, and it gives him an ironic satisfaction to
show how the most heroic and ideal thoughts are affected by the
little wanton tricks of circumstances and character.

This predominant concern with the natural humours and normal
animal instincts of the human race, this refusal ever to leave the
broad and beaten path of human frailty, gives a tone to his writings,
even when he is dealing with art and literature, quite different from
other aesthetes'.

He is not really an aesthete at all; he is too Voltairian for that. As a
critic he is learned, scholarly, clear-sighted and acute; but his sense
of the humorous inconsistencies of normal flesh and blood is too
habitually present with him to admit of that complete abandonment
to the spirit of his author, which, accompanied by interpretative
subtlety, secures the most striking results.

His criticisms are wise and interesting, but they necessarily miss the
sinuous clairvoyance of a writer like Remy de Gourmont who is able
to give himself up completely and with no ironic reservation to the
abnormalities of the temperament he is discussing. Remy de
Gourmont's own temperament has something in it more receptive,
more psychological, more supple than Anatole France's. He is in
himself a far less original genius and for that very reason he can
slide more reservedly into the bizarre nooks