eternal symbol of the
difference between the Englishman, who takes his irreligion as
seriously as his religion, and the Frenchman, who takes his irreligion
as smilingly as his _aperitif_.

It is just because he sums up the end of the nineteenth century so
well that Anatole France is already in some quarters a declining
fashion. He is the victim of a reaction against his century, not of a
reaction against his style. He is the last of the true mockers: the
twentieth century demands that even its mockers shall be partisans of
the coming race. Anatole France does not believe in the coming race.
He is willing to join a society for bringing it into existence--he is
even a Socialist--but his vision of the world shows him no prospect of
Utopias. He is as sure as the writer of _Ecclesiastes_ that every
blessed--or, rather, cursed--thing is going to happen over and over
again. Life is mainly a procession of absurdities in which lovers and
theologians and philosophers and collectors of bric-a-brac are the
most amusing figures. It is one of the happy paradoxes of human
conduct that, in spite of this vision of futilities, Anatole France
came forward at the Dreyfus crisis as a man of action, a man who
believed that the procession of absurdities could be diverted into a
juster road. "Suddenly," as Brandes has said, "he stripped himself of
all his scepticism and stood forth, with Voltaire's old blade gleaming
in his hand--like Voltaire irresistible by reason of his wit, like him
the terrible enemy of the Church, like him the champion of innocence.
But, taking a step in advance of Voltaire, France proclaimed himself
the friend of the poor in the great political struggle." He even did
his best to become a mob-orator for his faith. Since that time he has
given his name willingly to the cause of every oppressed class and
nation. It is as though he had no hope and only an intermittent spark
of faith; but his heart is full of charity.

That somewhere or other a preacher lay hidden in Anatole France might
have all along been suspected by observant readers of his works. He is
a born fabulist. He drifts readily into fable in everything he writes.
And, if his fables do not always walk straight to their moral in their
Sunday clothes, that is not because he is not a very earnest moralist
at heart, but because his wit and humour continually entice him down
by-paths. It is sometimes as though he set out to serve morality and
ended by telling an in