and tiresome after a while about this
massive gravity in the cult of one's own sensations.

Sensations? Well! We all know how subtle and pleasant they can be;
but this perpetual religion of them, this ponderous worship of them,
becomes at last something monstrous and inhuman, something
which makes us cry aloud for air and space. Not only does it become
inhuman and heavy--it becomes comic.

Every religion, even the religion of sensation, becomes comic when
the sharp salt breath of intellectual sanity ceases to blow upon it. Its
votaries seem to be going to and fro wrapped in sheep's wool. The
wool may be stained in Tyrian dyes; but it is wool for all that, and it
tends ultimately to impede the steps of the wearer and to dull not a
few of his natural perceptions.

If one imagines a symposium in the Elysian fields between Wilde
and Pater and d'Annunzio, and the sudden entrance upon them of the
great Voltaire, one cannot but believe that after a very short time this
religion of aestheticism would prove as tiresome to the old ribald
champion of a free humanity as any other ritual.

And in this respect Anatole France is with Voltaire. He has too
humorous a soul to endure the solemnity of the cultivated senses. He
would desert such a group of pious subjectivists to chat with Horace
about the scandals of the imperial court or with Rabelais about the
price of sausages.

Sceptical in other matters, egoists of the type I have mentioned are
inclined to grow unconscionably grave when questions of sex are
brought forward. This illusion at any rate--the illusion of sexual
attraction--they would be most loth to destroy.

But Anatole France fools sex without stint. It affords him, just as it
did Voltaire and Rabelais, his finest opportunities. He fools it up hill
and down dale. He shakes it, he trundles it, he rattles it, he bangs it,
he thumps it, he tumbles it in the mud, in the sand, in the earth--just
as Diogenes did with his most noble tub. Fooling sex is the grand
game of Anatole France's classic wit. The sport never wearies him.
It seems an eternal perennial entertainment. Hardly one of his books
but has this sex fooling as its principal theme.

It seems to his detached and speculative mind the most amusing and
irresistible jest in the world that men and women should behave as
they do; that matters should be arranged in just this manner.

What we arrive at once more in Anatole France is that humorous
drawing back from t