and crannies of
abnormal minds.

Anatole France is one of those great men of genius to whom the
gods have permitted an un-blurred vision of the eternal normalities
of human weakness. This vision he can never forget. He takes his
stand upon the ground which it covers, and from that ground he
never deviates.

Man for him is always an amorous and fantastic animal, using his
reason to justify his passions, and his imagination to justify his
illusions. He is always the animal who can laugh, the animal who
can cry, the animal who can beget or bear children. He is only in a
quite secondary sense the animal who can philosophise.

It is because of his constant preoccupation with the normal
eccentricities and pathetic follies of our race that he lays so much
stress upon outward action.

The normal man is rather an animal who wills and acts than an
animal who dreams and thinks; and it is with willing and acting,
rather than with dreaming and thinking, that Anatole France is
concerned. One of the main ironic devices of his humour is to show
the active animal led astray by his illusions, and the contemplative
animal driven into absurdity by his will.

With his outward-looking gaze fixed upon the eternal and pathetic
normalities of the human situation, Anatole France has himself, like
Voltaire, a constant tendency to gravitate towards politics and public
affairs.

In this respect his temperament is most obstinately classical. Like
Horace and all the ancient satirists, he feels himself invincibly
attracted to "affairs of state," even while they excite his derision.
One cannot read a page of his writing without becoming aware that
one is in the presence of a mind cast in the true classic mould.

In the manner of the great classical writers of Athens and Rome he
holds himself back from any emotional betrayal of his own feelings.
He is the type of character most entirely opposite to what might be
called the Rousseau-type.

He is un-modern in this and quite alone; for, in one form or another,
the Rousseau-type with its enthusiastic neurotic mania for
self-revelation dominates the entire literary field. One gets the
impression of something massive and self-possessed, something
serenely and almost inhumanly sane about him. One feels always
that he is the "Grand Gentleman" of literature with whom no
liberties may be taken. His tone is quiet, his manner equable, his air
smiling, urbane, superior. His reserve is the reserve of the