great
races of antiquity. With a calm, inscrutable, benevolent malice, he
looks out upon the world. There is a sense of much withheld, much
unsaid, much that nothing would ever induce him to say.

His point of view is always objective. It might be maintained,
though the thing sounds like a paradox, that his very temperament is
objective. Certainly it is a temperament averse to any outbursts of
unbalanced enthusiasm.

His attitude toward what we call Nature is more classical than the
classics. Virgil shows more vibrant emotion in the presence of the
sublimities of the natural elements. His manner when dealing with
the inanimate world is the manner of the Eighteenth Century
touched with a certain airiness and charm that is perhaps more
Hellenic than Latin. As one reads him one almost feels as though the
human race detached itself from its surroundings and put between
itself and Nature a certain clear and airy space, untroubled by any
magnetic currents of spiritual reciprocity. One feels as though
Nature were kept decisively and formally in her place and not
permitted to obtrude herself upon the consciousness of civilised
people except when they require some pleasant lawn or noble trees
or smiling garden of roses to serve as a background for their
metaphysical discussions or their wanton amorous play. What we
have come to call the "magic" of Nature is never for a moment
allowed to interrupt these self-possessed epicurean arguments of
statesmen, politicians, amorists, theologians, philosophers and
proconsuls.

Individual objects in Nature--a tree, a brook, the seashore, a bunch
of flowers, a glade in the forest, a terrace in a garden,--are described
in that clear, laconic, objective manner, which gives one the
impression of being able to touch the thing in question with one's
bare hand.

The plastic and tactile value of things is always indicated in Anatole
France's writings with brief, clear cut, decisive touches, but "the
murmurs and scents" of the great waters, the silences of the shadowy
forests are not allowed to cross the threshold of his garden of
Epicurus. Each single petal of a rose will have its curves, its colours,
its tints; but the mysterious forces of subterranean life which bring
the thing to birth are pushed back into the darkness. The marble-cold
resistance of Anatole France's classical mind offers a hard polished
surface against which the vague elemental energies of the world beat
in vain. He walks