It thus comes about that Anatole France, the most disillusioned and
sceptical of writers, is also the writer whose books throw over the
fancies and caprices of humanity the most large and liberal
benediction.

To realise how essentially provincial English and American writers
are, one has only to consider for a moment the absolute
impossibility of such books as "L'Orme du Mail," "Le Mannequin"
or "Monsieur Bergeret a Paris" appearing in either of these countries.

This amiable and smiling scepticism, this profound scholarship, this
subtle interest in theological problems, this ironical interest in
political problems, this detachment of tone, this urbane humanism,
make up an "ensemble" which one feels could only possibly appear
in the land of Rabelais and Voltaire.

Think of the emergence of a book in London or New York bearing
such quotations at the heads of the chapters as those which are to be
found in "Le Puits de Sainte Claire"! The mere look of the first page
of the volume, with its beautifully printed Greek sentence about
_ta physika kai ta ethika kai ta mathmatika_, lifts one suddenly and
with a delicious thrill of pleasure, as if from the touch of a cool,
strong, youthful hand, into that serene atmosphere of large
speculations and unbounded vistas which is the inheritance of the
great humane tradition: the tradition, older than all the dust of
modern argument, and making every other mental temper seem, in
comparison, vulgar, common, bourgeois and provincial.

The chapter headed "Saint Satyre" is prefaced by a beautiful hymn
from the "Breviarum Romanum"; while the story named "Guido
Cavalcanti" begins with a long quotation from "Il Decameron di
Messer Giovanni Boccaccio." I take the first instance that comes to
my hand; but all his books are the same. And one who reads Anatole
France for the sake of an exciting narrative, or for the sake of
illuminating psychology, or for the sake of some proselytising
theory, will be hugely disappointed. None of these things will he
find; nor, indeed, anything else that is tiresomely and absurdly
modern.

What he will find will be the old, sweet, laughing, mellow world of
rich antique wisdom; a world where the poetry of the ancients
blends harmoniously with the mystical learning of the fathers of the
church; a world where books are loved better than theories and
persons better than books; a world where the humours of the
pathetic flesh and blood of the human race are give