n their true value,
as more amusing than any philosophy and as the cause and origin of
all the philosophies that have ever been!

Anatole France is incorrigibly pagan. The pleasures of the senses are
described in all his books with a calm smiling assurance that
ultimately these are the only things that matter!

I suppose that no author that ever lived is so irritating to
strong-minded idealists. He does not give these people "the ghost of a
chance." He serenely assumes that all ideals are of human, too
human, origin, and that no ideals can stand up long against the
shocks of life's ironic caprices.

And yet while so maliciously introducing, with laconic Voltairian
gibes, the wanton pricking of human sensuality, he never forgets the
church. In nothing is he more French; in nothing is he more civilised,
than in his perpetual preoccupation with two things--the beauty and
frailty of women and the beauty and inconsistency of Christianity.

The clever young men who write books in England and America
seem possessed by a precisely opposite purpose; the purpose of
showing that Christianity is played out and the purpose of showing
that women are no longer frail.

That sort of earnest-minded attempt to establish some kind of
mystical substitute for the religion of our fathers, which one is
continually meeting in modern books and which has so withering an
effect both upon imagination and humour, is never encountered in
Anatole France. He is interested in old tradition and he loves to
mock at it. He is interested in human sensuality and he loves to
mock at it; but apart from traditional piety struggling with natural
passion, he finds nothing in the human soul that arrests him very
deeply.

Man, to Anatole France, is a heathen animal who has been baptised;
and the humour of his whole method depends upon our keeping a
firm hold upon both these aspects of our mortal life.

In a world where men propagated themselves like plants or trees and
where there was no organised religious tradition, the humour of
Anatole France would beat its wings in the void in vain. He requires
the sting of sensual desire and he requires an elaborate ecclesiastical
system whose object is the restraint of sensual desire. With these
two chords to play upon he can make sweet music. Take them both
away and there could be no Anatole France.

The root of this great writer's genius is _irony._ His whole
philosophy is summed up in that word, and all the mag