gifted magicians.  Contemplating the exactness of his images and the justice of his judgment, the freedom of his fancy and the fidelity of his purpose, one becomes aware of the futility of literary watchwords and the vanity of all the schools of fiction.  Not that M. Anatole France is a wild and untrammelled genius.  He is not that.  Issued legitimately from the past, he is mindful of his high descent.  He has a critical temperament joined to creative power.  He surveys his vast domain in a spirit of princely moderation that knows nothing of excesses but much of restraint.

II.—­“L’ILE DES PINGOUINS”

M. Anatole France, historian and adventurer, has given us many profitable histories of saints and sinners, of Roman procurators and of officials of the Third Republic, of grandes dames and of dames not so very grand, of ornate Latinists and of inarticulate street hawkers, of priests and generals—­in fact, the history of all humanity as it appears to his penetrating eye, serving a mind marvellously incisive in its scepticism, and a heart that, of all contemporary hearts gifted with a voice, contains the greatest treasure of charitable irony.  As to M. Anatole France’s adventures, these are well-known.  They lie open to this prodigal world in the four volumes of the Vie Litteraire, describing the adventures of a choice soul amongst masterpieces.  For such is the romantic view M. Anatole France takes of the life of a literary critic.  History and adventure, then, seem to be the chosen fields for the magnificent evolutions of M. Anatole France’s prose; but no material limits can stand in the way of a genius.  The latest book from his pen—­which may be called golden, as the lips of an eloquent saint once upon a time were acclaimed golden by the faithful—­this latest book is, up to a certain point, a book of travel.

I would not mislead a public whose confidence I court.  The book is not a record of globe-trotting.  I regret it.  It would have been a joy to watch M. Anatole France pouring the clear elixir compounded of his Pyrrhonic philosophy, his Benedictine erudition, his gentle wit and most humane irony into such an unpromising and opaque vessel.  He would have attempted it in a spirit of benevolence towards his fellow men and of compassion for that life of the earth which is but a vain and transitory illusion.  M. Anatole France is a great magician, yet there seem to be tasks which he dare not face.  For he is also a sage.

It is a book of ocean travel—­not, however, as understood by Herr Ballin of Hamburg, the Machiavel of the Atlantic.  It is a book of exploration and discovery—­not, however, as conceived by an enterprising journal and a shrewdly philanthropic king of the nineteenth century.  It is nothing so recent as that.  It dates much further back; long, long before the dark age when Krupp of Essen wrought at his steel plates and a German Emperor condescendingly suggested the last improvements in ships’ dining-tables.  The best idea of the inconceivable antiquity of that enterprise I can give you is by stating the nature of the explorer’s ship.  It was a trough of stone, a vessel of hollowed granite.