34.  ANATOLE FRANCE.  L’ORME DE MAIL.  L’ABBE JEROME COIGNARD.  LE LIVRE DE MON AMI. Either in French or the authorized English translation.

Anatole France, now translated into English, is the most classical, the most ironical, the most refined, of all modern European writers.  He is also, of all others, the most antipathetic to the Anglo-Saxon type of mind.  In a word he is a humanist of the great tradition—­a civilized artist—­a great and wise man.  He is Rabelaisian and Voltairian, at the same time.  His style has something of the urbanity, the unction, the fine malice, of Renan; but it has also a quality peculiar to its creator—­a sort of transparent objectivity, lucid as rarified air, and contemptuously cold as a fragment of antique marble.  Monsieur Bergeret, who appears in all four of the masterpieces devoted to Contemporary France, is a creation worthy, as some one has said, of the author of Tristram Shandy.  One cannot forget that Anatole France spent his childhood among the bookshops on the South side of the Seine.  We are conscious all the while in reading him of the wise, tender, pitiful detachment of a true scholar of the classics, contemplating the mad pell-mell of human life from a certain epicurean remoteness, and loving and mocking the sons and daughters of men, as if they were little children or comical small animals.

37.  REMY DE GOURMONT.  UNE NUIT AU LUXEMBOURG. Translated with a preface by Arthur Ransome, published by Luce, Boston.

Remy de Gourmont’s death must be regretted by all lovers of the rare in art and the remote in character.  As a poet his “Litany of the Rose” has that strange, ambiguous, sinister, and lovely appeal, the full appreciation of which is an initiation into all the “enclosed gardens” of the world.

He is a great critic—­perhaps the greatest since Walter Pater—­and as a philosopher his constant and frank advocacy of a noble and shameless Hedonism has helped to clear the air in the track of Nietzsche’s thunder-bolts.

His audacity in placing an exposition of the very principles of Epicurean Hedonism, touched with Spinozistic equanimity, into the mouth of our Lord, wandering through the Luxembourg Gardens, may perhaps startle certain gentle souls, but the Dorian delicacy of what might for a moment appear blasphemous robs this charming Idyll of any gross or merely popular profanity.  It is a book for those who have passed through more than one intellectual Renaissance.  Like the “Golden Ass” of Apuleius it has a philosophical justification for its mythological audacity.

38.  PAUL BOURGET.  LE DISCIPLE.

“Le Disciple” is perhaps the best work of this voluminous and interesting writer.  Devoid of irony, deficient in humor, lacking any large imaginative power, Paul Bourget holds, all the same, an unassailable place among French writers.  Though a devoted adherent of Goethe and Stendhal, Bourget represents, along with Bordeaux, the conservative ethical reaction.  He upholds Catholicism and the sacredness of the “home.”  He is a master in plot and has a clear, vigorous and appealing style.  A gravely portentous sentiment sometimes spoils his tragic effects; but every lover of Paris will enjoy the unctuous elaboration of the “backgrounds” of his stories, touched often with the most delicate and mellow evocations of that City’s atmosphere.