superb and his wisdom of no account.  To acquiesce is wise; to be ecstatic in acquiescence is not to have acquiesced at all.  It is to have identified oneself with an imagined power against whose manifestations, in those moments when no ecstasy remains, one rebels.  It is a megalomania, a sublime self-deception, a heroic attempt to project the soul on to the side of destiny, and to believe ourselves the masters of those very powers which have overwhelmed us.

Whether the present generation will produce great poetry, we do not know.  We are tolerably certain that it will not produce wise men.  It is too conscious of defeat and too embittered to be wise.  Some may seek that ecstasy of seeming acquiescence of which we have spoken; others, who do not endeavour to escape the pain by plunging the barb deeper, may try to shake the dust of life from off their feet.  Neither will be wise.  But precisely because they are not wise, they will seek the company of wise men.  Their own attitude will not wear.  The ecstasy will fail, the will to renunciation falter; the gray reality which permits no one to escape it altogether will filter like a mist into the vision and the cell.  Then they will turn to the wise men.  They will find comfort in the smile to which they could not frame their own lips, and discover in it more sympathy than they could hope for.

Among the wise men whom they will surely most frequent will be Anatole France.  His company is constant; his attitude durable.  There is no undertone of anguish in his work like that which gives such poignant and haunting beauty to Tchehov.  He has never suffered himself to be so involved in life as to be maimed by it.  But the price he has paid for his safety has been a renunciation of experience.  Only by being involved in life, perhaps only by being maimed by it, could he have gained that bitterness of knowledge which is the enemy of wisdom.  Not that Anatole France made a deliberate renunciation:  no man of his humanity would of his own will turn aside.  It was instinct which guided him into a sequestered path, which ran equably by the side of the road of alternate exaltation and catastrophe which other men of equal genius must travel.  Therefore he has seen men as it were in profile against the sky, but never face to face.  Their runnings, their stumblings and their gesticulations are a tumultuous portion of the landscape rather than symbols of an intimate and personal possibility.  They lend a baroque enchantment to the scene.

So it is that in all the characters of Anatole France’s work which are not closely modelled upon his own idiosyncrasy there is something of the marionette.  They are not the less charming for that; nor do they lack a certain logic, but it is not the logic of personality.  They are embodied comments upon life, but they do not live.  And there is for Anatole France, while he creates them, and for us, while we read about them, no reason why they should live.  For living, in the accepted sense, is an activity impossible without indulging many illusions; and fervently to sympathise with characters engaged in the activity demands that their author should participate in the illusions.  He, too, must be surprised at the disaster which he himself has proved inevitable.  It is not enough that he should pity them; he must share in their effort, and be discomfited at their discomfiture.