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.
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