us its singleness of eye, its grave and congruous simplicity were forever impossible-this curious dialectic and a peculiar sort of flatness or tepidity which is the natural counterpart of such an ingenuity and which is so familiar to every reader of French poetry. Without going outside the language compare, for example, this morsel of Corneille's Suite du Menteur, which Voltaire singles out for special praise, with a brief passage from a writer who, himself an admirer of the ancients, was yet quite untouched by the classical literary affectation, the artistry, of the renaissance-I mean Montaigne:

Quand les ordres du Ciel nous ont fait l'un pour l'autre,
Lyse, c'est un accord bien tost fait que le nostre.
Sa main entre les cœurs, par un secret pouvoir,
Séme l'intelligence avant que de se voir;

Il prépare si bien l'amant et la maîtresse

Que leur âme au seul nom s'emeut et s'intéresse:
On s'estime, on se cherche, on s'aime en un moment;
Tout ce qu'on s'entredit persuade aisément,
Et, sans s'inquiéter d'aucunes peurs frivoles,

Le foy semble courir au devant des paroles.

La langue en peu de mots en explique beaucoup;
Les yeux, plus éloquens, font tout voir tout d'un coup;
Et, de quoy qu'à l'envy tous les deux nous s'instruisent,
Le cœur en entend plus que tous les deux n'en disent.
La Suite du Menteur, iv., I.

It is on a somewhat similar subject, his friendship for de la Boëtie, that Montaigne speaks in the following terms:

Si l'on me presse de dire pourquoy je l'aymois, je sens que cela ne se peut exprimer: il y a, ce semble, au delà de tout mon discours et de ce que j'en puis dire, ne sçay quelle force divine et fatale, mediatrice de cette union. Ce n'est pas une particuliere consideration, ny deux, ny trois, ny quatre, ny mille; c'est je ne sçay quelle quinte essence de tout ce meslange, qui, ayant saisi toute ma volonté, l'amena se plonger et se perdre dans la sienne. Je dis perdre, à la verité, ne luy reservant rien qui luy fust propre ny qui fust sien.

It seems, indeed, as though there were but a single moment in the world's history when men could be unaffectedly simple without shallowness or banality; and, that moment passed, they must needs be intricate or nothing.

Les grandes choses, says Sainte-Beuve, et qui sont simples à la fois, ont été dites de bonne heure: les anciens moralistes et poëtes ont dessiné et saisi la nature humaine dans ses principaux et larges traits; il semble qu'ils n'aient laissé aux modernes que la découverte des détails et la grâce des raffinements.

And so, if the inference is correct, it evidently indicates a source of weakness as dangerous to modern classicism as is the risk of distraction and confusion to romanticism.

L'esclave imitateur nâit et s'évanouit;

La nuit vient, le corps reste, et son ombre s'enfuit.

L

ANATOLE FRANCE

ATE as was Anatole France to assume the

role of reviewer, there were early noticeable in his novels an air of half-humorous, halfironical detachment from the more active interests of life, a disposition to general ideas, and a curious sublimation of thought which brought them nearer to criticism, especially criticism after his own kind, than the novel usually dares to steer. It was fiction of a new sort-fiction drenched with ideas to the point of saturation; and if it is the office of criticism to elicit ideas and hold them up to contemplation, then in so far it was already criticism too. And yet, amply endowed in this vein as their writer would seem to have been, it must be confessed that after his novels his reviews, of which there are four volumes now collected, come as something of a disappointment. They are delightful reading as far as they go; but they are tantalisingly brief-altogether too short to accommodate the plenary amplitude of critical development, which is bound by its nature to be discursive if it is to be effective; while, delightful as they are singly, it is impossible to read many of them without becoming conscious of the trick-the

kind of sentimental heightening or magnification which the author applies to all subjects regardless of their relative merits or importance. Of method or system his criticism is, indeed, guiltless; but this procédé, this aggrandisement of every topic indiscriminately by exploiting its personal interest or relation to the writer, soon becomes unpleasantly conspicuous. On the whole, then, the most interesting portions of the collection are the prefaces to the several volumes, in which he undertakes to set out a consecutive account of his idea and practice of criticism.

Anatole France is a critic, so he would have us believe, very much as Sedaine was a poet— for fun, pour rire. "I am no critic at all," he declares in his pleasant airy way; "I should n't know how to manage the threshing-machine into which clever persons throw the literary harvest to separate the wheat from the chaff. If literature has stories as the fairies have, then these are of them." In this spirit of modest deprecation he goes on to disclaim, for himself in particular and for the critic in general, all title to the ancient traditional rights and properties of criticism, especially those of judgment and authority.

Criticism, he confesses with cheerful alacrity, is a sort of novel for the use of advised and curious spirits. And as every novel, properly understood, is an autobiography, the good critic is one who relates his adventures with masterpieces. [Here one might inquire,

parenthetically, if criticism is all a matter of personal liking, why, then, should the critic be restricted to masterpieces, and if so, how are these masterpieces to be decided upon?] There is no more an objective criticism, he continues, than there is an objective art; and all those who flatter themselves on putting anything other than themselves into their work are dupes of the most fallacious sort of illusion. The truth is,

one can never get outside of oneself. That is our greatest misfortune. What would n't we give to see heaven and earth for a moment with the faceted eye of the fly, or to comprehend nature with the rude and simple brain of the orang-outang? But that is forbidden us. We can not, like Teresias, be a man and remember how it seemed to be a woman.

We are each enclosed in his own person as in a perpetual prison. The best we can do, it seems to me, is to recognise this frightful condition of things with good grace and confess that we are talking about ourselves every time we are weak enough to talk at all.

Now this is all very sprightly, very brilliant, and very entertaining indeed. And it is on the strength of these, his own protestations, that Anatole France has come to be reputed the critic of caprice, of mere personal inclination, and to be lauded, it must be confessed, by many of the lighter-minded who would have been the first to decry the very same work had it been offered them with a solemn countenance. But one acquainted with Renan, the spirit from whom Anatole France most derives, may be permitted to doubt the absolute sincerity of these professions. If there is anything these