liberty, because it is not possible, and, above all, he does not believe that men will be good or bad: “They will be what they will be.” That is what he dreams as he sleeps on the white stone, the species of man evolving into another race possibly fine, possibly vile, but yet worth dreaming of because, as Mr Wells says, man is not final, and so long as a thing is not final it has the charm of a closed bud that conceals a flower the colour of which we do not know. Anatole France does not say whether the flower will burst forth gorgeous red or virginal white; it will be what it will be, and so best, for whatever its colour and its form it will be that thing which he loves in his quiet, smiling, sober way, the flower of life. V THE CRAFTSMAN AND THE MAN This may seem _énorme_ and yet somehow it is not: Anatole France is not exactly a literary man. He is not a literary man in the sense of Flaubert or Turgenev, for he is not content with being the god in the machine, he is always allowing you to see him guiding it; indeed in most of his work he is the god in the car. That is probably why Anatole France has never adopted classical form. He appreciates it, and in the many critical articles he has written he has praised just those people whose form was perfect ... but it is the sick man, not the robust man admires health. There is not one of his novels properly holds together. I mean that there is not one that develops harmoniously the story of certain human beings in a given atmosphere. At times, for instance in the four volumes of _Contemporary History_, you have the sense of developing lives, and then Anatole France puts on somebody else’s coat, like Maître Jacques, transforms himself from coachman into cook, calls himself Bergeret or Bonnard, or, more audaciously, takes on the shape of Vence, the genial worldling, or of Dechartre, the passionate sculptor, and talks. As soon as that happens the novel is forgotten; Anatole France takes the reader by the hand and draws him away to pick intellectual primroses. A delightful exercise; only when hundreds of these primroses are picked you have forgotten the novel you deserted. I have mentioned already the incoherence of _The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard_. Then there is the famous _Red Lily_, which is supposed to be a love story; it is a love story of the most passionate kind, only it is so inextricably mixed up with mystical excursions by a vagabond, ragged poet, evidently modelled on Verlaine, with views on pictorial art by Vence and Dechartre, that, interested as one is all the time, one loses one’s sense of proportion. When the lovers meet in the beautiful Florentine pavilion one is never sure that theirs is a love feast: at any moment it may turn into an essay on the glazes of Botticelli. Anatole France must at one time have been conscious of this, for in one of his books, _Histoire Comique_, he made a great effort to tell the story of a little actress who threw over her actor