“Pleasure seems to me to be the object of life, and the only useful thing in the world. God has so willed it, who made women, perfume, light, beautiful flowers, good wines, spirited horses, greyhounds and Persian cats. He has not said to his angels: ‘Have virtue,’ but ‘Have love,’ and has given us lips more sensitive than the rest of our skin so that we may caress women, eyes raised on high to see the light, subtle scent to breathe the soul of flowers, sinewy thighs to grip the flanks of stallions and to fly swift as thought without railway or engine, delicate hands to draw over the long heads of greyhounds, the velvet lines of cats, and the gleaming shoulders of creatures without virtue; he has given to us alone the treble and glorious privilege of drinking without being thirsty, of lighting tinder and of making love at all times, which distinguishes us from the brutes much more than the habits of reading newspapers and manufacturing maps.” In this preface lives much of Anatole France, his pure hedonism, his pagan love of the beautiful, his entire lack of moral purpose, counteracted by his consciousness of the decent, the elegant thing. If he believes, as I think he does, in honour, in truth, courtesy, pity, service, it is not owing to any harsh Protestant moral impulse, but to a feeling that there are fine, clean things revealed to us by some obscure Kantian, categorical imperative; if he has a morality at all it is the Ingersollian morality, that is to say obligation perceived by a fine soul. It is this inflames his style and links him with his forbears, with Voltaire, with Renan, with Molière, with the Italians of the sixteenth century, with the amiable Latins, with all the dead who loved the sunshine, with the gay gods, and the warriors who, on the way to the Elysian fields, did not turn their backs upon wine, woman and song. Not for him the sombre fates of duty, fear, retribution; not for him malignant Jove any more than malignant Jehovah. In the trenches in 1870 he read, not Sophocles, not Æschylus, but Virgil. As Brotteaux went to the guillotine he read Lucretius. For him flowers and honey to lay upon the little altars in Ausonian glades, and not the rapes and arguments of ancient Greece.