A Latin by heredity, it follows that Anatole France wields a style of singular purity. His work is very polished and very condensed. He uses as few words as possible to embody his idea, and when he has made his point, as, for instance, in stories such as _The Procurator of Judæa_, he stops. His desire is to knock out his reader, but he does not, like Zola, then proceed to kneel and to roll upon the prostrate figure, smothering it and flattening it out under a vast bulk. Anatole France never flounders; he does not follow the man who did so much damage to the literature of the nineteenth century by piling up seventeen unessential details, crowned, often by accident, with the essential one. Selection is with him a habit, and that is why Anatole France will never be confounded with the Zolas, the Sudermanns, the William de Morgans. Without selection he never could have achieved his delicate little pictures of men and women, of their passions stated in a paragraph; and still less could he have built those strange animals that he so loves. They are not always philosophical animals like Riquet, the dog, praying to man, his god; sometimes like Miragoane, they are just intelligent, doggy dogs, tail-wagging, greedy, apologetic, fulsome dogs; at other times they are just decorative beasts, especially the cats. For Anatole France, like Théophile Gautier, like Baudelaire, like Edgar Allan Poe, like almost every artist who really is an artist, loves cats. In his eyes the cat is as beautiful as woman. Here is a scrap, which I feel I render inadequately, devoted to sumptuous Hamilcar, the Persian cat in the library: “Hamilcar, somnolent prince in the city of books, watcher in the night! Thou dost defend against vile rodents those things, manuscript and printed, bought for the old student by his modest hoard and his tireless zeal. In this silent library which thy military virtues protect, Hamilcar, sleep languid as a sultana. For thou dost unite in thy person the formidable air of a Tartar warrior and the indolent grace of an Eastern maid. Heroic and voluptuous Hamilcar, sleep until the mice shall dance in the moonlight before the _Acta Sanctorum_ of the learned Bollandists.” That is poetry, though, as I have suggested before now, Anatole France, in spite of his great love of the beautiful, is too critical, too humorous, has too much detachment to be written down a poet. He loves the poets, notably Racine, and one does not quite see why. But he is not a poet because, I think, he is too remote; the blood of the earth does not flow in his veins, and it may be that if he were closely questioned he would confess that he thinks life very useful to literature. That is perhaps why he tolerates it so well, why he can smile at it, be serious and yet poke fun at it. What a Fabian he would have made!