And there is more: forgive me if I paint the lily a little, but others have painted it and in colours which displease me. The alleged reactionary of _The Gods are Athirst_, the man who was supposed to have gone back in 1914 upon the humanitarian and republican sentiments of the Dreyfus period, that man was, in 1882, in _Les Désirs de Jean Servien_ (a thoroughly second-rate novelette), painting an absurd revolutionary. The Commune reigns; he shows the hero the people rioting in the Luxembourg Gardens, and says: “M. Servien, look upon this scene and never forget it: here is a free people. _Indeed the citizens were walking upon the grass, plucking flowers in the beds, and breaking off the branches of the trees._” Anatole France had in those days few illusions as to the behaviour of free peoples! And again in the short stories which make up _Mother of Pearl_ (1892) one is oppressed by Anatole France’s hatred of the revolutionaries, their brute ignorance, vanity, stupidity, their mean revengefulness, and their silly imitation of Roman attitudes. Anatole France is what he was, and if he seems to have changed now and then, or to have been inconsistent, it is because he is a developed human being, a rare bird. He has not cut out his views as with a stencil; they are fluid, they overlap, and he can hold simultaneously two entirely divergent views. I submit that any man of high intellectual development tends to hold two views upon one topic. One view is that of his instinct, the other is that of his reason. In the case of Anatole France the instinct is always hedonistic; he is a pagan; he loves Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, and even the Catholic Church, for their beauty; he is fond of all the good things of the world, beautiful women, flowers, sweetmeats; of all the fine, disdainful aristocratic ideas of the artists and the philosophers.... But there is what may be called his social conscience, which is utilitarian and Socialistic. That conscience tells him that however much beauty he may extract from it, this world, filled with wars, with cruelties, with factories, with ugly houses and ugly clothes, with mean prejudices, is a world for which he is responsible because he is a man. The dream of that ugly world will not let him sleep easily upon his rose-decked couch. There is the conflict which has puzzled so many of his readers; sometimes an Epicurean, at other times a sort of Lloyd Georgeite is apparent. This does not mean that Anatole France is throwing over any ideas; he is merely being more or less influenced by one side of his own self. His love of humanity has always made it difficult for him to enjoy the fruit he raised to his mouth if it occurred to him just then that other mouths might go hungry. II SATIRIST AND CRITIC