If Anatole France is to be remembered--that is, for a while, which is perhaps all a man can hope--it will be as a critic and as a satirist. Whether he will be remembered longer than his contemporaries, Tolstoy or Mr Shaw, I do not know. Though he has delighted us, the race of delights is short and pleasures have mutable faces; he may share the fate of Flaubert, who is menaced; of de Maupassant, who is going; or of Schiller, forgotten; of Walter Scott, reduced to a juvenile circulation; of Thackeray, staking all upon one novel; of Dickens, surviving by the picturesque; of Tolstoy, convicted as a moralist; of Greeks uneasily staggering under the burden of illogical murder and absurd incest ... I do not think that he will join the glorious band: Homer, Shakespeare, Molière. For Anatole France has understood all things, but mainly in their details. He has made a mosaic, not a marble court; seated on Olympus, his eyes have been too keen, and he has seen men too clearly, man not enough. But still he is, I suppose, assured of his line in any biographical dictionary that may be printed in the year 3000, and that is a good deal. I like to think of that entry in the _Cyclopædia of Literature_ (published by the International Government Press; price, seven days labour bonds, net). It runs something like this: FRANCE (Anatole). Pen-name of Jacques Anatole Thibault. French writer, b. 1844. d.     . Satirist and critic. Some of his work has merit as reflecting the faintly enlightened views of an observer living in barbarous times. Anatole France is the only living satirist. He has actually no rivals; there are men such as Messrs Max Beerbohm, Hansi, Mirbeau, Hector Munro, F. P. Dunne, who have a glimmering of what satire means; Mr Wells would have more than a glimmering if, unfortunately, he did not hold deep convictions about right and wrong, a weakness to which, in spite of all appearances, Mr Shaw also succumbs; but Anatole France alone upholds the ancient tradition of Voltaire, of Defoe and Swift. His satire is always effective because it is always light, always pointed and always smiling. He has none of the bitterness of Swift and therefore he is the truer cynic, for true cynicism is not fierce; it is always genial. He never labours a point; he states, presents the contrasts between, for instance, what a rich man may do as opposed to a poor one, and then passes on, laughing, Pan-like dancing, with perhaps a tear or two in his laughter.