Henry James remarks somewhere that an American has to study for fifty years of his life in order to attain, culturally speaking, the point from which a European starts at birth. Just what does he mean by this unpatriotic utterance? I am reminded of it when I think of Anatole France, and recall his characteristic sayings. Consider the following: ’Tis a great infirmity to think. God preserve you from it, my son, as He has preserved His greatest saints, and the souls whom He loves with especial tenderness and destines to eternal felicity. Now it is possible to conceive of a Catholic bishop or a Methodist missionary or a Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan who might be too stupid to understand that remark; but it is difficult to conceive how, understanding it, he could withhold the tribute of a smile. Into this remark a great master of words has distilled the essence of a civilization, the precious flavor of centuries of culture. There are only thirty-four words in it, and yet you can afford to meditate upon it for a long time. The writer of such a paragraph possesses a mind emancipated from the shams and delusions of the ages; he is skeptical, realistic, and as witty as it is possible for a man to be; yet also he is urbane--he does not seize you by the shoulders and shake you, for he has learned that there are all kinds of strange people in the world, and he asks merely that you consent to smile with him. How is such a man brought into existence? His father was a book-seller, and so he breathed culture in his childhood; he read everything from every part of the world, especially things written by men long since dead; things full of that beauty mingled with sadness which is one of the gifts of time. Anatole France learned to be at home in strange cultures, and at the same time he studied the masters of his own country, whose specialties are precision and lucidity and charm of phrase. At the age of twenty-seven he published a story, “The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard,” a sentimental pretty tale about an elderly, kind-hearted French antiquarian, who rescues a little girl from cruel mistreatment, and then discovers that under the French law he is guilty of abduction. It might have been written by any of our magazine writers of the cheer-up, God’s-in-His-Heaven school--provided only that these writers had possessed a thousand years of culture.