Page:The Yellow Book - 05.djvu/308

sought for happiness and found it nowhere, save in a corner with a book."

To sum up, we have in M. Anatole France a fastidious and distinguished artist in prose; an inventor of fantastic and delightful characters; a thinker whose ingenious and suggestive philosophy is based on the solid foundations of thorough scholarship. His stories are as delicate as thin shells, and their subtle echo evokes the music of the wide seas. On the other hand, his critical essays are so graceful that they read like fairy tales. The lightness and grace of his work have made serious people shake their heads. They forget that a graceful use of the snaffle is more masterly than an ostentatious control of the curb.

"A good style," M. France says, "is like a ray of sunlight, which owes its luminous purity to the combination of the seven colours of which it is composed."

M. Frances style has precisely this luminous and complicated simplicity. But a reader unacquainted as yet with M. France's work must not expect too much. M. France's talent is subdued and limited. He is not an inventor of wonderful romance; he has never peered into the depths of the human soul; neither has his work the concise and masculine strength of a writer like Guy de Maupassant. He contemplates life from the Garden of Epicurus, smiling in plaintive tranquillity at the grotesque and tragic masks of the human comedy.

What the reader must expect to find in his books is an exquisitepuppet-show,