to-day and outmoded. What does M. Brousson's translator mean by "Himself"? Am I a whit more myself in dressing gown and slippers than in khaki and leggins or in the most formal apparel that I can master for the most public of performances? More comfortable, more happy, in one than in the other, but not a whit more myself. Indirectly this title perhaps protests against James Lewis May's "Anatole France," published in the autumn of 1924. Mr. May, coming to the master with Anglo-Saxon reverence for the "greatest living man of letters," saw in him a gracious old gentleman, with a strain of Virgilian sadness in him, who approached his disciple with a flower. Mr. May placed the flower opposite a tender passage in his Virgil, called into his mind all the expressions in the works of Anatole France which reveal his gentle and sad lucidity of soul, and declared that, for him, poetry was the master's precious and immortal part.
Now, this M. Brousson formed his impressions, took his pictures, at altogether different points of view. Moreover, M. Brousson is a different sort of artist. His Anatole France is not in the least respect a Virgilian personality. He is not, in any careful sense of the phrase, a "gracious old gentleman." He is an elderly Gallic antiquarian and voluptuary, tart, malicious, salty, a studious flatterer, an egotist, a cynic, a libertine, with a senile vanity concerning his prowess with "God's creatures."
M. Brousson has a sharp eye for the traits which attract him. He has a sharp pencil. He has a clear coherent conception of his subject as a most interesting and distinguished literary animal. His scores of brilliant distinct little pictures of him all "hang together." They produce a unified effect, which is not
