THE WORKS OF ANATOLE FRANCE first novel was Jocasta and The Famished Cat (1879). The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard appeared in 1881, and had the distinction of being crowned by the French Academy, into which he was received in 1896. ^ His work is illuminated with style, scholarship, and psychology ; but its outstanding features are the lambent wit, the gay mockery, the genial irony with which he touches every subject he treats. But the wit is never malicious, the mockery never derisive, the irony never barbed. To quote from his own Garden of Epicurus, "Irony and Pity are both of good counsel ; the first with her smiles makes life agreeable ; the other sanctifies it to us with her tears. The Irony I invoke is no cruel deity. She mocks neither love nor beauty. She is gentle and kindly disposed. Her mirth disarms anger, and it is she teaches us to laugh at rogues and fools whom but for her we might be so weak as to hate." ^ Often he shows how divine humanity triumphs over mere asceticism, and with entire reverence ; indeed, he might be described as an ascetic overflowing with humanity, just as he has been termed a " pagan, but a pagan constantly haunted by the preoccupation of Christ." He is in turn — like his own Choulette in The Red Lily — saintly and Rabelaisian, yet without incongruity. At all times he is the unrelenting foe of superstition and hypocrisy. Of himself he once modestly said : " You will find in my writings perfect sin- cerity (lying demands a talent I do not possess), much indul- gence, and some natural affection for the beautiful and good." U The mere extent of an author's popularity is perhaps a poor argument, yet it is significant that two books by this author are in their Hundred and Tenth Thousand, and numbers of them well into their Seventieth Thousand, whilst the one which a Frenchman recently described as " Monsieur France's most arid book " is in its Fifty-Eighth Thousand. % Inasmuch as M. France's only contribution to an English periodical appeared in "The Yellow Book," Vol. v., April 1895, together with the first important English appreciation of his work from the pen of the Hon. Maurice Baring, it is peculiarly appropriate that the English edition of his works should be issued from the Bodley Head.
