M. Anatole France is no mean theologian himself. He reports with great
casuistical erudition the debates in the saintly council assembled in Heaven for
the consideration of an event so disturbing to the economy of religious
mysteries. Ultimately the baptised Penguins had to be turned into human beings;
and together with the privilege of sublime hopes these innocent birds received
the curse of original sin, with the labours, the miseries, the passions, and the
weaknesses attached to the fallen condition of humanity.
At this point M. Anatole France is again an historian. From being the Hakluyt of
a saintly adventurer he turns (but more concisely) into the Gibbon of Imperial
Penguins. Tracing the development of their civilisation, the absurdity of their
desires, the pathos of their folly and the ridiculous littleness of their quarrels, his
golden pen lightens by relevant but unpuritanical anecdotes the austerity of a
work devoted to a subject so grave as the Polity of Penguins. It is a very
admirable treatment, and I hasten to congratulate all men of receptive mind on
the feast of wisdom which is theirs for the mere plucking of a book from a shelf.
TURGENEV {2}—1917
Dear Edward,
I am glad to hear that you are about to publish a study of Turgenev, that
fortunate artist who has found so much in life for us and no doubt for himself,
with the exception of bare justice. Perhaps that will come to him, too, in time.
Your study may help the consummation. For his luck persists after his death.
What greater luck an artist like Turgenev could wish for than to find in the
English-speaking world a translator who has missed none of the most delicate,
most simple beauties of his work, and a critic who has known how to analyse
and point out its high qualities with perfect sympathy and insight.
After twenty odd years of friendship (and my first literary friendship too) I may
well permit myself to make that statement, while thinking of your wonderful
Prefaces as they appeared from time to time in the volumes of Turgenev’s
complete edition, the last of which came into the light of public indifference in
the ninety-ninth year of the nineteenth century.
With that year one may say, with some justice, that the age of Turgenev had
come to an end too; yet work so simple and human, so independent of the
transitory formulas and theories of art, belongs as you point out in the Preface to