joy to watch M. Anatole France pouring the clear elixir compounded

of his Pyrrhonic philosophy, his Benedictine erudition, his gentle
wit and most humane irony into such an unpromising and opaque

vessel. He would have attempted it in a spirit of benevolence
towards his fellow men and of compassion for that life of the earth

which is but a vain and transitory illusion. M. Anatole France is
a great magician, yet there seem to be tasks which he dare not

face. For he is also a sage.
It is a book of ocean travel--not, however, as understood by Herr

Ballin of Hamburg, the Machiavel of the Atlantic. It is a book of
exploration and discovery--not, however, as conceived by an

enterprising journal and a shrewdly philanthropic king of the
nineteenth century. It is nothing so recent as that. It dates

much further back; long, long before the dark age when Krupp of
Essen wrought at his steel plates and a German Emperor

condescendingly suggested the last improvements in ships' dining-
tables. The best idea of the inconceivable antiquity of that

enterprise I can give you is by stating the nature of the
explorer's ship. It was a trough of stone, a vessel of hollowed

granite.
The explorer was St. Mael, a saint of Armorica. I had never heard

of him before, but I believe now in his arduousexistence with a
faith which is a tribute to M. Anatole France's pious earnestness

and delicate irony. St. Mael existed. It is distinctly stated of
him that his life was a progress in virtue. Thus it seems that

there may be saints that are not progressively virtuous. St. Mael
was not of that kind. He was industrious. He evangelised the

heathen. He erected two hundred and eighteen chapels and seventy-
four abbeys. Indefatigable navigator of the faith, he drifted

casually in the miraculoustrough of stone from coast to coast and
from island to island along the northern seas. At the age of

eighty-four his high stature was bowed by his long labours, but his
sinewy arms preserved their vigour and his rude eloquence had lost

nothing of its force.
A nautical devil tempting him by the worldlysuggestion of fitting

out his desultory, miraculoustrough with mast, sail, and rudder
for swifter progression (the idea of haste has sprung from the

pride of Satan), the simple old saint lent his ear to the subtle
arguments of the progressive enemy of mankind.

The venerable St. Mael fell away from grace by not perceiving at
once that a gift of heaven cannot be improved by the contrivances

of human ingenuity. His punishment was adequate. A terrific
tempest snatched the rigged ship of stone in its whirlwinds, and,

to be brief, the dazed St. Mael was stranded violently on the
Island of Penguins.

The saint wandered away from the shore. It was a flat, round
island whence rose in the centre a conical mountain capped with

clouds. The rain was falling incessantly--a gentle, soft rain
which caused the simple saint to exclaim in great delight: "This

is the island of tears, the island of contrition!"
Meantime the inhabitants had flocked in their tens of thousands to

an amphitheatre of rocks; they were penguins; but the holy man,
rendered deaf and purblind by his years, mistook excusably the

multitude of silly, erect, and self-important birds for a human
crowd. At once he began to preach to them the doctrine of

salvation. Having finished his discourse he lost no time in
administering to his interesting congregation the sacrament of

baptism.
If you are at all a theologian you will see that it was no mean

adventure to happen to a well-meaning and zealous saint. Pray
reflect on the magnitude of the issues! It is easy to believe what

M. Anatole France says, that, when the baptism of the Penguins
became known in Paradise, it caused there neither joy nor sorrow,

but a profound sensation.
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 admirabletreatment, 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 SMOKE "to all time."
Turgenev's creative activity covers about thirty years. Since it

came to an end the social and political events in Russia have moved
at an accelerated pace, but the deep origins of them, in the moral

and intellectualunrest of the souls, are recorded in the whole
body of his work with the unerring lucidity of a great national

writer. The first stirrings, the first gleams of the great forces
can be seen almost in every page of the novels, of the short

stories and of A SPORTSMAN'S SKETCHES--those marvellous landscapes
peopled by unforgettable figures.

Those will never grow old. Fashions in monsters do change, but the
truth of humanity goes on for ever, unchangeable and inexhaustible

in the variety of its disclosures. Whether Turgenev's art, which
has captured it with such mastery and such gentleness, is for "all

time" it is hard to say. Since, as you say yourself, he brings all
his problems and characters to the test of love, we may hope that

it will endure at least till the infinite emotions of love are
replaced by the exact simplicity of perfected Eugenics. But even

by then, I think, women would not have changed much; and the women
of Turgenev who understood them so tenderly, so reverently and so

passionately--they, at least, are certainly for all time.
Women are, one may say, the foundation of his art. They are

Russian of course. Never was a writer so profoundly, so whole-
souledly national. But for non-Russian readers, Turgenev's Russia

is but a canvas on which the incomparable artist of humanity lays
his colours and his forms in the great light and the free air of

the world. Had he invented them all and also every stick and
stone, brook and hill and field in which they move, his personages

would have been just as true and as poignant in their perplexed
lives. They are his own and also universal. Any one can accept

them with no more question than one accepts the Italians of
Shakespeare.

In the larger, non-Russian view, what should make Turgenev
sympathetic and welcome to the English-speaking world, is his

essentialhumanity. All his creations, fortunate and unfortunate,
oppressed and oppressors, are human beings, not strange beasts in a

menagerie or damned souls knocking themselves to pieces in the
stuffy darkness of mystical contradictions. They are human beings,

fit to live, fit to suffer, fit to struggle, fit to win, fit to
lose, in the endless and inspiring game of pursuing from day to day