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 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,