opened his mouth its metallic clang made the windows in the roof of
the hall ring. He does not use it with much skill, does not even
moderate it to begin with, employs no crescendo or diminuendo, but is
from the first to the last moment all ardour and passion. Hence even
in a hall which holds 6000 persons his voice seems too strong, and not
unfrequently produces a disturbing resonance. He would be heard better
if he spared himself more.
He has the instincts of the actor. He charges, like a fighting ram,
with bent head at an invisible enemy. Or he bends forwards with
outstretched arms, and then with a jerk is erect again. Or he makes
himself small, crouches down till he is almost sitting, and then
suddenly starts up. He talks himself into a heat; in the end is bathed
in perspiration. His style is emotional--the militant pathos of a man
who loves his fellow men.
In his improvisations he is unable to keep himself in check. He goes on
too long. Up and down, up and down in front of one marches the short,
broadshouldered, strongly-built figure, large-limbed, thick-necked,
with a round head and handsome bearded face. Beside him France and
Pressensé looked like stag and horse beside a bull.
France did not really speak, but read, as he always does--perhaps
because, as writer, he has too much tenderness for each sentence he has
composed to deliver it up to the chance of the moment. His style, which
does not permit of a word being omitted or transposed, is ironical;
but the irony every here and there gives way to earnestness, which is
the more effective from its rarity. And this style meets with approval;
in all its subduedness it provokes laughter and carries conviction. He
relates what has happened, interjects a point of interrogation--and
his hearers smile; a point of exclamation--and they are compelled to
reflect. He inserts a parenthesis, and between its curves one catches a
glimpse of all the stupidity and insolence standing outside of them.
France spoke first of the state of matters produced by Bonaparte's
Concordat, of the fact that the State pays the clergy of three creeds,
the Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish, but only of these three,
although during the course of the nineteenth century the country has
acquired far more Mohammedan subjects than it has Protestant or Jewish.
He said, with a playful allusion to the old story of the three rings,
told by Boccaccio and employed by Lessing in _Nathan der Wise_:
"With us the Minister of Public Worship, like the father in the old
Jewish parable, has three rings. He does not tell us which is the
true one, and in this he is wise. But if he is to have more than one,
why limit the number to three? Our Heavenly Father has given His sons
more than three rings, and they are not able to discern which is the
original, the true ring. Monsieur le Ministre, why have you not all
your Heavenly Father's rings? You pay the clergy of certain creeds
and not those of others. You surely do not make yourself the judge of
religious truth? You cannot maintain that the three religions are in
possession of the truth, seeing that each of them vigorously condemns
both the others?"
As every one is aware, the encroachments of the Roman Catholic Church
have led to the urgent demand by the Republican party for separation
of Church and State. France maintained that this separation must take
place at once. But what are to be its conditions? He scoffed at the
old cry: A free Church in a free State. This would be equivalent to
an armed Church in a disarmed State. "We undoubtedly owe the Church
liberty," he said; "only not an absolute, theoretical liberty, which
does not exist, but real liberty, a liberty which is bounded by all
other liberties. You may be perfectly certain, however, that the Church
will not be the least grateful to us for this. It will receive this
liberty as an insult and mockery."
France then proceeded to speak of the relations between Europe
and Eastern Asia, and in doing so said: "The European Powers have
accustomed themselves, whenever any breach of order occurs in the great
Empire of China, to send out troops--either one Power independently or
several in combination--which troops restore order by means of theft,
violence, plunder, slaughter, and incendiarism, and pacify the country
with guns and cannons.
"The unarmed Chinese do not defend themselves, or defend themselves
badly. They are slaughtered with agreeable facility. They are polite
and ceremonious, but we reproach them with a want of goodwill towards
Europeans. Our complaint against them is of the same nature as Monsieur
Duchaillu's complaint of the gorilla.
"That gentleman shot a female gorilla. She died clasping her young one
to her breast. He tore the young animal from its mother's arms, and
dragged it after him across Africa to sell it in Europe. But it gave
him just cause of complaint. It was unsociable. It preferred dying of
hunger to living in his society, and refused to take food. 'I was,' he
writes, 'unable to overcome its bad disposition.'
"We complain of the Chinese with as much right as M. Duchaillu
complained of his gorilla."
France went on to speak of the yellow danger for Europe, and
demonstrated that it was not to be compared with the white danger for
Asia. The yellow men have not sent Buddhist missionaries to Paris,
London, and St. Petersburg. Neither has any yellow military expedition
landed in France and demanded a strip of territory within which the
yellow men are not to be subject to the laws of the country, but to a
court composed of Mandarins have come to the conclusion that, things
being bad at the best, the existing state of matters was probably as
good as the untried--that this man should proclaim himself a son of
the Revolution, side with the working man, acknowledge his belief in
liberty, throw away his load and draw his sword--this is what moves
a popular audience, this is what plain people can understand and can
prize.
It has shown them that behind the author there dwelt a man--behind the
great author a brave man.
End of Project Gutenberg's Anatole France, by Georg Morris Cohen Brandes