Part 4

Francis de Pressensé's speech was distinguished by its simple, noble power. It was Huguenot oratory. He holds himself straight and still, speaks without a gesture, without an appeal to his audience, except that of his assertions to their sense of right. He communicates fact after fact and explains them. His command of language is so great that he has never to search for words, however quickly he speaks, and never mutilates a sentence, however hurriedly he flings it from him. In contrast to the usual custom of French orators, he makes not the slightest pause when he has said something particularly effective and applause breaks forth. He allows no time for the applause, but speaks on without a movement or a break, seemingly unconscious of it.

When the time came for Jaurès to speak, part of the platform was cleared, because he required its full length. The eloquence of the great Socialist is genuine Catholic eloquence. He recalls the most remarkable of the preachers in the churches of Naples. He, like them, is a Southern. And like them he requires a roomy stage, on which, whilst speaking, he can walk up and down, halt, and turn in all directions.

He has a voice like the trumpet of the Last Judgment. As soon as he 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