The Small-talk of France
The Opinions of Anatole France. By Nicolas Segur. (The Bodley Head. 7s. 6d.)
SnsTen Johnson, perhaps, there has been no man who has combined a taste for good talk with an audience so capable of enjoying and recording it as Anatole France. Oscar Wilde sparkled with epigrams that were polished and re- polished : the wit was there, but the company not always worthy of it. Amongst those whom the Parisian sage gathered round him, on the contrary, were:delightful women and clever writers such as the author, who had been born and bred in the best traditions of conversation—a French art.
With his thick white hair surmounted by a little crimson satin cap, his wonderful black eyes and his silken voice, Anatole France talked and talked with a lavishness and lambency that perhaps no one in his or in any other generation has ever equalled. Some of his best stories, M. Segur tells us, were given to his dog. Of those reserved to humans, we have a fine selection in the volume before us. We find him waxing eloquent about Einstein. " The amusing thing," he says, " is that the most abstract truths, precisely_ because they have no contact with facts, are longer lived than others." In science and history, a truth is merely the, theory to which for the time being nothing offers any contradiction. When it fits in with our accepted ideas, we call it true. But truths live and die even as we do. When other ideas are added to our stock truth retires once more- into our little brain-pan. Euclid survived two thousand years, now Einstein has dethroned him. . . . At this point in the conversation, M. Segur was asked to explain the experiments of Michelson, Anatole France explaining to his circle that the exposition was one of immense interest and importance. The chapter ends on this human note : " The old man's eyelids gradually began to close. Five minutes later he was snoring placidly,"
" How can one write when out in the world there is sunshine and flowers and women ? " France once asked. He was too impatient to enjoy the physical task of transcribing his thoughts to paper, preferring rather " to contemplate the broad river on which all things flow onward to the great beyond. I taste the delights of escape in meditation but not in writing. Every time they bring me a pen and set up a pile of paper before me I feel like making for the door or going up in a balloon." Perhaps, after all, great as hiM writing is, France will live to future generations through his talk. Here are some barbed shafts aimed at Spiritualism :
" Certainly Crookes had some luck in his day. He first of all performed a miracle in the natural order. He split the atom and diRPovered new metals, new rays, and Heaven knows what besides. He weighed the imponderable, and glimpsed the invisible. BSI) what is all that beside his experiences with Kate King, the familiar spirit who used to come and keep him company, who nestled at his feet, who gave him her hair to twine ? F'onder, then, on the ineffable delight of loving a woman platonically, without under- going the preliminary necessity of being too infirm for anything else . . . But his familiar genius was a pure humbug. She was a little woman of flesh and blood who merely played a trick on .the old scientist."
And here, in conclusion, is a gay monologue after a lecture on astronomy at which he had been rather put out by hearing such a quantity .of talk without being allowed an audience himself :
" France was silent for a few moments. Then, as he saw Madame D. advancing towards him with her hazel eyes and golden hair, be said, with a glance full of admiration for her beauty : 'Are you aware, Madame, that one of the stars in the Arctic Circle is very old and like to die ? Shall I succeed in stirring your emotion when I tell you that we are bound straight for the Constellation
of Hercules ? Aye, Madame, that is our destination. We are going to the Constellation of Hercules. That's what we are doing, while infants are born and aged folk are dying, while new religions are rising and old ones falling to ruin, we am speeding, and all the planetary bodies, with the Sun at their head, in headlong career towards the Constellation of Hercules. That is your trysting- place, Madame, your goal and ours. 'Tis there we shall arrive when our dust shall have disappeared, when the Earth is shattered to fragments and the light of the Sun extinguished and aeons yet to be have passed away. Thither we shall come, and where- fore ? We know not, but thither we are travelling ; and travelling at a speed of tens of thousands of miles to the second.' And glancing sadly at the pretty lady, h3 said : ' No matter ! Be seated all the same, and suffer me to kiss your hand before wo reach this mysterious destination.' "
There is something rather magnificent in this. It is not conversation as understood in England, but it is certainly French and France.
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