ISAIAH BERLIN
393
following day he opened the new Maison Frans;aise; he sat on the platform
with a somewhat Napoleonic expression, and seemed only
half
to listen
to the speeches of everyone else. Then he rose, and for, I suppose, about
four minutes spoke with the most magnificent eloquence about the obli–
gations of those who wore the gowns of university teachers, the obliga–
tions of intellectuals in the terrible world of sex and blood and banality
in which we were living. Most people there, I think, were rather embar–
rassed by this old-fashioned kind of rhetoric, and thought it unsuitable
to our time and circumstances-the English don't take very well to the
grand style of this type-but I thought it was absolutely splendid, and
think so still. This kind of eloquence is what W.B. Yeats used to defend
against those who believed in wringing the neck of rhetoric, the deflation
of words to the shape of the flatness of experience in an exact and exces–
sively austere fashion. Malraux believes in poetical afflatus, and this is a
thing which is exceptionally unfashionable today.
