The French Mastery of Style

“THE natural bent, the need, the mania, to influence others is the most salient trait of French character. . . . Every people has its mission ; this is the mission of the French. The most trifling idea they launch upon Europe is a battering-ram driven forward by thirty million men. Ever hungering for success and influence, the French would seem to live only to gratify this craving ; and inasmuch as a nation cannot have been given a mission without the means of fulfilling it, the French have been given this means in their language, by which they rule much more effectually than by their arms, though their arms have shaken the world.” This praise, possibly the highest the French language has ever received, cannot be said to emanate from one who was an entire foreigner : he was a native of Savoy, and everybody knows what affection, frequently chiding and captious, the Savoyards, from Vaugelas to François Buloz, have shown toward the French language. On the other hand, it can hardly be called the utterance of a Frenchman, coming as it does from Joseph de Maistre, ambassador from his Majesty the King of Sardinia to his Majesty the Tsar of all the Russias : and that is why I venture to quote it. There are things that modesty forbids us to say ourselves, but which we have the right to appropriate when others have said them, especially when their way of saying them makes us feel that there is a little jealousy mingled with the genuineness of their admiration. This same Joseph de Maistre writes furthermore : “ I recollect having read formerly a letter of the famous architect Christopher Wren, in which he discusses the right dimensions for a church. He fixes upon them solely with reference to the carrying power of the human voice, and he sets the limits beyond which the voice for any English ear becomes inaudible ; ‘ but,’ he says on this point, ' a French orator would make himself heard farther away, his pronunciation being firmer and more distinct.’ ” And finally, de Maistre adds by way of comment on this quotation: “ What Wren has said of oral speech appears to me still truer of that far more penetrating speech heard in books. The speech of Frenchmen is always audible farther away.” Let us take his word for it.

What, then, is the reason of this fact ? It is a question which has seemed to me worth discussing, now that all the great American universities are organizing their “ departments of Romance languages ” on a more liberal scale than they have done hitherto. If, speaking from the other side of the Atlantic, I could give them good reasons for perseveringin this path, I should possibly be rendering them a service. For, these reasons being purely literary, the American universities would doubtless then grant to “literature” proper an attention that several of them seem up to the present to have reserved entirely for “ philology.” We, for our part, should gain through coming into closer relations with these universities, and thereby with what is best in the American democracy. It is hard to see who in Europe or America could take exception to this exchange of kindly offices, at least if it be true that the French language and literature possess the distinctive features which I shall attempt to show.

Let us put aside at the start all thought of any superiority in French as a natural organism over other languages. especially over the other Romance languages. If our language has its native points of excellence, other languages have theirs : Italian, for instance, is sweeter, and Spanish more sonorous. Sonorousness and sweetness are neither of them points of excellence which we can afford to despise in a language ; and because they are to a certain extent “ physical,” they are none the less real or unusual. A fine voice, too, is only a fine voice ; and yet how much does it not contribute to the success of a great orator. It may even be said almost literally of Demosthenes and Cicero that they are the “ greatest voices ” that have been heard among men. It must be confessed that the physical properties of the French language are not at all out of the common ; and the truth is that, before turning them to account, most of our great writers in prose and verse have had a preliminary struggle to surmount them.

We must not be led, either, into thinking that we have had greater writers than the English or the Germans. This would be mere impertinence. If we could be tempted into believing it, all the labor of criticism for more than a hundred years would have been thrown away. Victor Hugo is a great poet, but Goethe and Shakespeare are great poets also. Genius has no national preferences.

But what may be truthfully said is that in France, from the very start, and especially during the last four hundred years, everybody has conspired to make of the French language that instrument of international exchange and universal communication which it has become. Noble ladies, from Marguerite de Valois, author of the Heptameron, to the Marquise de Rambouillet; ministers of state, like the Cardinal de Richelieu; princes and kings, Francis I., Charles IX. (the protector and rival of Ronsard), Louis XIV., have formed, as it were, part of a conspiracy which had as its definite object to gain for French universal acceptance in place of the classics. The French Academy was founded with no other purpose; its charter attests the fact, as also its membership, which, happily, has never been entirely confined to men of letters. Our writers, in order to conform to this design, have usually consented to give up a part of their originality. It has not been enough for them to understand themselves, or to be understood by their countrymen and within the limits of their frontiers. They believed long before Rivarol said it — in an Essay on the Universal Diffusion of the French Language, a subject for the best treatment of which the Berlin Academy had offered a prize in 1781 —that “what is not clear is not French.” To achieve this transparent and radiant clearness, to make some approach, at least, to this universal diffusion, so that in Germany and England, in Italy and America, the knowledge of the French language is a sign of culture, a mark of education, — to arrive at these results, I do not deny that they have been forced to make some sacrifices. These, however, I shall choose to ignore for the present, and I propose simply to discuss here two or three of the principal means that these conspirators of a somewhat unusual kind have taken to compass their end.

I.

In the first place, for three or four hundred years back, French writers, and we the public in common with them, have treated our language as a work of art. Let us have a clear understanding of the meaning of this word “art.”The Greeks in antiquity, the Italians of the Renaissance, gave an artistic stamp or character to the commonest utensils, — to an earthen jar or a tin plate, an amphora, a ewer. It is a stamp of a similar kind that our writers from the time of Ronsard have tried to give the French language. They have thought that every language, apart from the services it renders in the ordinary usage and every-day intercourse of life, is capable of receiving an artistic form, and this form they have desired to bestow upon our own language. Read with reference to this point the manifesto of the Pléiade, The Defense and Ennoblement of the French Language by Joachim du Bellay, which bears the date of 1549, and you will see that such is throughout not merely its genera] spirit, but its special and particular object. Since then not only have French prose writers and poets had the same ambition, but all their readers, even princes themselves, have encouraged it, have made it almost a question of state ; and the consequence is that no literary revolution or transformation has taken place in France which did not begin by being, knowingly and deliberately, a transformation or a modification of the language. This is what Malherbe, after Ronsard and in opposition to him, desired to do: namely, to give to the French language a precision and a clearness of outline, a musical cadence, a harmony of phrase, and finally a fullness of sense and sound, which seemed to him to be still lacking in the work of Ronsard ; and along with Malherbe, by other means, but in a parallel direction, this was likewise the aim of the précieuses. The same is true of Boileau, as well as of Molière. It was through language, since it was by the means of style and the criticism of style, as is seen in works like the Satires and the Précieuses Ridicules, that they brought the art of their time back to the imitation of nature. Even in our own days, what was romanticism, what were realism and naturalism, at the start ? The answer is always the same : they were theories of style before being doctrines of art; ways of writing before being ways of feeling or thinking; a reform of the language and an emancipation of the vocabulary, the striving after a greater flexibility of syntax, before it was known what use would be made of these conquests.

There is, then, in French, in the method of handling the language, a continuous artistic tradition. By very different and sometimes even opposing means, our writers have desired to please, in the best sense of the word,— to please themselves first of all, to please the public, to please foreigners ; to make of their language a universal language, analogous in a fashion to the language of music, to that of sounds or colors; and as the crowning triumph to make of a page of Bossuet or Racine, for instance, a monument of art, for qualities of the same order as a statue of Michael Angelo or a painting of Raphael.

From our great writers, and the cultivated and intelligent readers who are their natural judges, this concern for art has spread to the whole race, if indeed it were not truer to say that it was a matter of instinct. Who is not familiar with the phrase, “ Duas res . . . gens Gallica industriosissime persequitur : rem militarem et argute loqui ” ? “ Argute loqui,”

— this is to be artistic in one’s speech, and this everybody has been and tries to be among us ; and nowhere, surely, possibly not even in Greece, in the Athenian cafés, would you come across more “ elegant talkers " (beaux parleurs) than in France : they are to be met with in the villages : they are to be found in the workshops. Some of them, I am well aware, are insufferable withal, as for example the druggist Homais in Madame Bovary, and again the illustrious Gaudissart in the Comédie Humaine of Honore de Balzac. But what medal is without its reverse ? If we have so many “ elegant talkers,” it is because, in our whole system of public education, and even in our primary schools, this concern for art prevails. The fact is worthy of remark. What our little children learn in the schools under the name of orthography

— the word itself, when connected with its etymology, expresses the idea clearly enough — is to see in their language a work of art, since it is to recognize and enjoy what is well written. It is not possible, indeed, to fix in the memory the outer form of a word, its appearance, its physiognomy, so as not to confuse it with any other word, without its exact meaning being also stamped in the mind.

In this respect, the oddities, or, as we sometimes call them, the “ Chinese puzzles ” (chinoiseries) of orthography help to preserve shades of thought. The same may be said of the peculiarities of syntax. You will not teach children that Goliath was a tall man (un homme grand), and David a great man (un grand homme), without teaching them at the same time a number of ideas that are epitomized in these two ways of placing the adjective. You will not explain to little Walloons or to little Picards that a bonnet blanc is a white cap, and that a blanc bonnet is a woman, in their patois, without their deriving some profit even from this pastime or playing on words. Need I speak of the rules of our participles, — those participles which, as the vaudeville says, are always getting one into a muddle,² so much apparent fancifulness and caprice there is in their agreements ; and is it necessary for me to show that the most delicate analysis of the relations of ideas is implied in these very rules ? The whole question here is not whether our farmers or our workingmen have need of all this knowledge, whether it would not be more profitable for them to learn other things, and whether they might not give less time to picking up the peculiarities of orthography or the exceptions of French grammar. I am not passing judgment; I am simply taking cognizance of the facts, and trying to arrive at an explanation. Whatever qualities, then, are to be peculiarly admired in French, we may say without hesitation, are due less to the language itself, to its original nature, than to the intensive cultivation which it has always received at every step of our educational system, and which, for my part, I hope it may long continue to receive.

Not that this cultivation may not have and has not had its dangers, like those to which “euphuism,” “Marinism,” and " Gongorism ” have, in their time, exposed English, Italian, and Spanish. So much importance must not be attached to form as to lead to the sacrifice of substance ; more than one writer in French could be named who has fallen into this mistake, — for it is a mistake. They are the writers to whom we have given the name of précieux. However, before condemning them in a lump on the authority of Molière, it is well to remember that we find in their number men like Fontenelle, Marivaux, Massillon, and Montesquieu. But it remains true that to treat a language as a work of art is to run the risk of seeing in it, sooner or later, only itself. Its words take on a mystical value, independent and entirely apart, as it were, from the ideas they are meant to convey. " Examine,” said Baudelaire, “ this word,” — any ordinary word. “ Is it not of a glowing vermilion, and is the heavenly azure as blue as that word ? Look : has not this word the gentle lustre of the morning stars, and that one the livid paleness of the moon ? ” And Flaubert has written : " I recollect that my heart throbbed violently . . . from looking at a wall of the Acropolis, a perfectly bare wall! . . . The question occurs to me, then, Cannot a book, quite apart from what it says, produce the same effect? Is there not an intrinsic virtue in the choiceness of the materials, in the nicety with which they are put together, in the polish of the surfaces, in the harmony of the total effect ? ” They both failed to remember one thing, — which is that words express ideas before having a “ color ” or “ virtue ” peculiar to themselves. and that they are precise and luminous only with the clearness or the precision of these ideas. But Flaubert and Baudelaire are consistent with the principles of their school, and they show us what a man comes to when he no longer sees in language anything more than a work of art. Like them, he values words for themselves, for their appearance, for the sound they render, for various reasons which have nothing to do with the art of thinking. He detects genius in the turn of a phrase. Style becomes something intrinsic and mysterious, existing in and for itself. Virtuosity, which is only the indifference to the content of forms, gets possession of art, makes a plaything of it, perverts it or corrupts it ; and through the sheer desire “ to write well,” one finally comes, as George Sand pointed out to Flaubert, to write only for a dozen initiates ; even they do not always understand one, and besides, they never admire one for the reasons one would prefer.

II.

In what way may we avoid this danger ? Is it possible to point out several ways, or is there perhaps only one ? In any case, we can easily define and characterize the one our great writers have taken, although not always of their own accord. They have understood, or have been made to understand, that language, though a work of art, still continues to be above all a medium for the communication of thoughts and feelings, — what may be called their instrument of exchange, their current coin ; and that consequently perfect art cannot be conceived or sought for apart from those attributes which are the attributes of thought itself.

In French, as in English or German, and I presume also in Chinese, both prose writers and poets have always tended to make of their art an image or expression of themselves. It is for this very reason that they are writers, — because the things that had been said did not satisfy them, or because they wished to say them in another way, or else to say things that had not been said. Only in France, the court, “ society,” criticism, have reminded them that if they wrote, it was in order to be understood. From Ronsard to Victor Hugo, they have had imposed upon them, as a rule, the twofold condition to remain themselves, and at the same time to talk the language of everybody. The interest which they had inspired in a whole people for the things of literature turned in some sort against them. Having themselves invited all the cultivated minds about them to become judges of art, they were not allowed, when the fancy came over them later, to arrogate to themselves the right to be the sole judges of art. Public opinion, in return for the admiration and applause they solicited from it, felt constrained to ask of them certain definite concessions, — concessions which they consented to make; and doubtless they were right in so doing, after all, since they were thus enabled to give, not only to French literature, but to the French language, that social character which it possesses in so high a degree.

It was in this wise, in fact, that there found its way into our literature — or if the reader prefers, into our rhetoric — that tenet which Buffon summed up at the end of the classic period in the recommendation never to name things except by “ the most general terms.” Those who have ridiculed this phrase have misunderstood it; they have quibbled about the words ; they have feigned to believe, and possibly they really have believed, that the most general terms are the most abstract, the vaguest, the most colorless, the opposite of the exact, appropriate, and special term. Yet it would have been enough for them to read more carefully Buffon himself, and Voltaire, and Racine, and Molière, and Bossuet, and Pascal! They would then have seen that the most general terms are the terms of ordinary usage, those in everybody’s vocabulary, — terms that are intelligible without any need of going to the dictionary, that are not the peculiar dialect of a trade or the jargon of a coterie. “ If in talking of savages or of the ancient Franks,” Taine writes somewhere, " I say the ‘ battle-axe,’ every one understands at once ; if I say the ‘ tomahawk ’ or the * francisca,’ a great many people will fancy I am talking Teutonic or Iroquois.” And this strikes him as extremely amusing. It is natural that it should, harboring, as he does, the superstition of “ local color ” and of the “ technical term.” But he is wrong, and to prove it I need only seven lines of Boileau, from the tenth Satire : —

Whereby, it seems to me, two things are made plain : the one, that upon occasion Boileau — Boileau himself ! — called things by their names, did not shrink from technical terms; and the other, that in thus using technical terms in his verse, and because he did use them, he has rendered himself unintelligible to every one who is not acquainted with the game of ombre. Is a cultivated man required to know the game of ombre ? Therein lies the danger of technical terms. In the first place, few persons understand them ; and when it happens that everybody does understand them, they are no longer technical. This is what Buffon meant: Use general terms, because if you do not use them, you condemn yourself by your own act to be understood by only a small number of readers ; because technical terms, in so far as they are technical, are a stumbling-block in the way of expressing general truths, which alone constitute the domain of literature. Nay, more : try by means of general terms to bring into this very domain as much as possible of what is technical; do what Descartes did for philosophy, Pascal for theology, Montesquieu for politics, or what I myself, Buffon, have done for natural history. — Such has been the practice of our great writers; and doubtless nothing has contributed more to the success of the French language than its having become, thanks to them, the best fitted for the expression of general ideas.

It has likewise become the most “ oratorical ; ” and by this word I do not mean at all the most eloquent or the most grandiloquent, — Spanish might claim this honor, — but, on the contrary, the nearest to conversation and to the spoken language. We are sometimes told that we must not write as we talk. This is a mistake, against which, in case of need, our whole classic literature would protest. To write as we talk is precisely what we should do, with the proviso, of course, that we talk correctly. Vaugelas, who, as everybody knows, was the great French grammarian of the classic period, has said so expressly : The spoken word is the first in order and in dignity, inasmuch as the written word is only its image, as the other is the image of thought.” Possibly this may seem an odd bit of reasoning; it may even strike one as an amusing application of the law of primogeniture to criticism ; and one is quite free to deny that the dignity of the different kinds of composition and literary forms is to be measured by their age. But what, on the other hand, is certain, and what I recollect to have pointed out more than once, in conformity with Vaugelas’s suggestion, is that all the blunders with which puristical and pedantic grammarians are fond of reproaching Molière and La Fontaine, Pascal and Bossuet, are not even irregularities; on the contrary, they are seen to be the most natural and expressive form of their thought, as soon as we “ speak ” their comedies or sermons instead of “reading” them. In verse, as in prose, the grand style of the seventeenth century was a spoken style. Its merits are the merits of the conversation of well-bred people.

Or again, to use the language of experimental psychology of the present day, if it is true that writers are to be divided into “ hearers ” (auditifs) who hear themselves speak, and “ visualizers ” (visteels) who see themselves write, the greater part of the French writers of the seventeenth century belong to the first class. The ear, and not the eye, was their guide. It was not of their paper that they thought in writing, but of a body of hearers; and just as they use the most general terms to make themselves better understood by these hearers, so they strive to give to their " discourse, ” as they call it, the swing, the flexibility, and, it would not be too much to say, the familiar tone of conversation. Their way of arranging this discourse, which seems artificial to us, is, on the contrary, the most natural, since it follows the very movement of the thought. Their long periods, which we suppose to be premeditated and balanced by dint of laborious application, are, in truth, only the necessary form of sustained improvisation. If they happen to raise their voices, as do Pascal in his Thoughts and Bossuet in his Sermons, it is because the grandeur or the seriousness of the subject calls for it; and as a matter of fact, neither God nor death is to be spoken of lightly. But Molière in his great comedies and La Fontaine in his Fables give us the illusion of what is least set and formal in daily conversation. “ You might think that you were there yourself ; ” you will see, too, if you scrutinize them closely, that their sentence structure does not differ from that of Bossuet and Pascal. That is what is meant when French is said to be of all modern languages the most " oratorical,” the most similar when written — I mean, of course, when well written — to what it is when spoken, and consequently the most natural.

It is also “ the most exact and the clearest: ” the clearest, because what is obscure is precisely what is peculiar, special, or technical, the speech of the artilleryman or that of the sailor, the dialect of the factory or workshop; the most exact, because conversation would become a monologue if its finest shades of meaning were not caught, understood, and taken up immediately and as fast as the words fall from the lips. We cannot wait a quarter of an hour to laugh at a joke, and an epigram or a madrigal should have no need of commentary.

This clearness, moreover, is a result of the oratorical character of the French language as it has just been defined. We must think of other men, since we are speaking to them or for them, and spare no effort to give them ready access to our thought. This, again, is thoroughly French. Great writers, especially poets and philosophers, Carlyle and Browning in English, Schelling and even Goethe in German, have thought less of being intelligible to others than to themselves. “ I have just finished reading Sordello,” wrote Carlyle to his wife, “ without being able to find out whether Sordello was a poem, a city, or a man; ” and who will deny that there is some obscurity — willful and deliberate obscurity, it is true — in Sartor Resartus and in the famous lectures on Hero Worship? But a French writer always speaks to his reader as he would to a hearer, or to one with whom he is conversing. He believes with Boileau that “ the mind of man teems with a host of confused ideas and vague halfglimpses of the truth,” and also that “ we like nothing better than to have one of these ideas well elucidated and clearly presented to us.” His endeavor is, not to veil his thought, but, on the contrary, to lay it bare. He does not try to screen it, as it were, from the eyes of the profane, but, on the contrary, he takes every pains to render it accessible to them. He does not keep his secret jealously to himself, but he desires rather to impart it to everybody, — to his countrymen, to foreigners, to the world. “The only good works,” Voltaire has said, “are those that find their way into foreign countries and are translated there.” Is it surprising, then, that French, the one modern language having this ambition, has succeeded, so far as it has realized its purpose, only by divesting itself of all ambiguity ; only by filtering its ideas, so to speak, and ridding them of all impurities which would sully their transparent clearness ; and sometimes, too, by sacrificing everything which calls for too close reflection ? That is why, as I said, its precision and clearness did not come to it from any special or innate property, from any virtue which it brought with it as a natural dower, but from the application, the toil, the conscious effort, of its great writers. I may add that in this particular, the greatest of these writers, reserving for themselves other means of originality, have followed rather than guided public opinion.

What is indeed remarkable about these characteristics, which have come with time to belong to the French language, is that the demands of public opinion, its watchfulness and persistency, have done no less than the talent or even the genius of the individual writer in fixing and establishing them. Who took the first step, the public or the writer ? It would be difficult to find an answer for the question stated thus barely: at one time it has chanced to be the public, at another time the writer, who has taken the lead. Yet it will be observed that nearly all the literary revolutions in France have been anticipated, desired, and encouraged before a Ronsard, a Pascal, or a Hugo has appeared to bring them about. The revolution once begun. the public has always taken pains to see that the writer did not indulge his idiosyncrasies too far. Free to choose their thought, — this our writers have rarely been ; they have rarely even been more than half free in their manner of expressing this thought. They have been brought back, as often as they showed signs of wishing to depart from it, to the respect of an ideal, or rather to the working out of a design which was that of a whole race. To use the fine expression of Bossuet, praising this very feature in Greek literature, and admiring it there above all others, they have been forced to labor to “ the perfecting of civil life.” They have not been forced to confound art with morality, but they have not been allowed to forget that in a highly organized civilization literature is in some sort a social institution. They have even been rather sharply reminded of the fact, at times, when they have seemed to forget it. What they may have lost by being forced to bend to these requirements is not at present for me to say, concerned as I am with what they have gained : this is to have made of French literature a literature eminently human.

III.

“ Men’s passions,” it has been truly said, everywhere originally the same, live amidst the ices of the pole as well as under the tropical sun. The Cossack Poogatchef was ambitious, like the Italian Masaniello, and the fever of love burns the Kamschatkan no less than the African.” These are the “ original ” passions which the greatest of the French writers have studied in man. Other writers may have portrayed them more energetically, but surely no one has penetrated more thoroughly their innermost workings, or has had a closer knowledge of their psychology. This, we venture to say, is what foreigners like or value in our great writers. They are vaguely grateful to them, almost unconsciously so, for this effort to observe and note in man what is most general and most permanent. For in this way a particular literature has passed beyond its own boundaries, not in order to encroach on the boundaries of other literatures, or to appropriate qualities which did not belong to it, but to adapt them to its uses, and thereby establish itself, as it were, outside of space and time. It has not specially affected either its own ideas or those of others; but with the ideas of others and with its own mingled, fused together, and made to correct one another, freed from what was transitory in some of them and in some local, and consequently in either case accidental, French literature has tried to attain to an universal ideal which should be as lasting as the form in which it was clothed. Is not this very much what Italian painting of the Renaissance and Greek sculpture of the great period had done before ? And is not that why the tragedies of Racine and the sermons of Bossuet, like the marbles of Phidias and the paintings of Raphael, speak very nearly the same language to everybody ? Andromaque is for the drama what the Madonnas of Raphael are in the history of painting ; and in like manner, the Funeral Oration of Henrietta of England holds a position in oratory not unlike that of the Daughters of Niobe in sculpture.

The result has been a tendency in French literature, and secondarily a special fitness in the language, to discuss what are called nowadays “ social problems.” Whether the rights of man in general, or those of woman in particular, are being debated, we have in French a large vocabulary more suitable than any other, more precise and more extensive, to plead for them ; we have what the ancients called loci, — a store of readymade phrases on which the orator and the publicist have only to draw. If we must turn to the English for arguments and even for words to discuss the “ rights of the individual,” and to the Germans for reasons to uphold the “ rights of association,” no literature has found more generous accents than ours, nor any language words more capable of expressing the rights of man so far as he is a subject for justice and charity. No loftier strains of eloquence have ever been uttered, to remind men of their equality in the presence of pain and death, than by our great preachers, Bossuet, Bourdaloue, Massillon ; and this in language of marvelous strength, simplicity, and harmony. And where has all that can be said to make the powers of this world tremble for the validity of their claims been expressed in a keener or more impassioned form than in some of the pamphlets of Voltaire or in the fiery discourses of Rousseau ?

Nothing, again, was more characteristic of the French press for many years, — I say “was,” for of late things have changed somewhat, — as compared with the English or American press, for example, than the satisfaction, the copiousness, and the perfect clearness with which it treated those doctrinal questions which are the point of contact, or, if I may be allowed the expression, the point of intersection of morals and politics. The reason is that French journalism found in the language an instrument ready for its use, and had only to draw on the common stock of literary tradition. If it wanted, for instance, to show the iniquity of slavery, it had only to remember the Philosophic History of the two Indias or the Spirit of Laws. If it wished to remind wealth of its duties, it could consult, not Rousseau merely, but Massillon in his sermon on Dives, or Bossuet in his sermon on the Eminent Dignity of the Poor. Rather, it had no need of consulting the latter or remembering the former; the dictionary of every-day speech was sufficient. Two hundred years of literature had made social problems circulate in the very veins of the language ; it had embodied them in its words. It had made of French the conspiracy spoken of by Joseph de Maistre : “ Omnia quæ loquitur populus iste conjuratio est.” Even to-day no other language has a power of propaganda like French, and so long as it keeps this power we need have no fear of its being neglected. To assure its position in the world, we have only to guard against giving up lightly the qualities it still retains ; the abandonment of them, so far from being a progress, as some of the “ symbolists ” have supposed, would be a retrogression toward the origins.

Need I add here, to reassure those who may possibly see in the French language only an instrument of socialistic propaganda, that it is possible to give a good meaning to the word “ socialism ; ” or should I not say rather that nothing is more dangerous than to leave the monopoly of the word to those who abuse it ? This is to do violence to its etymology ! It would be better to point out that social problems, comprising as they do all that is of interest or concern to society, include in their number the problems of the “polite world.” And so, for the same reasons that have made French the language of social discussion, it has become, in the hands of our great writers, the language of polite conversation. This is one of the rare services we owe to the salons, — not to those most in repute, the salon of Madame Geoffrin or that of Madame Tencin, but, on the contrary, to those most ridiculed, especially to the salon of the Marquise de Rambouillet. Now, inasmuch as “ society,” or what passes under that name, has no other object than the putting in common of all that is deemed agreeable, elegant, and noble in life in order to enjoy it more fully, we can readily imagine what vivacity, flexibility, and ease two hundred years of society must have given to the French language. It was there, in society, and in the salons where women held sway, that a literature till then too pedantic and too masculine was forced to bend and yield, to learn to have respect for their modesty or for their delicacy, and to adorn itself, so to speak, with some, at least, of the virtues of their sex. It was there that due stress, and at times a little more than due stress, was laid on the art of enhancing what one says by the way of saying it. It was there that the plan was formed to make of French a universal language in place of the classics, and to this end to give it the qualities it still lacked. It was there, too, that the fact was realized that, language being a human product, it was the duty of men to rescue it from the fatality of its natural development, and to subordinate it not only to the requirements of art, but also to the necessities of social progress.

In conclusion, it is well to remember that Horace’s line is only half true : —

No! Usage is not wholly this master or this capricious tyrant of language. Granting that it were, its fluctuations or its peculiarities would still have their history, this history its reasons, and these reasons their explanation; or rather, usage is only a name which serves to hide our ignorance of the causes, and if, instead of taking it for granted, we analyze it, languages are found to be the work of those who write them. The example of French would be enough to prove this. It was not naturally clearer than any other language ; it has become so. It was no better fitted than any other language for the expression of general ideas; it has become so. It was not a work of art in the time of the Strasburg Oaths or the Canticle of St. Eulalia, and yet it has become so. I have tried to show how, by what means, in virtue of what united effort, and I hope I have made it clear. Americans, I fancy, will not be sorry to see thus restored to the domain of the will what philologians or linguists had unjustly taken away from it, — if indeed this be not, in their eyes, an additional reason for valuing our language. They are supposed to prize nothing more highly than the victories of the will: the diffusion of the French language in the world is one of these victories; and may I not say that what renders it more precious is the fact — evident, I trust, from the foregoing — that our writers have won it only by identifying the interests of their self-love with the interests of art and of humanity?

F. Brunetière.