, 1873-05-04

taelr uIQB. IHG 0lst 16CI s4laL lInpTeSEea every
student OF French literature is the remarkable
clearness Of the w1ite1s-their superiority to
all their European rivals in perspicuitv
and precision It is remarkable
fact that in the age Of our great
writers, when our literature Tas unriyal1ed
in the gorgeous opulence OF it's rhetoric, the
English language WAS never once made the OBJ
ject OF conscious attention. No man aeems ever
to have reflected that there wss wrong and
right in tho choice Of words or phrases, in the
mechanism OF sentences, or even in the gram
mar. Men wrote eloquently because they wrote
foelingly; they wrote automatically because
they wrote naturally and without a0ectatton; but
if falso or acephalous structure Of sentence
if a barba1ous word or foreign idiom-clancea
to present itse1f. no writer OF tho seventeenth
century WAS scrupulous enough to correct it.
The French writer's, on tho other hand, early
saw the supreme Importance Of artistic express
sion, and gave mora attention to the cul-
tyation Of their. 1anguage-to the study
Of its idiomatic niceties and dclicacies-than
any other people. Partly because the French
mind has keener perception than the English
OF the. Greek-like simplicity and directness
which belong to the highest artistic beauty;
partly because the French hare more conscience
in intellectual matters; and partly because the
French Academy acted as literary police for the
suppression Of verbal license, Franco, mora
than two centuries ago, took the lead in literary
workmanship, and that supremacy: she still
maintains. While the great writer's Of England
wero still pouring forth their thoughts with in-
artistic skil1, or were rising to perfect beauty Of
statement only when possessed with that white
heat Of passion which gives to rhetoric an ar
rowy directness and rhythmical flow, France
had already achieved classic propriety
OF style, and to-day she teaches rhetoric
to England with Us much authority
ga Greece taught it to Rome. What
English author of the sixteenth OF eyenteenth
centuries rivals in style tho exquisite beauty Of
Pascal? Who in the eighteenth exhibits such
command Of all the lu1uries and delcacies Of ex-
pression-such 3 marriage Of hythmical music
with logical accuracy Of thought as Paul Louis
Courier ?-and where in the nineteenth shall We
find another style 80 artistic as that Of Renan or
George Sand; 80 delicate, brilliant, equab1e,
and strong as that of Sainte-Benve2
It is singular fact that the oft-quoted eaying,
"Lnnguage Was given to man to conceal his
thought" should have come from Frenchman
the. man who, Of al men On the face Of
sooner has thought or emotion than he is in an
agony to communicate it. OF all the faulta OF
style, there is none for which Frenchman has
30 profound q horror as for obscurity.
Take all of the Gallo writer's from Montaigns
to Lamartine, and search through the works Of
each from title-page to fnis, and you Will hunt
as vainly for an obscure passage, as in a German
author for clear ono. Dip where you will into
Pascal, Descartes, Bosauet, Rousseau, or Taine,
you will find every sentence written as with
sunbeam Nothing can be moro eren than the
fow, nothing more logical than the STRUCTURE, OF
the periods; the 1mpid clearncss Of the pebblod
brook runs through them all while, On tho
other hand, Taylor, Hooker, and Milton abound
With e11ipses, Farentheses, and invo1ntions, and
your great German thinker-especially, if q
etaphysician-treats . sentence as q sort OF;
carpet-bag into which to cram all the ideas it can
be made to hold As with the giants Of French
literature, 30 with the dwarfs; shallow
these may be, but foggy and Incompetent
sible, never. Even one Of the most distinguished
English critics admits that in the competition Of
the literary chiefs Of Europe, tho palm Of su-
perority must be given to the writer's, not OF his
OWL country, but Of France. fDarkeaed," be
says, "as the literary language OF France has
often been by the fumes Of undigested metaphy-
sics, there is no author, and scarcely any reader
there, who would not stand aghast ut the intro
duction into his native tongue Of that inorganic
language which even samual Taylor :Coleridga
himself tumb1ed ont in somo Of his more elabo-
rnte specu1ations, and with which the, imitators
OF that great man are at this day distorting and
GermaniziDg the speech OF our progenito1s."
Some French fortune-tel1ers hnve recently
been arrested at Nantes, whose prescriptions