The Valley Virginian. [volume] (Staunton, Va.) 1865-1895, 1881-03-03
''Parlez-Vo Francois ?"
AN ESSAY BY DAVID SWING.


country. All the young years given by Ameri
cans TO the study of French are years turned
away from the greatest language yet know
to man. All the acquisitions of the human
race, all the sciences and arts and histories ant
sentiments ofhumanity have passed into tn,
English tongue. Each word stands for an idea
and in each modern dialect all ideas reappear
He that has perfectly mastered his, own Ian
guage has store of information immense il
bulk and rich in value. To excavate many
channels for river is to lessen the unity anC
power of the stream otherwise majestic. Il
will always be proof of some blunder Of judg-
ment or OF some stubborn vanity when Amer
leans will be found using a little French and
German and Italian who have not mastered
the English Of VIM. Writ or of Tennyson OF
4 the eloquent Ruskin. 1t is not languages man
needs, but language. 1t is not a room full of
violins, but the power to make music. 1t is
therefore simply painful to hear a fashionable
girl or womon or man combining several Ian
guages in conversations when the listener
1 knows well that this bright talker could not
by any possibility compose an essay in the En-
glish OF Washington Irving or Chas. Sumner
or poet Whittier While they have trifed
! with grammars and lexicons, or have said
| elegantly this or that compliment of the sea-
son, their own grand English has moved away
from their mind and heart just as husband and
home at last disappear from the world of the
artful beauty, leaving in her possession the
IOl1 fod hp,,ry III a-Ie
of invitation to dinner or to dance-invitat1ons
sent and accepted long ago, when the forehead
was smooth and the lips red.
A modern language is prodigious affair.
All will admit that as a system of sounds tor
expressing truths the Greek language has no
equal, but it comes short in just this particu-
lar-that the Greeks had not as much to ex-
press as the Germans and French and English
now have in their keeping. An island has
become continent, a river has widened intoa
sea- Each of these three modern tongues
holds in its embrace universe, while the
Greek held onlya star. To master one of these
new forms of speech is the task of life, and
happy the American who shall ever reach in
his own tongue the ease and skill reached in
their own tongues by Chateaubriand and La
MARITIME and by CASTELAR, in his dialect or by
Schiller in the rich German. Such result
cannot be reached by attempts to study the
words of Lamartine and Goethe, but by study
ing the same universe as that which envelop
ed them, and by compelling our own English
harp to play for us all our sincere and passion
ate music. 1t must be that the popularity of
French comes from forgetfulness of the alb
immenseness which asks for many years of
early and late study and which should so cap
tivate each one born into it's confines that like
the contented soul, one should never care to
wander away from home.
The chase after French must come from the
want of thought as to the greatness of our own
speech, and hence must be one of the popular
decisions of the age, but there lies against the
worship of French a separate objection. In
our generation that nation is not coming to us
as Greece came, laden with deep and inspiring
thoughts. Greek speech was once the speech
of the worlds greatest minds. We recall Plato
and Aristotle and Thucidides, and that type of
of manhood. These were the men who pro-
jected Greek into the old courses of study.
But that old type of manhood is now stand
ing in England and Germany and America, and
the French verbs and nouns and adjectives are
given to us only in the name of fashion and
Paris. "Parlez-vous Francois ?" simply means,
"Have you seen Paris Have you some of her
dresses, her dramas her wall paper her furni-
ture, her luxury?" A language which sets us
all wild for elegant clothing and for handsom-
er furniture. and for new shapes of wedding
cards, and which so delights us at the drama,
can never come in the dignity of those classic
verbs which never mentioned anything except
the great emotions and exploits of the soul
The Greek showed man human life in it's war
and travels and rhetoric and logic and liberty
and aesthetic yearnings, but the French of our
Boarding schools does little for the average
student, except enable him or her to read the
bill of fare at fashionable hotel, and to
call by the charming name of buffet what
once was side board, and to buy and enjoy as
an esc1Stodre what had once been known as a
writing desk, and to feel wise over the pro-
gress which removes from lady her work
table and places before her a cle10n7aaer. So far
as the study of this modern dialect inflames
the young heart in the direction of bills offare
and novelties for the parlor or dining-room, it
can hardly compare favorably with the study
of those classic forms which ignored the hotel
keeper and the cook, and introduced the stu
dent to Homer and Cicero.
Even when whole life is given to ones
English or native French, so inadequate still
is that language to express the soul that it
seems form of wickedness to divide the heart
between many masters, and to have no SUI
preme friend Chateaubriand, the greatest
master of the French tongue, when he stood
near the Niagara Falls almost hundred years
ago, ard saw evening coming down from the
sky upon the sublime scene; saw the woods
growing gloomy in the deep shadows, and
heard the sound of the waters increasing its
solemnity as the little voices died away in the
nights repose, said: 'It is not within the
power of human words to express this gran
deur of nature" Skilled as he was in the most
rich and sensitive form of speech that speech,
all Of whose resources he knew well, now
failed him, and his spirit had to remain inn
prisoned, there being no gateway by which its
sentiments could escape to the hearts of his
countrymen What are you and l to do, then,
if we have not loved early and late and deeply
our own Engish-that English which is now
leader in literature and all learning; if we
have for years gone along with heart DIVIDED
in two or with mind that had studied words
more than it has thought and prayed and
laughed and wept amid the sublime scenes of
nature or the more impressive mysteries of
mankind? "Parlez-vous Francois ?" Not well:
not at all; would to heaven we could even
speak English.
Handy Hints.
Cotton wool wet with sweet oil and laudanum
relieves the ear-ache very soon.