This sermon might have been made even broader in its application. It is
not always only the ignorant who are discommoded by a misguided reliance
on foreign words as bestowers of elegance; it is often the man of
culture, aware of the meaning of the alien vocable but none the less
jarred by its obtrusion on an English page. The man of culture may have
his attention disturbed even by a foreign word which has long been
acclimatized in English, if it still retains its unfriendly appearance.
I suppose that _savan_ has established its citizenship in our
vocabulary; it is, at least, domiciled in our dictionaries[2]; but when
I found it repeated by Frederic Myers, in _Science and a Future Life_,
to avoid the use of 'scientist', the French word forced itself on me,
and I found myself reviving a boyish memory of a passage in Abbott's
_Life of Napoleon_ dealing with Bonaparte's expedition to Egypt and
narrating the attacks of the Mamelukes, when the order was given to
form squares with '_savans_ and asses in the center'.
An otherwise fine passage of Ruskin's has always been spoilt for me by
the wilful incursion of two French words, which seem to me to break the
continuity of the sentence: 'A well-educated gentleman may not know many
languages; may not be able to speak any but his own; may have read very
few books. But whatever language he knows, he knows precisely; whatever
word he pronounces, he pronounces rightly; above all, he is learned in
the peerage of words; knows the words of true descent and ancient blood
at a glance from words of modern _canaille_; remembers all their
ancestry, their intermarriages, distantest relationships, and the extent
to which they were admitted, and offices they hold, among the national
_noblesse_ of words, at any time and in any country.' Are not _canaille_
and _noblesse_ distracting? Do they not interrupt the flow? Do they not
violate what Herbert Spencer aptly called the Principle of Economy of
Attention, which he found to be the basis of all the rules of rhetoric?
Since I have made one quotation from Ruskin, I am emboldened to make two
from Spencer, well known as his essay on 'Style' ought to be:--'A reader
or listener has at each moment but a limited amount of mental power
available. To recognize and interpret the symbols presented to him,
requires part of his power; to arrange and combine the images suggested
requires a further part; and only that part which remains can be used
for realizing the thought conveyed. Hence, the more time and attention
it takes to receive and understand each sentence, the less time and
attention can be given to the contained idea; and the less vividly will
that idea be conceived.'--'Carrying out the metaphor that language is
the vehicle of thought, there seems reason to think that in all cases
the friction and inertia of the vehicle deduct from its efficiency; and
that in composition, the chief, if not the sole thing to be done, is to
reduce this friction and inertia to the smallest possible amount.'
_Savan_ and _canaille_ and _noblesse_ may be English words; but they
have not that appearance. They have not rooted themselves in English
earth as _war_ has, for instance, and _cab_ and _wig_. To me, for one,
they increase the friction and the inertia; and yet, of course, the
words themselves are not strange to me; they seem to me merely out of
place and in the way. I can easily understand why Myers and Ruskin
wanted them, even needed them. It was because they carried a meaning not
easily borne by more obvious and more hackneyed nouns. 'The words of our
mother tongue', said Lowell in his presidential address to the Modern
Language Association of America, 'have been worn smooth by so often
rubbing against our lips and our minds, while the alien word has all the
subtle emphasis and beauty of some new-minted coin of ancient Syracuse.
In our critical estimates we should be on our guard against its charm.'
Since I have summoned myself as a witness I take the stand once more to
confess that Alan Seeger's lofty lyric, 'I have a rendezvous with Death'
has a diminished appeal because of the foreign connotations of
'rendezvous'. The French noun was adopted into English more than three
centuries ago; and it was used as a verb nearly three centuries ago; it
does not interfere with the current of sympathy when I find it in the
prose of Scott and of Mark Twain. Nevertheless, it appears to me
unfortunate in Seeger's noble poem, where it forces me to taste its
foreign flavour.
Another French word, _bouquet_, is indisputably English; and yet when I
find it in Walt Whitman's heartfelt lament for Lincoln, 'O Captain, my
Captain', I cannot but feel it to be a blemish:--
'For you _bouquets_ and ribbon'd wreaths--for you the shore's a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning.'
It may be hypercriticism on my part, but _bouquet_ strikes me as sadly
infelicitous; and a large part of its infelicity is due to its having
kept its French spelling and its French pronunciation. It is not in
keeping; it diverts the flow of feeling; it is almost indecorous--much
as a quotation from Voltaire in the original might be indecorous in a
funeral address delivered by an Anglican bishop in a cathedral.
[Footnote 2: _Savan_ is quite obsolete in British use, and is not in the
_Century Dictionary_ or in Webster, 1911. _Savant_ is common, and often
written without italics, but the pronunciation is never
anglicized.--H.B.]