NATIONAL STYLE 199 



discoveries and crumbling theologies and social and political 

 revolutions. 



VI 



French, being an analytical language, is encumbered with 

 auxiliary verbs, prepositions, explanatory and supplementary 

 conjunctions ' lex auxiliaires avoir et etre, le verbe faire, les 

 conjonctions encombrantes ; toute cette pouillerie de notre 

 prose fran<?aise,' as a French critic puts it. Compared with 

 Italian, the vowel-sounds are poor, the volume and natural 

 rhythm of the vocables mediocre. Compared with English, 

 French lacks variety and compass. Compared with German, 

 the vocabulary is limited ; those concrete and suggestive 

 words which give scope to the metaphysical imagination are 

 wanting. 



French might be described as the least endowed by nature 

 of the European languages. It often happens, however, that 

 when the soil is poor, industry and tillage succeed in raising 

 finer crops than wave upon the fatter glebe of luckier neigh- 

 bours. So the intelligent attention paid to style in France, 

 and conscious and persistent cultivation of the language by 

 refined thinkers, the usage of a society pervious to ideas, of a 

 Court where dulness and grossness were accounted crimes, of 

 academies devoted to the study of diction, of drawing-rooms 

 in which piquancy of phrase gave point to conversation, of a 

 capital electric with the brain-life of modern civility this 

 effort to attain perfection, carried on through centuries by 

 an enlightened and exquisitely polished race, has rendered 

 French unrivalled in certain of the very highest qualities of 

 verbal utterance. 



Style is not so much a matter of linguistic resources, as 

 of the art and tact with which those resources are husbanded 

 for use. If the French are less liberally endowed than some 

 of their neighbours, they have made more of the wealth at 

 their disposal. Every word of their comparatively limited 

 vocabulary has been vitalised, penetrated with suggestions, 

 cut and polished like a diamond of many facets, imbued with 

 psychological colour and association. The beauty of French 



