his pages with untranslated foreign expressions. It is an insolence toward the majority of the purchasers, for it is a very frank and impudent way of saying, "Get the translations made yourselves if you want it—this book is not written for the ignorant classes".... The writer would say that he uses the foreign language where the delicacy of his point cannot be conveyed in English. Very well, then, he writes his best things for the tenth man, and he ought to warn the other nine not to buy his book.'

The result of these straight-forward and out-spoken remarks is set forth by Mark Twain himself: 'When the musing spider steps upon the red-hot shovel, he first exhibits a wild surprise, then he shrivels up. Similar was the effect of these blistering words upon the tranquil and unsuspecting agent. I can be dreadfully rough on a person when the mood takes me.'

VI

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 dictionaries2; 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:—

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.

VII

There are several questions which writers and speakers who give thought to their expressions will do well to ask themselves when they are tempted to employ a French word or indeed a word from any alien tongue. The first is the simplest: Is the foreign word really needed? For example, there is no benefit in borrowing impasse when there exists already in English its exact equivalent, 'blind-alley', which carries the meaning more effectively even to the small percentage of readers or listeners who are familiar with French. Nor is there any gain in résumé when 'summary' and 'synopsis' and 'abstract' are all available.

The second question is perhaps not quite so simple: Is the French word one which English has already accepted and made its own? We do not really need questionnaire, since we have 'interrogatory', but if we want it we can make shift with 'questionary'; and for concessionnaire we can put 'concessionary'. To balance 'employer' there is 'employee', better by far than employé, which insists on a French pronunciation. Matthew Arnold and Lowell, always apt and exact in their use of their own tongue, were careful to prefer the English 'technic' to the French technique, which is not in harmony with the adjectives 'technical' and polytechnic. So 'clinic' seems at last to have vanquished its French father clinique, as 'fillet' has superseded filet; and now that 'valet' has become a verb it has taken on an English pronunciation.

Then there is littérateur. If a synonym for 'man of letters' is demanded why not find it in 'literator', which