“Il s’est trompe
de défunte.” The writer of this
phrase had his sense of that portly manner of French,
and his burlesque is fine; but — the paradox
must be risked — because he was French he
was not able to possess all its grotesque mediocrity
to the full; that is reserved for the English reader.
The words are in the mouth of a widower who, approaching
his wife’s tomb, perceives there another “monsieur.”
“Monsieur,” again; the French reader
is deprived of the value of this word, too, in its
place; it says little or nothing to him, whereas the
Englishman, who has no word of the precise bourgeois
significance that it sometimes bears, but who must
use one of two English words of different allusion — man
or I gentleman — knows the exact value of
its commonplace. The serious Parisian, then,
sees “un autre monsieur;”
as it proves anon, there had been a divorce in the
history of the lady, but the later widower is not
yet aware of this, and explains to himself the presence
of “un monsieur” in his own place by that
weighty phrase, “Il s’est trompe
de défunte.”
The strange effect of a thing so charged
with allusion and with national character is to cause
an English reader to pity the mocking author who was
debarred by his own language from possessing the whole
of his own comedy. It is, in fact, by contrast
with his English that an Englishman does possess it.
Your official, your professional Parisian has a vocabulary
of enormous, unrivalled mediocrity. When the
novelist perceives this he does not perceive it all,
because some of the words are the only words in use.
Take an author at his serious moments, when he is
not at all occupied with the comedy of phrases, and
he now and then touches a word that has its burlesque
by mere contrast with English. “L’Histoire
d’un Crime,” of Victor Hugo,
has so many of these touches as to be, by a kind of
reflex action, a very school of English. The
whole incident of the omnibus in that grave work has
unconscious international comedy. The Deputies
seated in the interior of the omnibus had been, it
will be remembered, shut out of their Chamber by the
perpetrator of the Coup d’Etat, but each had
his official scarf. Scarf — pish! — “l’echarpe!”
“Ceindre l’echarpe” — there
is no real English equivalent. Civic responsibility
never was otherwise adequately expressed. An
indignant deputy passed his scarf through the window
of the omnibus, as an appeal to the public, “et
l’agita.” It is a pity that the French
reader, having no simpler word, is not in a position
to understand the slight burlesque. Nay, the
mere word “public,” spoken with this peculiar
French good faith, has for us I know not what untransferable
gravity.
There is, in short, a general international
counterchange. It is altogether in accordance
with our actual state of civilization, with its extremely
“specialized” manner of industry, that
one people should make a phrase, and another should
have and enjoy it. And, in fact, there are certain
French authors to whom should be secured the use of
the literary German whereof Germans, and German women
in particular, ought with all severity to be deprived.
For Germans often tell you of words in their own
tongue that are untranslatable; and accordingly they
should not be translated, but given over in their
own conditions, unaltered, into safer hands.
There would be a clearing of the outlines of German
ideas, a better order in the phrase; the possessors
of an alien word, with the thought it secures, would
find also their advantage.
So with French humour. It is
expressly and signally for English ears. It
is so even in the commonest farce. The unfortunate
householder, for example, who is persuaded to keep
walking in the conservatory “pour rétablir
la circulation,” and the other who
describes himself “sous-chef de bureau
dans l’enregistrement,” and he who
proposes to “faire hommage”
of a doubtful turbot to the neighbouring “employe
de l’octroi” — these and all
their like speak commonplaces so usual as to lose in
their own country the perfection of their dulness.
We only, who have the alternative of plainer and
fresher words, understand it. It is not the
least of the advantages of our own dual English that
we become sensible of the mockery of certain phrases
that in France have lost half their ridicule, uncontrasted.
Take again the common rhetoric that
has fixed itself in conversation in all Latin languages — rhetoric
that has ceased to have allusions, either majestic
or comic. To the ear somewhat unused to French
this proffers a frequent comedy that the well-accustomed
ear, even of an Englishman, no longer detects.
A guard on a French railway, who advised two travellers
to take a certain train for fear they should be obliged
to “végéter” for a whole hour in
the waiting-room of such or such a station seemed to
the less practised tourist to be a fresh kind of unexpected
humourist.
One of the phrases always used in
the business of charities and subscriptions in France
has more than the intentional comedy of the farce-writer;
one of the most absurd of his personages, wearying
his visitors in the country with a perpetual game
of bowls, says to them: “Nous jouons cinquante
centimes — les bénéfices seront
verses intégralement a la souscription
qui est ouverte a la commune
pour la construction de nôtre
maison d’ecole.”
“Flétrir,” again.
Nothing could be more rhetorical than this perfectly
common word of controversy. The comic dramatist
is well aware of the spent violence of this phrase,
with which every serious Frenchman will reply to opponents,
especially in public matters. But not even the
comic dramatist is aware of the last state of refuse
commonplace that a word of this kind represents.
Refuse rhetoric, by the way, rather than Emerson’s
“fossil poetry,” would seem to be the right
name for human language as some of the processes of
the several recent centuries have left it.
The French comedy, then, is fairly
stuffed with thin-S for an Englishman. They are
not all, it is true, so finely comic as “Il
s’est trompe de défunte.”
In the report of that dull, incomparable sentence
there is enough humour, and subtle enough, for both
the maker and the reader; for the author who perceives
the comedy as well as custom will permit, and for
the reader who takes it with the freshness of a stranger.
But if not so keen as this, the current word of French
comedy is of the same quality of language. When
of the fourteen couples to be married by the mayor,
for instance, the deaf clerk has shuffled two, a looker-on
pronounces: “Il s’est empêtre
dans les futurs.” But for
a reader who has a full sense of the several languages
that exist in English at the service of the several
ways of human life, there is, from the mere terminology
of official France, high or low — daily France — a
gratuitous and uncovenanted smile to be had.
With this the wit of the report of French literature
has not little to do. Nor is it in itself, perhaps,
reasonably comic, but the slightest irony of circumstance
makes it so. A very little of the mockery of
conditions brings out all the latent absurdity of the
“sixième et septième arron-dissements,”
in the twinkling of an eye. So is it with the
mere “domicile;” with the aid of but a
little of the burlesque of life, the suit at law to
“réintégrer lé domicile conjugal”
becomes as grotesque as a phrase can make it.
Even “a domicile” merely — the
word of every shopman — is, in the unconscious
mouths of the speakers, always awaiting the lightest
touch of farce, if only an Englishman hears it; so
is the advice of the police that you shall “circuler”
in the street; so is the request, posted up, that you
shall not, in the churches.
So are the serious and ordinary phrases,
“maison nuptiale,” “maison
mortuaire,” and the still more serious “repos
dominical,” “oraison dominicale.”
There is no majesty in such words. The unsuspicious
gravity with which they are spoken broadcast is not
to be wondered at, the language offering no relief
of contrast; and what is much to the credit of the
comic sensibility of literature is the fact that, through
this general unconsciousness, the ridicule of a thousand
authors of comedy perceives the fun, and singles out
the familiar thing, and compels that most elaborate
dulness to amuse us. Us, above all, by virtue
of the custom of counterchange here set forth.
Who shall say whether, by operation
of the same exchange, the English poets that so persist
in France may not reveal something within the English
language — one would be somewhat loth to think
so — reserved to the French reader peculiarly?
Byron to the multitude, Edgar Poe to the select?
Then would some of the mysteries of French reading
of English be explained otherwise than by the plainer
explanation that has hitherto satisfied our haughty
curiosity. The taste for rhetoric seemed to
account for Byron, and the desire of the rhetorician
to claim a taste for poetry seemed to account for
Poe. But, after all, patatras! Who
can say?