X.


DEBASING THE MORAL CURRENCY.

"Il ne faut pas mettre un ridicule où il n'y en a point: c'est se gâter
le goût, c'est corrompre son jugement et celui des autres. Mais le
ridicule qui est quelque part, il faut l'y voir, l'en tirer avec grâce
et d'une manière qui plaise et qui instruise."

I am fond of quoting this passage from La Bruyère, because the subject
is one where I like to show a Frenchman on my side, to save my
sentiments from being set down to my peculiar dulness and deficient
sense of the ludicrous, and also that they may profit by that
enhancement of ideas when presented in a foreign tongue, that glamour of
unfamiliarity conferring a dignity on the foreign names of very common
things, of which even a philosopher like Dugald Stewart confesses the
influence. I remember hearing a fervid woman attempt to recite in
English the narrative of a begging Frenchman who described the violent
death of his father in the July days. The narrative had impressed her,
through the mists of her flushed anxiety to understand it, as something
quite grandly pathetic; but finding the facts turn out meagre, and her
audience cold, she broke off, saying, "It sounded so much finer in
French--_j'ai vu le sang de mon père_, and so on--I wish I could repeat
it in French." This was a pardonable illusion in an old-fashioned lady
who had not received the polyglot education of the present day; but I
observe that even now much nonsense and bad taste win admiring