terms find their way out of
this technical vocabulary into common conversation and
literary style, and hence it is that we now speak and
think with words cumbersome and difficult to manage.
We adopt them ready made and conjoined, we repeat
them according to routine; we make use of them without
considering their scope and without a nice appreciation
of their sense; we only approximate to that which we
would like to express. Fifteen years are necessary for
an author to learn to write, not with genius, for that
is not to be acquired, but with clearness, sequence,
propriety and precision. He finds himself obliged to
weigh and investigate ten or twelve thousand words and
diverse expressions, to note their origin, filiation and
relationships, to rebuild on an original plan, his ideas
and his whole intellect. If he has not done it, and he
wishes to reason on rights, duties, the beautiful, the
State or any other of man's important interests, he
gropes about and stumbles; he gets entangled in long,
vague phrases, in sonorous common-places, in crabbed
and abstract formulas. Look at the newspapers and the
speeches of our popular orators. It is especially the
case with workmen who are intelligent but who have had no
classical education; they are not masters of words, and,
consequently, of ideas; they use a refined language which
is not natural to them; it is a perplexity to them and
consequently confuses their minds; they have had no
time to filter it drop by drop. This is an enormous
disadvantage, from which the Greeks were exempt. There
was no break with them between the language of concrete
facts and that of abstract reasoning, between the
language spoken by the people and that of the learned;
the one was a counterpart of the other; there was no term
in any of Plato's dialogues which a youth, leaving his
gymnasia, could not comprehend; there is not a phrase in
any of Demosthenes' harangues which did not readily find
a lodging-place in the brain of an Athenian peasant or
blacksmith. Attempt to translate into Greek one of Pitt's
or Mirabeau's discourses, or an extract from Addison or
Nicole, and you will be obliged to recast and transpose
the thought; you will be led to find for the same
thoughts, expressions more akin to facts and to concrete
experience; a fl