mple combinations, up to the loftiest.[3223] By virtue of this, in
1789, the French tongue ranks above every other. The Berlin Academy
promises a prize to for anyone who best can explain its pre-eminence. It
is spoken throughout Europe. No other language is used in diplomacy. As
formerly with Latin, it is international, and appears that, from now on,
it is to be the preferred tool whenever men are to reason.

It is the organ only of a certain kind of reasoning, la raison
raisonnante, that requiring the least preparation for thought, giving
itself as little trouble as possible, content with its acquisitions,
taking no pains to increase or renew them, incapable of, or unwilling to
embrace the plenitude and complexity of the facts of real life. In its
purism, in its disdain of terms suited to the occasion, in its avoidance
of lively sallies, in the extreme regularity of its developments, the
classic style is powerless to fully portray or to record the infinite
and varied details of experience. It rejects any description of
the outward appearance of reality, the immediate impressions of the
eyewitness, the heights and depths of passion, the physiognomy, at once
so composite yet absolute personal, of the breathing individual, in
short, that unique harmony of countless traits, blended together
and animated, which compose not human character in general but one
particular personality, and which a Saint-Simon, a Balzac, or a
Shakespeare himself could not render if the rich language they used,
and which was enhanced by their temerities, did not contribute its
subtleties to the multiplied details of their observation.[3224]
Neither the Bible, nor Homer, nor Dante, nor Shakespeare[3225] could be
translated with this style. Read Hamlet's monologue in Voltaire and see
what remains of it, an abstract piece of declamation, with about as much
of the original in it as there is of Othello in his Orosmane. Look at
Homer and then at Fenelon in the island of Calypso; the wild, rocky
island, where "gulls and other sea-birds with long wings," build their
nests, becomes in pure French prose an orderly park arranged "for the
pleasure of the eye." In the eighteenth century, contemporary novelists,
themselves belonging to the classic epoch, Fielding, Swift, Defoe,
Sterne and Richardson, are admitted into France only after excisions and
much weakening; their expressions are too free and their scenes are to
impressive; their freedom, their coarseness