ench Ariel not only gives
magic service to the critical Prospero, but seeks no emancipation,
desires nothing better. Hence an admirable clearness and shapeliness in
the criticism of France. Hence, also, in its best criticism a high
degree of imaginative subtilty and penetration, without prejudice either
to the dominion of common sense in the thought or to clearness in the
statement.

M. Renan's essay on "The Origin of Language" is typical of his quality.
Treating of an abstruse, though enticing problem,--_almost_ profound,
and that in comparison with the soundest and sincerest thinking of our
time,--it is yet so clear and broad, its details are so perfectly held
in solution by the thought, the thought itself moves with such ease,
grace, and vigor, and in its style there is such crystal perspicuity and
precision, that one must he proof against good thinking and excellent
writing not to feel its charm.

The main propositions of the work--whose force and significance, of
course, cannot be felt in this dry enumeration--are that language issues
from the spontaneity of the human spirit,--"spontaneity, which is both
divine and human"; that its origin is simultaneous with the opening of
consciousness in the human race; that it preserves a constant parallel
with consciousness, that is, with the developed spirit of man, in its
nature and growth; and that, by consequence, its first form is not one
of analytic simplicity, but of a high synthesis and a rich complexity.
The whole mind, he says, acts from the first, only not with the power of
defining, distinguishing, separating, which characterizes the intellect
of civilized man; his objects are groups; he grasps totalities; sees
objects _and_ their relationships as one fact; tends to connect his
whole consciousness with all he sees, making the stone a man or a god:
and language, in virtue of its perpetual parallelism with consciousness,
must be equally synthetic and complex from the start.

He finds himself opposed, therefore, first, to those, "like M. Bonald,"
who attribute language to a purely extraneous, not an interior,
revelation; secondly, to the philosophers of the eighteenth century, who
made it a product of free and reflective reason; thirdly, to the German
school, who trace it back to a few hundred monosyllabic roots, each
expressing with analytic precision some definite material object, from
which roots the whole subsequent must be derived by etymologic
spinning-out, b