r 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
retablir 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 "vegeter" 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 hi