ll be. To speak at least _one_ foreign language is not only
a parlor accomplishment: it is for whoever is to be a citizen-of-the-world
a necessity. There is a Turkish proverb that he who knows two
languages, his own and another, has two souls. Certainly there is no
better way to approach a nation's soul than through its language. But,
in the second place, the Romance tongues have certain artistic
qualities which English in a great measure lacks. The student who has
intelligently mastered one of them has a better sense of form, of
delicate shades of expression, and--if the language be French--of
clarity of phrase: what Pater termed _nettete d'expression_. He learns
to respect language (as few Americans now do), to study its
possibilities in a way which a mere knowledge of English might never
have suggested, and to appreciate its moral as well as its social
power: for French forces him to curb his thought, to weigh his
contention, to be simple and clear in the most abstruse matters. In a
famous essay on the Universality of French, Rivarol said: "Une
traduction francaise est toujours une _explication_."

And lastly, in themselves and in the civilizations they stand for,
the Romance tongues are the bridge between ourselves and antiquity.
Since the decline in the study of Greek and Latin, this is a factor to
be seriously considered. It is the fashion today to berate the past,
to speak of the dead hand of tradition, and to flatter ourselves with
the delusion of self-sufficiency. To be sure, the aim of education is
never to pile up information but to "fit your mind for any sort of
exertion, to make it keen and flexible." But the best way to encompass
this is to feed the mind on ideas, and ideas are not produced every
day, nor for that matter every year, and luckily all ideas have not
the same value. There are the ideas of Taine, of Rousseau, of
Voltaire, of Descartes, of Montaigne, of Ficino, of Petrarch, of
Dante, of Cicero, of Aristotle, of Plato; and in a moment I have run
the gamut of all the centuries of our Western civilization. Who will
tell me which ideas we shall need most tomorrow? Evidently, we cannot
know them all. But we can at least make the attempt to know the best.
And incidentally let it be said that he who professes the Romance
tongues can no more dispense with the Classics than the Classics can
today afford to dispense with Romance: French, Italian, and Spanish
are the Latin--and one might add the Greek--of