lends itself
to the wrapping up of a simple meaning in a cloud of words; whereas
English seems to encourage those who use it not indeed to obscurity but
to desultoriness and beating about the bush, French properly used is
almost automatically clear and precise. Rivarol's somewhat sententious
conceit that the French language has a 'probite attachee a son genie' is
not a conceit merely. That this lucidity is sometimes accompanied by
want of depth is quite true, but it is equally true that it is often
mistaken for it. There is no want of depth in Descartes or in
Malebranche, yet there are no clearer writers in the whole range of
philosophic literature.

To these main characteristics others which are in a way corollaries
might be added, such as urbanity, ease, ready adaptation to different
classes of subject, and the like. But those already dwelt upon are the
principal, and they have sufficed to make French, as far as general
usefulness and interest go, the best vehicle of expression in prose
among European languages. In poetry it is not quite the same. Most of
the qualities just enumerated are in poetry but of secondary use, some
of them are almost directly unfavourable to the vagueness, the
indefinite suggestion, the 'making the common uncommon,' which are
necessary to poetry. The clearness of French prose has a tendency to
become colourless in French poetry, its sobriety turns to the bald, its
wit to conceits and prettinesses, its inventiveness to an undue reliance
on complicated devices for creating an artificial attraction, its sense
of form and rule to dryness and lack of passion. Moreover the merely
sonorous qualities of French render it a difficult instrument for the
production of varied poetical sounds. It is almost wholly destitute of
quantity, and the intonation which supplies that want is of such a kind
that hardly any foot but the iambus is possible in it. On the other hand
its terminations admit of elaborate and harmonious rhymes (indeed French
poetry without rhyme is a practical impossibility), and the abundance of
mute _e_ endings has facilitated the adoption of an artificial source of
variation of sound in the so-called 'masculine and feminine' rhyming
which is in its perfection almost peculiar to the language. With these
aids and by the most elaborate attention to metre and euphony, the great
poets of France have been enabled to surmount to a very large extent the
corresponding difficulties of their proso