"
In this effort to ennoble the French language, to give it grace, number,
perfection, and as painters do to their pictures, that last, so
desirable, touch--cette derniere main que nous desirons--what Du Bellay
is pleading for is his mother-tongue, the language, that is, in which
one will have the utmost degree of what is moving and passionate. He
recognised of what force the music and dignity of languages are, how
they enter into the inmost part of things; and in pleading for the
cultivation of the French language, he is pleading for no merely
scholastic interest, but for freedom, impulse, reality, not in
literature merely, but in daily communion of speech. After all, it was
impossible to have this impulse in Greek and Latin, dead languages shut
up in books as in reliquaries--peris et mises en reliquaires de livres.
By aid of this starveling stock--pauvre plante et vergette--of the
French language, he must speak delicately, movingly, if he is ever to
speak so at all: that, or none, must be for him the medium of what he
calls, in one of his great phrases, le discours fatal des choses
mondaines--that discourse about affairs which decides men's fates.
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