JUST FRENCH—THAT'S ALL
Perhaps one should report progress in learning French. Of course Narcissa and the Joy were chattering it in a little while. That is the way of childhood. It gives no serious consideration to a great matter like that, but just lightly accepts it like a new game or toy and plays with it about as readily. It is quite different with a thoughtful person of years and experience. In such case there is need of system and strategy. I selected different points of assault and began the attack from all of them at once—private lessons; public practice; daily grammar, writing and reading in seclusion; readings aloud by persons of patience and pronunciation.
I hear of persons picking up a language—grown persons, I mean—but if there are such persons they are not of my species. The only sort of picking up I do is the kind that goes with a shovel. I am obliged to excavate a language—to loosen up its materials, then hoist them with a derrick. My progress is geological and unhurried. Still, I made progress, of a kind, and after putting in five hours a day for a period of months I began to have a sense of results. I began to realize that even in a rapid-fire conversation the sounds were not all exactly alike, and to distinguish scraps of meaning in conversations not aimed directly at me, with hard and painful distinctness. I began even to catch things from persons passing on the street—to distinguish French from patois—that is to say, I knew, when I understood any of it, that it was not patois. I began to be proud and to take on airs—always a dangerous thing.
One day at the pharmacy I heard two well-dressed men speaking. I listened intently, but could not catch a word. When they went I said to the drug clerk—an Englishman who spoke French:
"Strange that those well-dressed men should use patois."
He said: "Ah, but that was not patois—that was very choice French—Parisian."
I followed those men the rest of the afternoon, at a safe distance, but in earshot, and we thus visited in company most of the shops and sights of Vevey. If I could have followed them for a few months in that way it is possible—not likely, but possible—that their conversation might have meant something to me.
Which, by the way, suggests the chief difference between an acquired and an inherited language. An acquired language, in time, comes to mean something, whereas the inherited language is something. It is bred into the fiber of its possessor. It is not a question of considering the meaning of words—what they convey; they do not come stumbling through any anteroom of thought, they are embodied facts, forms, sentiments, leaping from one inner consciousness to another, instantaneously and without friction. Probably every species of animation, from the atom to the elephant, has a language—perfectly understood and sufficient to its needs—some system of signs, or sniffs, or grunts, or barks, or vibrations to convey quite as adequately as human speech the necessary facts and conditions of life. Persons, wise and otherwise, will tell you that animals have no language; but when a dog can learn even many words of his master's tongue, it seems rather unkind to deny to him one of his own. Because the oyster does not go shouting around, or annoy us with his twaddle, does not mean that he is deprived of life's lingual interchanges. It is not well to deny speech to the mute, inglorious mollusk. Remember he is our ancestor.
To go back to French: I have acquired, with time and heavy effort, a sort of next-room understanding of that graceful speech—that is to say, it is about like English spoken by some one beyond a partition—a fairly thick one. By listening closely I get the general drift of conversation—a confusing drift sometimes, mismeanings that generally go with eavesdropping. At times, however, the partition seems to be thinner, and there comes the feeling that if somebody would just come along and open a door between I should understand.
It is truly a graceful speech—the French tongue. Plain, homely things of life—so bald, and bare, and disheartening in the Anglo-Saxon—are less unlovely in the French. Indeed, the French word for "rags" is so pretty that we have conferred "chiffon" on one of our daintiest fabrics. But in the grace of the language lies also its weakness. It does not rise to the supreme utterances. I have been reading the bible texts on the tombstones in the little cemetery of Chardonne. "L'éternel est mon berger" can hardly rank in loftiness with "The Lord is my shepherd," nor "Que votre cœur ne se trouble point" with "Let not your heart be troubled." Or, at any rate, I can never bring myself to think so.