The colloquial linguistic faculty and its physiological groundwork / by Walter Hayle Walshe.

  • Walshe, Walter Hayle, 1812-1892.
Date:
1885
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The colloquial linguistic faculty and its physiological groundwork / by Walter Hayle Walshe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    two French works, the Vie de Charming and the Vie de Village en Angleterre; to the former R^musat contri- buted the preface—did he lend any further help, say, in revision of either volume ? Again, we have recently been assured, on the high authority of a critic in the Times, that Mr. J. D. Lewis has renewed the alleged feat of William Beckford, and written a book ( Causes celebres de l'Angle- terre ) in thoroughly Parisian French ; but, with all my respect for the literary dicta of the leading journal, I should feel better satisfied of the writer's claims to an award so high, had it been pronounced by a clever Parisian school- boy than by a judge capable of writing the perfect English article in which it is recorded.* Literati of German and Russian birth occasionally become notably dextrous in French composition ; Heine and Turgenieff in particular indubitably acquired extraordinary ease and finish in managing the language. Some of Turgenieffs novels were, indeed, originally written in French (avowedly, or at least presumably, without native help), and sent to St. Petersburgh for translation into Russian.f But these ex- ceptional men had both lived for years in Paris ; and to what extent each may, or may not, have lost his mother-tongue in its fullness of perfection, there is no public available evi- dence to show. That some deterioration must have taken place seems extremely probable from such facts as the fol- lowing. I met somewhile since a Polish lady who, after a few years residence in London, spoke our language with such an amount of idiomatic purity and precision, and with an accent so free from Continental twang, that she might easily have passed muster as an Englishwoman to native ears even of most delicate organisation, unless their owners * The critic's model English prima facie disqualifies him as a Judge of Appeal in French ; critical mastership in both tongues is a power so habitually unattainable, that its possession cannot be admitted in any particular instance, unless on proof tendered. The affirmative verdict of M. Waddington, though so long a resident in this country, would have been but poor evidence that the style of an English book, written by one of his countrymen, reached the standard of cultured British purity. Even Jeffrey, the critic par cnii>w//fia»i, betrays a want of thorough acquaintance with the idiom of the language by trifling slips in his survey of French literature (1'iWc Collected Essays :' from the Edinburgh Review). t I understand, too, that the novel by Une Grande Dame Russe,-' which recently—1884—created such a sensation in Berlin, is written in very unexceptionable French.