it takes to receive and understand each sentence, the less time and attention can be given to the contained idea; and the less vividly will that idea be conceived.’—­’Carrying out the metaphor that language is the vehicle of thought, there seems reason to think that in all cases the friction and inertia of the vehicle deduct from its efficiency; and that in composition, the chief, if not the sole thing to be done, is to reduce this friction and inertia to the smallest possible amount.’

Savan and canaille and noblesse may be English words; but they have not that appearance.  They have not rooted themselves in English earth as war has, for instance, and cab and wig.  To me, for one, they increase the friction and the inertia; and yet, of course, the words themselves are not strange to me; they seem to me merely out of place and in the way.  I can easily understand why Myers and Ruskin wanted them, even needed them.  It was because they carried a meaning not easily borne by more obvious and more hackneyed nouns.  ’The words of our mother tongue’, said Lowell in his presidential address to the Modern Language Association of America, ’have been worn smooth by so often rubbing against our lips and our minds, while the alien word has all the subtle emphasis and beauty of some new-minted coin of ancient Syracuse.  In our critical estimates we should be on our guard against its charm.’

Since I have summoned myself as a witness I take the stand once more to confess that Alan Seeger’s lofty lyric, ‘I have a rendezvous with Death’ has a diminished appeal because of the foreign connotations of ‘rendezvous’.  The French noun was adopted into English more than three centuries ago; and it was used as a verb nearly three centuries ago; it does not interfere with the current of sympathy when I find it in the prose of Scott and of Mark Twain.  Nevertheless, it appears to me unfortunate in Seeger’s noble poem, where it forces me to taste its foreign flavour.

Another French word, bouquet, is indisputably English; and yet when I find it in Walt Whitman’s heartfelt lament for Lincoln, ’O Captain, my Captain’, I cannot but feel it to be a blemish:—­

  ’For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—­for you the shore’s a-crowding,
   For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning.’

It may be hypercriticism on my part, but bouquet strikes me as sadly infelicitous; and a large part of its infelicity is due to its having kept its French spelling and its French pronunciation.  It is not in keeping; it diverts the flow of feeling; it is almost indecorous—­much as a quotation from Voltaire in the original might be indecorous in a funeral address delivered by an Anglican bishop in a cathedral.

[Footnote 2:  Savan is quite obsolete in British use, and is not in the Century Dictionary or in Webster, 1911. Savant is common, and often written without italics, but the pronunciation is never anglicized.—­H.B.]