There is, in short, a general international counterchange.  It is altogether in accordance with our actual state of civilization, with its extremely “specialized” manner of industry, that one people should make a phrase, and another should have and enjoy it.  And, in fact, there are certain French authors to whom should be secured the use of the literary German whereof Germans, and German women in particular, ought with all severity to be deprived.  For Germans often tell you of words in their own tongue that are untranslatable; and accordingly they should not be translated, but given over in their own conditions, unaltered, into safer hands.  There would be a clearing of the outlines of German ideas, a better order in the phrase; the possessors of an alien word, with the thought it secures, would find also their advantage.

So with French humour.  It is expressly and signally for English ears.  It is so even in the commonest farce.  The unfortunate householder, for example, who is persuaded to keep walking in the conservatory “pour retablir la circulation,” and the other who describes himself “sous-chef de bureau dans l’enregistrement,” and he who proposes to “faire hommage” of a doubtful turbot to the neighbouring “employe de l’octroi”—­these and all their like speak commonplaces so usual as to lose in their own country the perfection of their dulness.  We only, who have the alternative of plainer and fresher words, understand it.  It is not the least of the advantages of our own dual English that we become sensible of the mockery of certain phrases that in France have lost half their ridicule, uncontrasted.

Take again the common rhetoric that has fixed itself in conversation in all Latin languages—­rhetoric that has ceased to have allusions, either majestic or comic.  To the ear somewhat unused to French this proffers a frequent comedy that the well-accustomed ear, even of an Englishman, no longer detects.  A guard on a French railway, who advised two travellers to take a certain train for fear they should be obliged to “vegeter” for a whole hour in the waiting-room of such or such a station seemed to the less practised tourist to be a fresh kind of unexpected humourist.

One of the phrases always used in the business of charities and subscriptions in France has more than the intentional comedy of the farce-writer; one of the most absurd of his personages, wearying his visitors in the country with a perpetual game of bowls, says to them:  “Nous jouons cinquante centimes—­les benefices seront verses integralement a la souscription qui est ouverte a la commune pour la construction de notre maison d’ecole.”

“Fletrir,” again.  Nothing could be more rhetorical than this perfectly common word of controversy.  The comic dramatist is well aware of the spent violence of this phrase, with which every serious Frenchman will reply to opponents, especially in public matters.  But not even the comic dramatist is aware of the last state of refuse commonplace that a word of this kind represents.  Refuse rhetoric, by the way, rather than Emerson’s “fossil poetry,” would seem to be the right name for human language as some of the processes of the several recent centuries have left it.