Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/165

Rh had done in the sixteenth. Shakespeare worked it to his will, at times with a divine success, at times with deplorable failure. Carlyle did the same, only that the failure was the rule and the success was the exception, and many smaller men have gone and done likewise, each in his own fashion. For our literature still more or less (and how much more than less!) remains in the condition described in the Book of Judges, and each man does that which is right in his own eyes. 'On est libre,' continued M. Renan, 'de ne pas l'écrire [la langue française]; mais dès qu'on entreprend cette tâche difficile, il faut passer les mains liées sous les fourches caudines du dictionnaire autorisé et de la grammaire que l'usage a consacrée.' ('You need not write it if you do not wish; but from the moment that you undertake this difficult task, it is necessary to pass with bound hands under the Caudine forks of the authorised vocabulary and of the grammar sanctioned by custom.') And this holds as good to-day, four decades later, as it did then, despite the scornful rejection of style by the extremists who gather round the dusty and tattered banner still held desperately aloft by M. Zola. Thus, then, do we start handicapped beside the third-rate, yea, and the tenth-rate, of our fellows in France. But this is only the first of their advantages. They have others all but as great and as precious. They have known