Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/153

Rh lations, because it is impossible to reproduce them with the same grace with which the original author used them. For each language has I know not what peculiarity of its own, and if you force yourself to express the naturalness, le naïf, of this in another language, observing the law of translation, which is not to expatiate beyond the limits of the author himself, your words will be constrained, cold and ungraceful;'—then he fixes the test of all good translation,—'To prove this read me Demosthenes and Homer in Latin, Cicero and Virgil in French, and see whether they produce in you the same affections which you experience in reading those authors in the original.'

In this effort to ennoble the French language, to give it grace, number, perfection, and as painters do to their pictures, cette dernière main que nous désirons, what Du Bellay is pleading for is his mother-tongue, the language, that is, in which one will have the utmost degree of what is moving and passionate. He recognised of what force the music and dignity of languages are, how they enter into the inmost part of things; and in pleading for the cultivation of the French language he is pleading for no merely scholastic interest, but for freedom, impulse, reality, not in literature merely, but in daily communion of speech. After all it was im-