While we encourage a distinction which
establishes two kinds of truth, one for the world, and another for the
conscience, while we take pleasure in a kind of speech that has no
relation to the real thought of speaker or hearer, but to the rostrum
only, we must not be hasty to condemn a sentimentalism which we do our
best to foster. We listen in public with the gravity or augurs to what we
smile at when we meet a brother adept. France is the native land of
eulogy, of truth padded out to the size and shape demanded by
_comme-il-faut_. The French Academy has, perhaps, done more harm by the
vogue it has given to this style, than it has done good by its literary
purism; for the best purity of a language depends on the limpidity of its
source in veracity of thought. Rousseau was in many respects a typical
Frenchman, and it is not to be wondered at if he too often fell in with
the fashion of saying what was expected of him, and what he thought due
to the situation, rather than what would have been true to his inmost
consciousness. Perhaps we should allow something also to the influence of
a Calvinistic training, which certainly helps men who have the least
natural tendency towards it to set faith above works, and to persuade
themselves of the efficacy of an inward grace to offset an outward and
visible defection from it.
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