And alas, much as we like listening to French or
Italian, for example, Italians and Frenchmen (if we insist on having
their opinion) will confess that English has for them a rather harsh
sound. Altogether, it seems to me unlikely that the world will let
English supplant French for international purposes, and likely that
French will be ousted only when the world shall have been so
internationalised that the children of every land will have to learn,
besides their own traditional language, some kind of horrible
universal lingo begotten on Volapuk by a congress of the world's worst
pedants.
Almost I could wish I had been postponed to that era, so much have I
suffered through speaking French to Frenchmen in the presence of
Englishmen. Left alone with a Frenchman, I can stumble along, slowly
indeed, but still along, and without acute sense of ignominy.
Especially is this so if I am in France. There is in the atmosphere
something that braces one for the language. I don't say I am not
sorry, even so, for my Frenchman. But I am sorrier for him in England.
And if any Englishmen be included in the scene my sympathy with him is
like to be lost in my agony for myself.
Would that I had made some such confession years ago! O folly of
pride! I liked the delusion that I spoke French well, a delusion
common enough among those who had never heard me.
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