Page 2, 3rd March 1939

3rd March 1939

Page 2

Page 2, 3rd March 1939 — Mgr. "Ronnie" Knox Explains:
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Mgr. "Ronnie" Knox Explains:

WHY IT IS HE CANNOT SPEAK FRENCH
THIS IS MGR. RONALD KNOX'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS A GALLICIST.
He calls it the autobiography of an ordinary middle-class person who has learnt French in the ordinary middle-class way. . .
And he asks how it is that a person who has spent such a comparatively large part of his life learning French is a non-starter whenever conversation has to be conducted in that. language.
By Mgr. Ronald Knox.
I never had a French governess; there were never meal times in my
family during which conversation had to be conducted in French, nor did any person of French extraction darken our doors.
When did I start learning French?
I cannot even remember.
I started Greek when I was seven, and the fact that the crocodile moves its upper jaw remains with me to this day. Those early sentence books do contrive, with an uncanny knack of characterisation to sum up for you the atmosphere of the civilisation you are studying. ho krokodeilos ten ano gnatkon kinei-the crocodile moves his upper jaw-typical of that spirit of Inquiry with which the Greek genius first taught 118 to investigate the secrets of nature.
litalbus aedifteavit nturans-Balbus built a wall, and in doing so he was a typical Roman, and showed the spirit of the imperial race which ordered our civilisation for us.
Donnez-moi la plume, l'encre, et le papier du jardinier-the Frenchman revealed himself in that sentence as the victim of a restless literary ambition which must express itself at all costs, yet would express itself with the neatness, the concinnity, the ordered precision which distinguishes a cultivated garden from a romantic forest.
First Steps
My first French master at prep school was Barn. His real name was Evans. I can see him yet, with singular clearness, 811 one vees the pictures of those days: a little man in a light-grey suit, with a shining bald head, prominent cheeks, a pointed grey beard and derni-lunettes
I mean those spectacles which are cut off square at the top so as only to cover the lower half of the eyes, while the upper half peered at you with a permanent twinkle that expressed at once eagerness for his subject and contempt for his pupils.
We memorised (at this period) an interminable list of masculines ending in E mute. The verb Boaiiiir had no terrors for me : I could have met a Frenchman and said to him " that thou mightest boil thyself " without turning a hair.
Learnt Nothing-Even at Eton !
At Eton I came under the tuition of a Frenchman, M. Cuvelier, regrettably nicknamed " Cow-belly "; a sad man with a drooping sandy moustache, very kind-hearted, but incapable of rousing enthusiasm. I learnt nothing, I am afraid, in those French classes, except a number of disconnected pieces of general knowledge from a book of French compositions.
In the upper part of the school I came under the influence of M. Hua. This was a little man with a heavy black beard and a comedian's manner, and there was a legend about him which endeared him to everyone's imagination.
Late at night, it was said, M. Hua let himself out of his lodgings in the High Street and knocked at a little secret door in the wall of Windsor Castle, and there he sat till the small hours of morning telling dirty stories to King Edward VII.
" Classical French"
There WM also a system known as " classical French." This only taught you to read French, not to write, still less to speak it.
Since I left school I have never read French for the sake of reading French, although, finding it infinitely the best language for spiritual reading, I have read a good deal. I have got through six of the late Abbe Bremond's admirable volumes, each of them six hundred pages or so, bearing a title which may be roughly translated A Literary History of the Religious Sentiment in France.
I claim that I can read French.
Moreover, I can understand French when it is spoken, within limits. I don't
make the effort to follow a French conversation between two other people. But I can make pretty good time with a lecture or a sermon, or even with conversation addressed to me, as long as it doesn't exceed the speed limit.
" Vous Avez, Avez-Vous?"
I have even heard confessions in French without having to fall back on the ingenious expedient of that legendary English priest who, after listening to a stream of voluble self-accusation without understanding one word of it, drew himself up judicially and said, "OH, VOUS AVEZ, AVEZ-VOUS?"
Why is it, then, that I can't talk French?
In the first analysis the thing is simple enough. I cannot talk French because I am hopelessly self-conscious. I am afraid of talking it badly. The result is that I always talk it badly, for the first requisite in talking a foreign language, as in making a public speech, is some measure of self-confidence. And here, strangely enough, I think you may say that all the French we learned so tearfully at school is not a help but a positive hindrance. We do not remember how to do it right, but we remember with painful clearness how many ways there are of doing it wrong.
There is another inhibition which holds me tongue-tied. I cannot bear discussing the obvious topic, or saying the obvious things about it. I would rather remain silent. And the phrases which spring to my mind ready-made, if I am forced into conversation with foreigners, are always the obvious phrases about the obvious things, so that I despise myself for using them.
Because he finds that I understand him quite tolerably when he speaks French to me, the Frenchman never suspects my inability to talk French to him.
I sometimes wonder whether this sort of thing happens in the higher spheres of diplomacy.
What is to be Done?
One way, of course, would be for the French, I mean the mass of Frenchmen, to learn some English. Why don't they? It is notorious that French boys have lessons about twice as long as those of English boys; what on earth are they at all the time?
There is this objection, too. The French do not, like the English, make things easy when they are talking a foreign language by trying to pretend that they have understood when they haven't. They hold up the conversation by demanding to have things explained to them, and nearly always what they want to have explained is the inexplicable.
Another solution is that English people should give up trying to learn French altogether, except, of course, those who Intended to go into the Foreign Office or the Consular Service. In that case, I suppose, all future conversations between ordinary English and ordinary French people would have to he conducted in some neutral tongue.
But such a compromise would involve fresh dangers of positive misunderstanding. I prefer, therefore, as I say, to leave the prescription of remedies to others, and to content myself with this tentative diagnosis of one among the numerous causes which make the entente cordiale difficult to work out in every-day practice.
Given as a speech to a meeting of the Society of Our Lady of Good Counsel.




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