Facon de parler
Sir: Ned Halley (Letters, 9 June) takes me and other contributors to task for using `infelicitous French idiom'.
Although generally agreeing with George Orwell that one should avoid using a foreign word or expression unless there is no equivalent English mot piste (steady!), I thought it quite appropriate, in a light- hearted review of a book on international comedy, to use a Moliere quotation. He is after all France's greatest comic dramatist; some would say greatest dramatist tout court (steady again!) and I could not find a better English bon mot or jeu d'esprit.
What Mr Halley calls my 'melancholy contrivance' is probably Moliere's best- known catch-phrase. If a French writer put `Once more unto the breach, dear friends' or 'To be or not to be' into a review would this call forth indignation from the French shires? I somehow doubt it; it is only in England that cultural insularity is actually applauded. Surely in The Spectator, as W. C. Fields put it, 'We must strive to instruct and uplift as well as to entertain'; and I see no harm in a little discreet cosmopolitanism. No — or rather Non, je ne regrette rien! Jonathan Cecil
Garrick Club, London WC2
Previous page
