In the last chapter a polite tradition of speaking was seen struggling to maintain itself in unpropitious circumstances. Where earlier practitioners of the oratorical art, in France at least, had generally assumed a consensus about what could or could not be said, many of the revolutionary orators found themselves face to face with a more disquieting audience. In the public galleries of the Convention were men and women for whom the time-honoured decorum of rhetoric meant little. This seems to me an emblematic case of the confrontation with an alien world which will be the theme of the following chapters. For polite culture, this alien world could take the form of the common people. Or it could be, quite literally, the culture, and in particular the writing, of a foreign country.

Translation is a particularly revealing phenomenon in this respect, for it implies the assimilation of foreign bodies. To translate is to carry across, to invade a foreign territory and bring back a prize which is then made available to enrich the native store, to infuse new blood into the traditional culture. In certain historical cases the new import is the literature of a politer society. So, in the French Renaissance, the learning and urbanity of the Greek and Roman classics were set against a native tradition that had come to seem barbarous or rustic. The aim was to ‘illustrate’ the French language. Over the following two centuries, however, a gradual change took place.