Coloured by the neighbourhood of silence, solemnised by thought or steeled by action, words are still its only means of rising above words."ACCEDAT VERBUM AD ELEMENTUM," said St.Ambrose, "ET FIATSACRAMENTUM." So the elementary passions, pity and love, wrath and terror, are not in themselves poetical; they must be wrought upon by the word to become poetry.In no other way can suffering be transformed to pathos, or horror reach its apotheosis in tragedy.
When all has been said, there remains a residue capable of no formal explanation.Language, this array of conventional symbols loosely strung together, and blown about by every wandering breath, is miraculously vital and expressive, justifying not a few of the myriad superstitions that have always attached to its use.The same words are free to all, yet no wealth or distinction of vocabulary is needed for a group of words to take the stamp of an individual mind and character."As a quality of style" says Mr.
Pater, "soul is a fact." To resolve how words, like bodies, become transparent when they are inhabited by that luminous reality, is a higher pitch than metaphysic wit can fly.Ardent persuasion and deep feeling enkindle words, so that the weakest take on glory.
The humblest and most despised of common phrases may be the chosen vessel for the next avatar of the spirit.It is the old problem, to be met only by the old solution of the Platonist, that Soul is form, and doth the body make.
The soul is able to inform language by some strange means other than the choice and arrangement of words and phrases.Real novelty of vocabulary is impossible; in the matter of language we lead a parasitical existence, and are always quoting.Quotations, conscious or unconscious, vary in kind according as the mind is active to work upon them and make them its own.In its grossest and most servile form quotation is a lazy folly; a thought has received some signal or notorious expression, and as often as the old sense, or something like it, recurs, the old phrase rises to the lips.This degenerates to simple phrase-mongering, and those who practise it are not vigilantly jealous of their meaning.Such an expression as "fine by degrees and beautifully less" is often no more than a bloated equivalent for a single word - say "diminishing" or "shrinking." Quotations like this are the warts and excremental parts of language; the borrowings of good writers are never thus superfluous, their quotations are appropriations.
Whether it be by some witty turn given to a well-known line, by an original setting for an old saw, or by a new and unlooked-for analogy, the stamp of the borrower is put upon the goods he borrows, and he becomes part owner.Plagiarism is a crime only where writing is a trade; expression need never be bound by the law of copyright while it follows thought, for thought, as some great thinker has observed, is free.The words were once Shakespeare's;if only you can feel them as he did, they are yours now no less than his.The best quotations, the best translations, the best thefts, are all equally new and original works.From quotation, at least, there is no escape, inasmuch as we learn language from others.All common phrases that do the dirty work of the world are quotations - poor things, and not our own.Who first said that a book would "repay perusal," or that any gay scene was "bright with all the colours of the rainbow"? There is no need to condemn these phrases, for language has a vast deal of inferior work to do.The expression of thought, temperament, attitude, is not the whole of its business.It is only a literary fop or doctrinaire who will attempt to remint all the small defaced coinage that passes through his hands, only a lisping young fantastico who will refuse all conventional garments and all conventional speech.At a modern wedding the frock-coat is worn, the presents are "numerous and costly," and there is an "ovation accorded to the happy pair."These things are part of our public civilisation, a decorous and accessible uniform, not to be lightly set aside.But let it be a friend of your own who is to marry, a friend of your own who dies, and you are to express yourself - the problem is changed, you feel all the difficulties of the art of style, and fathom something of the depth of your unskill.Forbidden silence, we should be in a poor way indeed.
