This meeting of concrete and abstract, of sense and thought, keeps the eye travelling along the utmost skyline of speculation, where the heavens are interfused with the earth.In short, the third and greatest virtue of words is no other than the virtue that belongs to the weapons of thought, - a deep, wide, questioning thought that discovers analogies and pierces behind things to a half-perceived unity of law and essence.In the employ of keen insight, high feeling, and deep thinking, language comes by its own; the prettinesses that may be imposed on a passive material are as nothing to the splendour and grace that transfigure even the meanest instrument when it is wielded by the energy of thinking purpose.The contempt that is cast, by the vulgar phrase, on "mere words" bears witness to the rarity of this serious consummation.
Yet by words the world was shaped out of chaos, by words the Christian religion was established among mankind.Are these terrific engines fit play-things for the idle humours of a sick child?
And now it begins to be apparent that no adequate description of the art of language can be drawn from the technical terminology of the other arts, which, like proud debtors, would gladly pledge their substance to repay an obligation that they cannot disclaim.
Let one more attempt to supply literature with a parallel be quoted from the works of a writer on style, whose high merit it is that he never loses sight, either in theory or in practice, of the fundamental conditions proper to the craft of letters.Robert Louis Stevenson, pondering words long and lovingly, was impressed by their crabbed individuality, and sought to elucidate the laws of their arrangement by a reference to the principles of architecture.
"The sister arts," he says, "enjoy the use of a plastic and ductile material, like the modeller's clay; literature alone is condemned to work in mosaic with finite and quite rigid words.You have seen those blocks, dear to the nursery: this one a pillar, that a pediment, a third a window or a vase.It is with blocks of just such arbitrary size and figure that the literary architect is condemned to design the palace of his art.Nor is this all; for since these blocks or words are the acknowledged currency of our daily affairs, there are here possible none of those suppressions by which other arts obtain relief, continuity, and vigour: no hieroglyphic touch, no smoothed impasto, no inscrutable shadow, as in painting; no blank wall, as in architecture; but every word, phrase, sentence, and paragraph must move in a logical progression, and convey a definite conventional import."It is an acute comparison, happily indicative of the morose angularity that words offer to whoso handles them, admirably insistent on the chief of the incommodities imposed upon the writer, the necessity, at all times and at all costs, to mean something.The boon of the recurring monotonous expanse, that an apprentice may fill, the breathing-space of restful mechanical repetition, are denied to the writer, who must needs shoulder the hod himself, and lay on the mortar, in ever varying patterns, with his own trowel.This is indeed the ordeal of the master, the canker-worm of the penny-a-liner, who, poor fellow, means nothing, and spends his life in the vain effort to get words to do the same.
But if in this respect architecture and literature are confessed to differ, there remains the likeness that Mr.Stevenson detects in the building materials of the two arts, those blocks of "arbitrary size and figure; finite and quite rigid." There is truth enough in the comparison to make it illuminative, but he would be a rash dialectician who should attempt to draw from it, by way of inference, a philosophy of letters.Words are piled on words, and bricks on bricks, but of the two you are invited to think words the more intractable.Truly, it was a man of letters who said it, avenging himself on his profession for the never-ending toil it imposed, by miscalling it, with grim pleasantry, the architecture of the nursery.Finite and quite rigid words are not, in any sense that holds good of bricks.They move and change, they wax and wane, they wither and burgeon; from age to age, from place to place, from mouth to mouth, they are never at a stay.They take on colour, intensity, and vivacity from the infection of neighbourhood; the same word is of several shapes and diverse imports in one and the same sentence; they depend on the building that they compose for the very chemistry of the stuff that composes them.The same epithet is used in the phrases "a fine day" and "fine irony," in "fair trade" and "a fair goddess." Were different symbols to be invented for these sundry meanings the art of literature would perish.For words carry with them all the meanings they have worn, and the writer shall be judged by those that he selects for prominence in the train of his thought.Aslight technical implication, a faint tinge of archaism, in the common turn of speech that you employ, and in a moment you have shaken off the mob that scours the rutted highway, and are addressing a select audience of ticket-holders with closed doors.
A single natural phrase of peasant speech, a direct physical sense given to a word that genteel parlance authorises readily enough in its metaphorical sense, and at a touch you have blown the roof off the drawing-room of the villa, and have set its obscure inhabitants wriggling in the unaccustomed sun.In choosing a sense for your words you choose also an audience for them.
