I have sometimes fancied that a musical instrument retains among its
capabilities and potentialities something of the character, some hint
of the soul, some waiting echo from the life of each who has played
upon it: that the violin which Paganini had touched was not altogether
the same afterward as before, nor had quite so fine a fibre after some
coarser spirit had stirred its strings. Our language is a less delicate
instrument: it is not susceptible to a debasing contagion; it receives
no permanent and essential impress but from the hand of skill. You may
fill it with false notes, and these will speak discordant when invoked
by a clumsy hand; but when the master plays they are all unheard—silent
in the quickened harmonies of masters who have played before.
My design is to show in the lucidest way that I can the supreme
importance of words, their domination of thought, their mastery of
character. Had the Scriptures been translated, as literally as now,
into the colloquial speech of the unlearned, and had the originals been
thereafter inaccessible, only direct interposition of the Divine Power
could have saved the whole edifice of Christianity from tumbling to
ruin.
Max Muller distilled the results of a lifetime of study into two lines:
No Language without Reason.
No Reason without Language.
The person with a copious and obedient vocabulary and the will and
power to apply it with precision thinks great thoughts. The mere glib
talker—who may have a meagre vocabulary and no sense of discrimination
in the use of words—is another kind of creature. A nation whose
language is strong and rich and flexible and sweet—such as English was
just before the devil invented dictionaries—has a noble literature
and, compared with contemporary nations barren in speech, a superior
morality. A word is a crystallized thought; good words are precious
possessions, which nevertheless, like gold, may be mischievously used.
The introduction of a bad word, its preservation, the customary misuse
of a good one—these are sins affecting the public welfare. The fight
against faulty diction is a fight against insurgent barbarism—a fight
for high thinking and right living—for art, science, power—in a word,
civilization. A motor without mechanism; an impulse without a medium
of transmission; a vitalizing thought with no means to impart it; a
fertile mind with a barren vocabulary—than these nothing could be more
impotent. Happily they are impossible. They are not even conceivable.
Conduct is of character, character is of thought, and thought is
unspoken speech. We think in words; we can not think without them.
Shallowness or obscurity of speech means shallowness or obscurity of
thought. Barring a physical infirmity, an erring tongue denotes an
erring brain. When I stumble in my speech I stumble in my thought.
Those who have naturally the richest and most obedient vocabulary
are also the wisest thinkers; there is little worth knowing but what
they have thought. The most brutish savage is he who is most meagrely
equipped with words; fill him with words to the top of his gift and
you would make him as wise as he is able to become.
The man who can neither write well nor talk well would have us believe
that, like the taciturn parrot of the anecdote, he is “a devil to
think.” It is not so. Though such a man had read the Alexandrian
library he would remain ignorant; though he had sat at the feet of
Plato he would be still unwise. The gift of expression is the measure
of mental capacity; its degree of cultivation is the exponent of
intellectual power. One may choose not to utter one’s mind—that is
another matter; but if he choose he can. He can utter it all. His mind,
not his heart; his thought, not his emotion. And if he do not sometimes
choose to utter he will eventually cease to think. A mind without
utterance is like a lake without an outlet: though fed with mountain
springs and unfailing rivers, its waters do not long keep sweet.
Human speech is an imperfect instrument—imperfect by reason of its
redundancy, imperfect by reason of its poverty. We have too many words
for our meaning, too many meanings for our words. The effect is so
confusing and embarrassing that the ability to express our thoughts
with force and accuracy is extremely rare. It is not a gift, but a
gift and an accomplishment. It comes not altogether by nature, but is
achieved by hard, technical study.
In illustration of the poverty of speech take the English word
“literature.” It means the art of writing and it means the things
written—preferably in the former sense by him who has made it a study,
almost universally in the latter by those who know nothing about it.
Indeed, the most of these are unaware that it has another meaning,
because unaware of the existence of the thing which in that sense it
means. Tell them that literature, like painting, sculpture, music and
architecture, is an art—the most difficult of arts—and you must expect
an emphatic dissent. The denial not infrequently comes from persons of
wide reading, even wide writing, for the popular writer commonly utters
his ideas as, if he pursued the vocation for which he is better fitted,
he would dump another kind of rubbish from another kind of cart—pull
out the tailboard and let it go. The immortals have a different method.
Among the minor trials of one who has a knowledge of the art of
literature is the book of one who has not. It is a light affliction,
for he need not read it. The worthy bungler’s conversation about
the books of others is a sharper disaster, for it can not always
be evaded and must be courteously endured; and, goodness gracious!
how comprehensively he does not know! How eagerly he points out the
bottomless abyss of his ignorance and leaps into it! The _censor
literarum_ is perhaps the most widely distributed species known to
zoology.
The ignorance of the reading public and the writing public concerning
literary art is the eighth wonder of the world. Even its rudiments
are to these two great classes a thing that is not. From neither the
talk of the one nor the writing of the other would a student from Mars
ever learn, for illustration, that a romance is not a novel; that
poetry is a thing apart from the metrical form in which it is most
acceptable; that an epigram is not a truth tersely stated—is, in fact,
not altogether true; that fable is neither story nor anecdote; that the
speech of an illiterate doing the best he knows how is another thing
than dialect; that prose has its prosody no less exacting than verse.
The ready-made critic and the ready-made writer are two of a kind and
each is good enough for the other. To both, writing is writing, and
that is all there is of it. If we had two words for the two things now
covered by the one word “literature” perhaps the benighted could be
taught to distinguish between, not only the art and the product, but,
eventually, the different kinds of the product itself. As it is, they
are in much the same state of darkness as that of the Southern young
woman before she went North and learned, to her astonishment, that the
term “damned Yankee” was two words—she had never heard either without
the other.
In literature, as in all art, manner is everything and matter nothing;
I mean that matter, however important, has nothing to do with the _art_
of literature; that is a thing apart. In literature it makes very
little difference what you say, but a great deal how you say it. It is
precisely this thing called style which determines and fixes the place
of any written discourse; the thoughts may be the most interesting, the
statements the most important, that it is possible to conceive; yet if
they be not cast in the literary mold, the world can not be persuaded
to accept the work as literature. What could be more important and
striking than the matter of Darwin’s books, or Spencer’s? Does anyone
think of Darwin and Spencer as men of letters? Their manner, too, is
admirable for its purpose—to convince. Conviction, though, is not a
literary purpose. What can depose Sterne from literature? Yet who says
less than Sterne, or says it better?
It is so in painting. One man makes a great painting of a sheepcote;
another, a bad one of Niagara. The difference is not in the subject—in
that the Niagara man has all the advantage; it is in the style.
Art—literary, graphic, or what you will—is not a matter of matter, but
a matter of manner. It is not the What but the How. The master enchants
when writing of a pebble on the beach; the bungler wearies us with a
storm at sea. Let the dullard look to his theme and thought; the artist
sets down what comes. He pickles it sweet with a salt savor of verbal
felicity, and it charms like Apollo’s lute.