Now the word is nothing in itself; it is not sound primarily,
but thought. The word is but a sign, a negligible quantity
in human intercourse--a counter in which the coins are ideas
and emotions--merely legal tender, of no value save in
exchange. What we really experience in the sound of a
sentence, in the sight of a printed page, is a complex
sequence of visual and other images, ideas, emotions, feelings,
logical relations, swept along in the stream of consciousness,
--differing, indeed, in certain ways from daily experience,
but yet primarily of the web of life itself. The words in
their nuances, march, tempo, melody add certain elements to
this flood--hasten, retard, undulate, or calm it; but it is
the THOUGHT, the understood experience, that is the stuff of
literature.
Words are first of all meanings, and meanings are to be
understood and lived through. We can hardly even speak of
the meaning of a word, but rather of what it is, directly,
in the mental state that is called up by it. Every definition
of a word is but a feeble and distant approximation of the
unique flash of experience belonging to that word. It is not
the sound sensation nor the visual image evoked by the word
which counts, but the whole of the mental experience, to
which the word is but an occasion and a cue. Therefore, since
literature is the art of words, it is the stream of thought
itself that we must consider as the material of literature.
In short, literature is the dialect of life--as Stevenson
said; it is by literature that the business of life is
carried on. Some one, however, may here demur: visual signs,
too, are the dialect of life. We understand by what we see,
and we live by what we understand. The curve of a line, the
crescendo of a note, serve also for wordless messages. Why
are not, then, painting and music the vehicles of experience,
and to be judged first as evocation of life, and only
afterward as sight and hearing? This conceded, we are thrown
back on that view of art as "the fixed quantity of imaginative
thought supplemented by certain technical qualities,--of
color in painting, of sound in music, of rhythmical words in
poetry," from which is has been the one aim of the preceding
arguments of this book to free us.
The holders of this view, however, ignore the history and
significance of language. Our sight and hearing are given
to us prior to our understanding or use of them. In a way,
we submit to them--they are always with us. We dwell in
them through passive states, through seasons of indifference;
moreover when we see to understand, we do not SEE, and when
we hear to understand we do not hear. Only shreds of
sensation, caught up in our flight from one action to another,
serve as signals for the meanings which concern us. In
proportion as action is prompt and effective, does the cue
as such tend to disappear, until, in all matters of skill,
piano-playing, fencing, billiard-playing, the sight or sound
which serves as cue drops almost together out of consciousness.
So far as it is vehicle of information, it is no longer sight
or sound as such--interest has devoured it. But language
came into being to supplement the lacks of sight and sound.
It was created by ourselves, to embody all active outreaching
mental experience, and it comes into particular existence to
meet an insistent emergency--a literally crying need. In
short, it is CONSTITUTED by meanings--its essence is
communication. Sight and sound have a relatively independent
existence, and may hence claim a realm of art that is largely
independent of meanings. Not so the art of words, which can
be but the art of meanings, of human experience alone.
And yet again, were the evocation of life the means and
material of all art, that art in which the level of imaginative
thought was low, the range of human experience narrow, would
take a low place in the scale. What, then, of music and
architecture? Inferior arts, they could not challenge
comparison with the poignant, profound, all-embracing art of
literature. But this is patently not the fact. There is no
hierarchy of the arts. We may not rank St. Paul's Cathedral
below "Paradise Lost." Yet is the material of all experience
is the material of all art, they must not only be compared,
but "Paradise Lost" must be admitted incomparably the
greater. No--we may not admit that all the arts alike deal
with the material of expression. The excellence of music
and architecture, whatever it may be, cannot depend on this
material. Yet by hypothesis it must be through the use of
its material that the end of beauty is reached by every art.
A picture has lines and masses and colors, wherewith to play
with the faculty of vision, to weave a spell for the whole man.
Beauty is the power to enchant him through the eye and all
that waits upon it, into a moment of perfection. Literature
has "all thoughts, all passions, all delights"--the treasury
of life--to play with, to weave a spell for the whole man.
Beauty in literature is the power to enchant him, through
the mind and heart, across the dialect of life, into a moment
of perfection.