THE GROWTH OF COMMUNICATION
PRE-VERBAL COMMUNICATION—THE RISE OF SPEECH—ITS MENTAL AND SOCIAL
FUNCTION—THE FUNCTION OF WRITING—PRINTING AND THE MODERN WORLD—THE
NON-VERBAL ARTS.
The chief means of what we may call pre-verbal communication are the
expression of the face—especially of the mobile portions about the eyes
and mouth—the pitch, inflection, and emotional tone of the voice; and
the gestures of the head and limbs. All of these begin in involuntary
movements but are capable of becoming voluntary, and all are eagerly
practised and interpreted by children long before they learn to speak.
They are immediately joined to action and emotion: the inflections of
the voice, for instance, play upon the child’s feelings as directly as
music, and are interpreted partly by an instinctive sensibility. I have
heard a child seventeen months old using her voice so expressively,
though inarticulately, that it sounded, a little way off, as if she
were carrying on an animated conversation. And gesture, such as
reaching out the hand, bending forward, turning away the head, and the
like, springs directly from the ideas and feelings it represents.
The human face, “the shape and color of a mind and life,” is a kind
of epitome of society, and if one could only read all that is written
in the countenances of men as they pass he might find a great deal
of sociology in them. Hereditary bias, family nurture, the print
of the school, current opinion, contemporary institutions, all are
there, drawn with a very fine pencil. If one wishes to get a real
human insight into the times of Henry the Eighth, for example, he
can hardly do better than to study the portrait drawings of Holbein;
and so of other periods, including our own, whose traits would
appear conspicuously in a collection of portraits. Many people can
discriminate particular classes, as, for instance, clergymen, by their
expression, and not a few will tell with much accuracy what church
the latter belong to and whether they are of the lower rank or in
authority. Again there is a difference, indescribable, perhaps, yet
apparent, between the look of American and of English youths—still more
of girls—which reflects the differing social systems.
This sort of communication is, of course, involuntary. An artificial
mechanism of communication originates when man begins purposely to
reproduce his own instinctive motions and cries, or the sounds,
forms, and movements of the world about him, in order to recall the
ideas associated with them. All kinds of conventional communication
are believed to be rooted in these primitive imitations, which, by a
process not hard to imagine, extend and differentiate into gesture,
speech, writing, and the special symbols of the arts and sciences; so
that the whole exterior organization of thought refers back to these
beginnings.
We can only conjecture the life of man, or of his humanizing
progenitor, before speech was achieved; but we may suppose that facial
expression, inarticulate cries and songs,[23] and a variety of
imitative sounds and actions aroused sympathy, permitted the simpler
kinds of general ideas to be formed, and were the medium through
which tradition and convention had their earliest development. It is
probable that artificial gesture language was well organized before
speech had made much headway. Even without words life may have been
an active and continuous mental whole, not dependent for its unity
upon mere heredity, but bound together by some conscious community
in the simpler sorts of thought and feeling, and by the transmission
and accumulation of these through tradition. There was presumably
coöperation and instruction of a crude sort in which was the germ of
future institutions.
No one who has observed children will have any difficulty in
conjecturing the beginnings of speech, since nearly every child
starts in to invent a language for himself, and only desists when he
finds that there is one all ready-made for him. There are as many
natural words (if we may call them so) as there are familiar sounds
with definite associations, whether coming from human beings, from
animals, or from inanimate nature. These the child instinctively loves
to reproduce and communicate, at first in mere sport and sociability,
then, as occasion arises, with more definite meaning. This meaning is
easily extended by various sorts of association of ideas; the sounds
themselves are altered and combined in usage; and thus speech is well
begun.
Many humble inventors contribute to its growth, every man, possibly,
altering the heritage in proportion as he puts his individuality
into his speech. Variations of idea are preserved in words or other
symbols, and so stored up in a continuing whole, constantly growing
in bulk and diversity, which is, as we have seen, nothing less than
the outside or sensible embodiment of human thought, in which every
particular mind lives and grows, drawing from it the material of its
own life, and contributing to it whatever higher product it may make
out of that material.
A word is a vehicle, a boat floating down from the past, laden with
the thought of men we never saw; and in coming to understand it we
enter not only into the minds of our contemporaries, but into the
general mind of humanity continuous through time. The popular notion of
learning to speak is that the child first has the idea and then gets
from others a sound to use in communicating it; but a closer study
shows that this is hardly true even of the simplest ideas, and is
nearly the reverse of truth as regards developed thought. In that the
word usually goes before, leading and kindling the idea—we should not
have the latter if we did not have the word first. “This way,” says the
word, “is an interesting thought; come and find it.” And so we are led
on to rediscover old knowledge. Such words, for instance, as _good_,
_right_, _truth_, _love_, _home_, _justice_, _beauty_, _freedom_; are
powerful makers of what they stand for.
A mind without words would make only such feeble and uncertain progress
as a traveller set down in the midst of a wilderness where there were
no paths or conveyances and without even a compass. A mind with them
is like the same traveller in the midst of civilization, with beaten
roads and rapid vehicles ready to take him in any direction where men
have been before. As the traveller must pass over the ground in either
case, so the mind must pass through experience, but if it has language
it finds its experience foreseen, mapped out and interpreted by all the
wisdom of the past, so that it has not only its own experience but that
of the race—just as the modern traveller sees not only the original
country but the cities and plantations of men.
The principle that applies to words applies also to all structures
that are built of words, to literature and the manifold traditions
that it conveys. As the lines of Dante are “foot-paths for the thought
of Italy,” so the successful efforts of the mind in every field are
preserved in their symbols and become foot-paths by which other minds
reach the same point. And this includes feeling as well as definite
idea. It is almost the most wonderful thing about language that by
something intangible in its order and movement and in the selection and
collocation of words, it can transmit the very soul of a man, making
his page live when his definite ideas have ceased to have value. In
this way one gets from Sir Thomas Browne, let us say, not his conceits
and credulities, but his high and religious spirit, hovering, as it
were, over the page.
The achievement of speech is commonly and properly regarded as the
distinctive trait of man, as the gate by which he emerged from his
pre-human state. It means that, like Helen Keller, he has learned that
everything has, or may have, a name, and so has entered upon a life
of conscious fellowship in thought. It not only permitted the rise of
a more rational and human kind of thinking and feeling, but was also
the basis of the earliest definite institutions. A wider and fuller
unity of thought took place in every group where it appeared. Ideas
regarding the chief interests of primitive life—hunting, warfare,
marriage, feasting and the like—were defined, communicated and
extended. Public opinion no doubt began to arise within the tribe, and
crystallized into current sayings which served as rules of thought and
conduct; the festal chants, if they existed before, became articulate
and historical. And when any thought of special value was achieved in
the group, it did not perish, but was handed on by tradition and made
the basis of new gains. In this way primitive wisdom and rule were
perpetuated, enlarged and improved until, in connection with ceremonial
and other symbols, they became such institutions, of government,
marriage, religion and property as are found in every savage tribe.
Nor must we forget that this state of things reacted upon the natural
capacities of man, perhaps by the direct inheritance of acquired social
habits and aptitudes, certainly by the survival of those who, having
these, were more fitted than others to thrive in a social life. In this
way man, if he was human when speech began to be used, rapidly became
more so, and went on accumulating a social heritage.
So the study of speech reveals a truth which we may also reach in many
other ways, namely, that the growth of the individual mind is not a
separate growth, but rather a differentiation within the general mind.
Our personal life, so far as we can make out, has its sources partly in
congenital tendency, and partly in the stream of communication, both
of which flow from the corporate life of the race. The individual has
no better ground for thinking of himself as separate from humanity
than he has for thinking of the self he is to-day as separate from the
self he was yesterday; the continuity being no more certain in the one
case than in the other. If it be said that he is separate because he
feels separate, it may be answered that to the infant each moment is
separate, and that we know our personal life to be a whole only through
the growth of thought and memory. In the same way the sense of a larger
or social wholeness is perhaps merely a question of our growing into
more vivid and intelligent consciousness of a unity which is already
clear enough to reflective observation.
It is the social function of writing, by giving ideas a lasting record,
to make possible a more certain, continuous and diversified growth of
the human mind. It does for the race very much what it does for the
individual. When the student has a good thought he writes it down,
so that it may be recalled at will and made the starting-point for a
better thought in the same direction; and so mankind at large records
and cherishes its insights.
Until writing is achieved the accumulation of ideas depends upon oral
tradition, the capacity of which is measured by the interest and
memory of the people who transmit it. It must, therefore, confine
itself chiefly to ideas and sentiments for which there is a somewhat
general and constant demand, such as popular stories—like the Homeric
legends—chants, proverbs, maxims and the like. It is true that
tradition becomes more or less specialized in families and castes—as
we see, for instance, in the widespread existence of a hereditary
priesthood—but this specialization cannot be very elaborate or very
secure in its continuance. There can hardly be, without writing, any
science or any diversified literature. These require a means by which
important ideas can be passed on unimpaired to men distant in time
and space from their authors. We may safely pronounce, with Gibbon,
that “without some species of writing no people has ever preserved the
faithful annals of their history, ever made any considerable progress
in the abstract sciences, or ever possessed, in any tolerable degree of
perfection, the useful and agreeable arts of life.”[24]
Nor can stable and extended government be organized without it, for
such government requires a constitution of some sort, a definite and
permanent body of law and custom, embracing the wisdom of the past
regarding the maintenance of social order.
It is quite the same with religious systems. The historical religions
are based upon Scriptures, the essential part of which is the recorded
teaching of the founder and his immediate disciples, and without such
a record Christianity, Buddhism or Mohammedanism could never have
been more than a small and transient sect. There may well have been
men of religious genius among our illiterate forefathers, but it was
impossible that they should found enduring systems.
The whole structure and progress of modern life evidently rests upon
the preservation, in writing, of the achievements of the antique mind,
upon the records, especially, of Judea, Greece and Rome. To inquire
what we should have been without these would be like asking what we
should have been if our parents had not existed. Writing made history
possible, and the man of history with his complex institutions. It
enabled a rapid and secure enlargement of that human nature which had
previously been confined within small and unstable groups.
If writing, by giving thought permanence, brought in the earlier
civilization, printing, by giving it diffusion opened the doors of the
modern world.
Before its advent access to the records of the race was limited to a
learned class, who thus held a kind of monopoly of the traditions upon
which the social system rested. Throughout the earlier Middle Ages,
for example, the clergy, or that small portion of the clergy who were
educated, occupied this position in Europe, and their system was the
one animate and wide-reaching mental organization of the period. For
many centuries it was rare for a layman, of whatever rank, to know
how to sign his name. Through the Latin language, written and spoken,
which would apparently have perished had it not been for the Church,
the larger continuity and coöperation of the human mind was maintained.
Those who could read it had a common literature and a vague sense of
unity and brotherhood. Roman ideas were preserved, however imperfectly,
and an ideal Rome lived in the Papacy and the Empire. Education,
naturally, was controlled by the clergy, who were also intrusted with
political correspondence and the framing of laws. As is well known they
somewhat recast the traditions in their own interest, and were aided
by their control of the communicating medium in becoming the dominant
power in Europe.
Printing means democracy, because it brings knowledge within the reach
of the common people; and knowledge, in the long run, is sure to make
good its claim to power. It brings to the individual whatever part
in the heritage of ideas he is fit to receive. The world of thought,
and eventually the world of action, comes gradually under the rule
of a true aristocracy of intelligence and character, in place of an
artificial one created by exclusive opportunity.
Everywhere the spread of printing was followed by a general awakening
due to the unsettling suggestions which it scattered abroad. Political
and religious agitation, by no means unknown before, was immensely
stimulated, and has continued unabated to the present time. “The
whole of this movement,” says Mr. H. C. Lea, speaking of the liberal
agitations of the early sixteenth century, “had been rendered possible
by the invention of printing, which facilitated so enormously the
diffusion of intelligence, which enabled public opinion to form and
express itself, and which, by bringing into communication minds of
similar ways of thinking, afforded opportunity for combined action.”
“When, therefore, on October 31, 1517, Luther’s fateful theses were
hung on the church door at Wittenberg, they were, as he tells us, known
in a fortnight throughout Germany; and in a month they had reached Rome
and were being read in every school and convent in Europe—a result
manifestly impossible without the aid of the printing press.”[25]
The printed page is also the door by which the individual, in our own
time, enters the larger rooms of life. A good book, “the precious
life blood of a master spirit stored upon purpose to a life beyond
life,”[26] is almost always the channel through which uncommon minds
get incitement and aid to lift themselves into the higher thought that
other uncommon minds have created. “In study we hold converse with
the wise, in action usually with the foolish.”[27] While the mass of
mankind about us is ever commonplace, there is always, in our day, a
more select society not far away for one who craves it, and a man like
Abraham Lincoln, whose birth would have meant hopeless serfdom a few
centuries ago, may get from half a dozen books aspirations which lead
him out to authority and beneficence.
While spoken language, along with the writing and printing by which it
is preserved and disseminated, is the main current of communication,
there are from the start many side channels.
Thus among savage or barbarous peoples we everywhere find, beside
gesture language, the use of a multitude of other symbols, such as the
red arrow for war, the pipe of peace, signal fires, notched sticks,
knotted cords, totems, and, among nations more advanced in culture,
coats-of-arms, flags and an infinite diversity of symbolic ritual.
There is, indeed, a world of signs outside of language, most of which,
however, we may pass by, since its general nature is obvious enough.
The arts of painting, sculpture, music, and architecture, considered as
communication, have two somewhat different functions: First, as mere
picture or image writing, conveying ideas that could also be conveyed
(though with a difference) in words; and, second, as the vehicle of
peculiar phases of sentiment incommunicable in any other way. These two
were often, indeed usually, combined in the art of the past. In modern
times the former, because of the diffusion of literacy, has become of
secondary importance.
Of the picture-writing function the mosaics, in colors on a gold
ground, that cover the inner walls of St. Mark’s at Venice are a
familiar instance. They set forth in somewhat rude figures, helped
out by symbols, the whole system of Christian theology as it was then
understood. They were thus an illuminated book of sacred learning
through which the people entered into the religious tradition. The same
tradition is illustrated in the sculpture of the cathedrals of Chartres
and Rheims, together with much other matter—secular history, typified
by figures of the kings of France; moral philosophy, with virtues
and vices, rewards and punishments; and emblems of husbandry and
handicraft. Along with these sculptures went the pictured windows, the
sacred relics—which, as Gibbon says, “fixed and inflamed the devotion
of the faithful”[28]—the music, and the elaborate pageants and ritual;
all working together as one rich sign, in which was incarnated the
ideal life of the times.
A subtler function of the non-verbal arts is to communicate matter that
could not go by any other road, especially certain sorts of sentiment
which are thus perpetuated and diffused.
One of the simplest and most fruitful examples of this is the depiction
of human forms and faces which embody, as if by living presence, the
nobler feelings and aspirations of the time. Such works, in painting or
sculpture, remain as symbols by the aid of which like sentiments grow
up in the minds of whomsoever become familiar with them. Sentiment is
cumulative in human history in the same manner as thought, though less
definitely and surely, and Christian feeling, as it grew and flourished
in the Middle Ages, was fostered by painting as much, perhaps, as by
the Scriptures. And so Greek sculpture, from the time of the humanists
down through Winckelmann and Goethe to the present day, has been a
channel by which Greek sentiment has flowed into modern life.
This record of human feeling in expressive forms and faces, as
in the madonnas and saints of Raphael, is called by some critics
“illustration”; and they distinguish it from “decoration,” which
includes all those elements in a work of art which exist not to
transmit something else but for their own more immediate value,
such as beauty of color, form, composition and suggested movement.
This latter is communication also, appealing to vivid but otherwise
inarticulate phases of human instinct. Each art can convey a unique
kind of sentiment and has “its own peculiar and incommunicable sensuous
charm, its own special mode of reaching the imagination.” In a picture
the most characteristic thing is “that true pictorial quality ...
the inventive or creative handling of pure line and color, which, as
almost always in Dutch painting, as often also in the works of Titian
or Veronese, is quite independent of anything definitely poetical in
the subject it accompanies” in music “the musical charm—that essential
music, which presents no words, no matter of sentiment or thought,
separable from the special form in which it is conveyed to us.”[29] And
so with architecture, an art peculiarly close to social organization,
so that in many cases—as in the Place of Venice—the spirit of a social
system has been visibly raised up in stone.
It needs no argument, I suppose, to show that these arts are no
less essential to the growth of the human spirit than literature or
government.
FOOTNOTES:
[23] On the probability that song preceded speech, see Darwin, Descent
of Man, chap. 19.
[24] Decline and Fall, Milman-Smith edition, i, 354.
[25] The Cambridge Modern History, i, 684, 685.
[26] Milton, Areopagitica.
[27] Bacon, Antitheta on Studies.
[28] Decline and Fall, Milman-Smith edition, iii, 428.
[29] Walter Pater, Essay on the School of Giorgione.