Languages are more to us than systems of thought-transference. They are
invisible garments that drape themselves about our spirit and give a
predetermined form to all its symbolic expression. When the expression
is of unusual significance, we call it literature.[194] Art is so
personal an expression that we do not like to feel that it is bound to
predetermined form of any sort. The possibilities of individual
expression are infinite, language in particular is the most fluid of
mediums. Yet some limitation there must be to this freedom, some
resistance of the medium. In great art there is the illusion of absolute
freedom. The formal restraints imposed by the material--paint, black and
white, marble, piano tones, or whatever it may be--are not perceived; it
is as though there were a limitless margin of elbow-room between the
artist's fullest utilization of form and the most that the material is
innately capable of. The artist has intuitively surrendered to the
inescapable tyranny of the material, made its brute nature fuse easily
with his conception.[195] The material "disappears" precisely because
there is nothing in the artist's conception to indicate that any other
material exists. For the time being, he, and we with him, move in the
artistic medium as a fish moves in the water, oblivious of the existence
of an alien atmosphere. No sooner, however, does the artist transgress
the law of his medium than we realize with a start that there is a
medium to obey.
[Footnote 194: I can hardly stop to define just what kind of expression
is "significant" enough to be called art or literature. Besides, I do
not exactly know. We shall have to take literature for granted.]
[Footnote 195: This "intuitive surrender" has nothing to do with
subservience to artistic convention. More than one revolt in modern art
has been dominated by the desire to get out of the material just what it
is really capable of. The impressionist wants light and color because
paint can give him just these; "literature" in painting, the sentimental
suggestion of a "story," is offensive to him because he does not want
the virtue of his particular form to be dimmed by shadows from another
medium. Similarly, the poet, as never before, insists that words mean
just what they really mean.]
Language is the medium of literature as marble or bronze or clay are the
materials of the sculptor. Since every language has its distinctive
peculiarities, the innate formal limitations--and possibilities--of one
literature are never quite the same as those of another. The literature
fashioned out of the form and substance of a language has the color and
the texture of its matrix. The literary artist may never be conscious of
just how he is hindered or helped or otherwise guided by the matrix, but
when it is a question of translating his work into another language, the
nature of the original matrix manifests itself at once. All his effects
have been calculated, or intuitively felt, with reference to the formal
"genius" of his own language; they cannot be carried over without loss
or modification. Croce[196] is therefore perfectly right in saying that
a work of literary art can never be translated. Nevertheless literature
does get itself translated, sometimes with astonishing adequacy. This
brings up the question whether in the art of literature there are not
intertwined two distinct kinds or levels of art--a generalized,
non-linguistic art, which can be transferred without loss into an alien
linguistic medium, and a specifically linguistic art that is not
transferable.[197] I believe the distinction is entirely valid, though
we never get the two levels pure in practice. Literature moves in
language as a medium, but that medium comprises two layers, the latent
content of language--our intuitive record of experience--and the
particular conformation of a given language--the specific how of our
record of experience. Literature that draws its sustenance mainly--never
entirely--from the lower level, say a play of Shakespeare's, is
translatable without too great a loss of character. If it moves in the
upper rather than in the lower level--a fair example is a lyric of
Swinburne's--it is as good as untranslatable. Both types of literary
expression may be great or mediocre.
[Footnote 196: See Benedetto Croce, "Aesthetic."]
[Footnote 197: The question of the transferability of art productions
seems to me to be of genuine theoretic interest. For all that we speak
of the sacrosanct uniqueness of a given art work, we know very well,
though we do not always admit it, that not all productions are equally
intractable to transference. A Chopin étude is inviolate; it moves
altogether in the world of piano tone. A Bach fugue is transferable into
another set of musical timbres without serious loss of esthetic
significance. Chopin plays with the language of the piano as though no
other language existed (the medium "disappears"); Bach speaks the
language of the piano as a handy means of giving outward expression to a
conception wrought in the generalized language of tone.]
There is really no mystery in the distinction. It can be clarified a
little by comparing literature with science. A scientific truth is
impersonal, in its essence it is untinctured by the particular
linguistic medium in which it finds expression. It can as readily
deliver its message in Chinese[198] as in English. Nevertheless it must
have some expression, and that expression must needs be a linguistic
one. Indeed the apprehension of the scientific truth is itself a
linguistic process, for thought is nothing but language denuded of its
outward garb. The proper medium of scientific expression is therefore a
generalized language that may be defined as a symbolic algebra of which
all known languages are translations. One can adequately translate
scientific literature because the original scientific expression is
itself a translation. Literary expression is personal and concrete, but
this does not mean that its significance is altogether bound up with the
accidental qualities of the medium. A truly deep symbolism, for
instance, does not depend on the verbal associations of a particular
language but rests securely on an intuitive basis that underlies all
linguistic expression. The artist's "intuition," to use Croce's term, is
immediately fashioned out of a generalized human experience--thought and
feeling--of which his own individual experience is a highly personalized
selection. The thought relations in this deeper level have no specific
linguistic vesture; the rhythms are free, not bound, in the first
instance, to the traditional rhythms of the artist's language. Certain
artists whose spirit moves largely in the non-linguistic (better, in the
generalized linguistic) layer even find a certain difficulty in getting
themselves expressed in the rigidly set terms of their accepted idiom.
One feels that they are unconsciously striving for a generalized art
language, a literary algebra, that is related to the sum of all known
languages as a perfect mathematical symbolism is related to all the
roundabout reports of mathematical relations that normal speech is
capable of conveying. Their art expression is frequently strained, it
sounds at times like a translation from an unknown original--which,
indeed, is precisely what it is. These artists--Whitmans and
Brownings--impress us rather by the greatness of their spirit than the
felicity of their art. Their relative failure is of the greatest
diagnostic value as an index of the pervasive presence in literature of
a larger, more intuitive linguistic medium than any particular language.
[Footnote 198: Provided, of course, Chinese is careful to provide itself
with the necessary scientific vocabulary. Like any other language, it
can do so without serious difficulty if the need arises.]
Nevertheless, human expression being what it is, the greatest--or shall
we say the most satisfying--literary artists, the Shakespeares and
Heines, are those who have known subconsciously to fit or trim the
deeper intuition to the provincial accents of their daily speech. In
them there is no effect of strain. Their personal "intuition" appears as
a completed synthesis of the absolute art of intuition and the innate,
specialized art of the linguistic medium. With Heine, for instance, one
is under the illusion that the universe speaks German. The material
"disappears."
Every language is itself a collective art of expression. There is
concealed in it a particular set of esthetic factors--phonetic,
rhythmic, symbolic, morphological--which it does not completely share
with any other language. These factors may either merge their potencies
with those of that unknown, absolute language to which I have
referred--this is the method of Shakespeare and Heine--or they may weave
a private, technical art fabric of their own, the innate art of the
language intensified or sublimated. The latter type, the more
technically "literary" art of Swinburne and of hosts of delicate "minor"
poets, is too fragile for endurance. It is built out of spiritualized
material, not out of spirit. The successes of the Swinburnes are as
valuable for diagnostic purposes as the semi-failures of the Brownings.
They show to what extent literary art may lean on the collective art of
the language itself. The more extreme technical practitioners may so
over-individualize this collective art as to make it almost unendurable.
One is not always thankful to have one's flesh and blood frozen to
ivory.
An artist must utilize the native esthetic resources of his speech. He
may be thankful if the given palette of colors is rich, if the
springboard is light. But he deserves no special credit for felicities
that are the language's own. We must take for granted this language with
all its qualities of flexibility or rigidity and see the artist's work
in relation to it. A cathedral on the lowlands is higher than a stick on
Mont Blanc. In other words, we must not commit the folly of admiring a
French sonnet because the vowels are more sonorous than our own or of
condemning Nietzsche's prose because it harbors in its texture
combinations of consonants that would affright on English soil. To so
judge literature would be tantamount to loving "Tristan und Isolde"
because one is fond of the timbre of horns. There are certain things
that one language can do supremely well which it would be almost vain
for another to attempt. Generally there are compensations. The vocalism
of English is an inherently drabber thing than the vowel scale of
French, yet English compensates for this drawback by its greater
rhythmical alertness. It is even doubtful if the innate sonority of a
phonetic system counts for as much, as esthetic determinant, as the
relations between the sounds, the total gamut of their similarities and
contrasts. As long as the artist has the wherewithal to lay out his
sequences and rhythms, it matters little what are the sensuous qualities
of the elements of his material.
The phonetic groundwork of a language, however, is only one of the
features that give its literature a certain direction. Far more
important are its morphological peculiarities. It makes a great deal of
difference for the development of style if the language can or cannot
create compound words, if its structure is synthetic or analytic, if the
words of its sentences have considerable freedom of position or are
compelled to fall into a rigidly determined sequence. The major
characteristics of style, in so far as style is a technical matter of
the building and placing of words, are given by the language itself,
quite as inescapably, indeed, as the general acoustic effect of verse is
given by the sounds and natural accents of the language. These necessary
fundamentals of style are hardly felt by the artist to constrain his
individuality of expression. They rather point the way to those
stylistic developments that most suit the natural bent of the language.
It is not in the least likely that a truly great style can seriously
oppose itself to the basic form patterns of the language. It not only
incorporates them, it builds on them. The merit of such a style as W.H.
Hudson's or George Moore's[199] is that it does with ease and economy
what the language is always trying to do. Carlylese, though individual
and vigorous, is yet not style; it is a Teutonic mannerism. Nor is the
prose of Milton and his contemporaries strictly English; it is
semi-Latin done into magnificent English words.
[Footnote 199: Aside from individual peculiarities of diction, the
selection and evaluation of particular words as such.]
It is strange how long it has taken the European literatures to learn
that style is not an absolute, a something that is to be imposed on the
language from Greek or Latin models, but merely the language itself,
running in its natural grooves, and with enough of an individual accent
to allow the artist's personality to be felt as a presence, not as an
acrobat. We understand more clearly now that what is effective and
beautiful in one language is a vice in another. Latin and Eskimo, with
their highly inflected forms, lend themselves to an elaborately periodic
structure that would be boring in English. English allows, even demands,
a looseness that would be insipid in Chinese. And Chinese, with its
unmodified words and rigid sequences, has a compactness of phrase, a
terse parallelism, and a silent suggestiveness that would be too tart,
too mathematical, for the English genius. While we cannot assimilate the
luxurious periods of Latin nor the pointilliste style of the Chinese
classics, we can enter sympathetically into the spirit of these alien
techniques.
I believe that any English poet of to-day would be thankful for the
concision that a Chinese poetaster attains without effort. Here is an
example:[200]
[Footnote 200: Not by any means a great poem, merely a bit of occasional
verse written by a young Chinese friend of mine when he left Shanghai
for Canada.]
Wu-river[201] stream mouth evening sun sink,
North look Liao-Tung,[202] not see home.
Steam whistle several noise, sky-earth boundless,
Float float one reed out Middle-Kingdom.
[Footnote 201: The old name of the country about the mouth of the
Yangtsze.]
[Footnote 202: A province of Manchuria.]
These twenty-eight syllables may be clumsily interpreted: "At the mouth
of the Yangtsze River, as the sun is about to sink, I look north toward
Liao-Tung but do not see my home. The steam-whistle shrills several
times on the boundless expanse where meet sky and earth. The steamer,
floating gently like a hollow reed, sails out of the Middle
Kingdom."[203] But we must not envy Chinese its terseness unduly. Our
more sprawling mode of expression is capable of its own beauties, and
the more compact luxuriance of Latin style has its loveliness too.
There are almost as many natural ideals of literary style as there are
languages. Most of these are merely potential, awaiting the hand of
artists who will never come. And yet in the recorded texts of primitive
tradition and song there are many passages of unique vigor and beauty.
The structure of the language often forces an assemblage of concepts
that impresses us as a stylistic discovery. Single Algonkin words are
like tiny imagist poems. We must be careful not to exaggerate a
freshness of content that is at least half due to our freshness of
approach, but the possibility is indicated none the less of utterly
alien literary styles, each distinctive with its disclosure of the
search of the human spirit for beautiful form.
[Footnote 203: I.e., China.]
Probably nothing better illustrates the formal dependence of literature
on language than the prosodic aspect of poetry. Quantitative verse was
entirely natural to the Greeks, not merely because poetry grew up in
connection with the chant and the dance,[204] but because alternations
of long and short syllables were keenly live facts in the daily economy
of the language. The tonal accents, which were only secondarily stress
phenomena, helped to give the syllable its quantitative individuality.
When the Greek meters were carried over into Latin verse, there was
comparatively little strain, for Latin too was characterized by an acute
awareness of quantitative distinctions. However, the Latin accent was
more markedly stressed than that of Greek. Probably, therefore, the
purely quantitative meters modeled after the Greek were felt as a shade
more artificial than in the language of their origin. The attempt to
cast English verse into Latin and Greek molds has never been successful.
The dynamic basis of English is not quantity,[205] but stress, the
alternation of accented and unaccented syllables. This fact gives
English verse an entirely different slant and has determined the
development of its poetic forms, is still responsible for the evolution
of new forms. Neither stress nor syllabic weight is a very keen
psychologic factor in the dynamics of French. The syllable has great
inherent sonority and does not fluctuate significantly as to quantity
and stress. Quantitative or accentual metrics would be as artificial in
French as stress metrics in classical Greek or quantitative or purely
syllabic metrics in English. French prosody was compelled to develop on
the basis of unit syllable-groups. Assonance, later rhyme, could not but
prove a welcome, an all but necessary, means of articulating or
sectioning the somewhat spineless flow of sonorous syllables. English
was hospitable to the French suggestion of rhyme, but did not seriously
need it in its rhythmic economy. Hence rhyme has always been strictly
subordinated to stress as a somewhat decorative feature and has been
frequently dispensed with. It is no psychologic accident that rhyme came
later into English than in French and is leaving it sooner.[206] Chinese
verse has developed along very much the same lines as French verse. The
syllable is an even more integral and sonorous unit than in French,
while quantity and stress are too uncertain to form the basis of a
metric system. Syllable-groups--so and so many syllables per rhythmic
unit--and rhyme are therefore two of the controlling factors in Chinese
prosody. The third factor, the alternation of syllables with level tone
and syllables with inflected (rising or falling) tone, is peculiar to
Chinese.
[Footnote 204: Poetry everywhere is inseparable in its origins from the
singing voice and the measure of the dance. Yet accentual and syllabic
types of verse, rather than quantitative verse, seem to be the
prevailing norms.]
[Footnote 205: Quantitative distinctions exist as an objective fact.
They have not the same inner, psychological value that they had in
Greek.]
[Footnote 206: Verhaeren was no slave to the Alexandrine, yet he
remarked to Symons, _à propos_ of the translation of _Les Aubes_, that
while he approved of the use of rhymeless verse in the English version,
he found it "meaningless" in French.]
To summarize, Latin and Greek verse depends on the principle of
contrasting weights; English verse, on the principle of contrasting
stresses; French verse, on the principles of number and echo; Chinese
verse, on the principles of number, echo, and contrasting pitches. Each
of these rhythmic systems proceeds from the unconscious dynamic habit of
the language, falling from the lips of the folk. Study carefully the
phonetic system of a language, above all its dynamic features, and you
can tell what kind of a verse it has developed--or, if history has
played pranks with its phychology, what kind of verse it should have
developed and some day will.
Whatever be the sounds, accents, and forms of a language, however these
lay hands on the shape of its literature, there is a subtle law of
compensations that gives the artist space. If he is squeezed a bit here,
he can swing a free arm there. And generally he has rope enough to hang
himself with, if he must. It is not strange that this should be so.
Language is itself the collective art of expression, a summary of
thousands upon thousands of individual intuitions. The individual goes
lost in the collective creation, but his personal expression has left
some trace in a certain give and flexibility that are inherent in all
collective works of the human spirit. The language is ready, or can be
quickly made ready, to define the artist's individuality. If no
literary artist appears, it is not essentially because the language is
too weak an instrument, it is because the culture of the people is not
favorable to the growth of such personality as seeks a truly individual
verbal expression.