Is only apparently a paradox. The latent content of all languages is the

same--the intuitive _science_ of experience. It is the manifest form

that is never twice the same, for this form, which we call linguistic

morphology, is nothing more nor less than a collective _art_ of thought,

an art denuded of the irrelevancies of individual sentiment. At last

analysis, then, language can no more flow from race as such than can the

sonnet form.

Nor can I believe that culture and language are in any true sense

causally related. Culture may be defined as _what_ a society does and

thinks. Language is a particular _how_ of thought. It is difficult to

see what particular causal relations may be expected to subsist between

a selected inventory of experience (culture, a significant selection

made by society) and the particular manner in which the society

expresses all experience. The drift of culture, another way of saying

history, is a complex series of changes in society's selected

inventory--additions, losses, changes of emphasis and relation. The

drift of language is not properly concerned with changes of content at

all, merely with changes in formal expression. It is possible, in

thought, to change every sound, word, and concrete concept of a language

without changing its inner actuality in the least, just as one can pour

into a fixed mold water or plaster or molten gold. If it can be shown

that culture has an innate form, a series of contours, quite apart from

subject-matter of any description whatsoever, we have a something in

culture that may serve as a term of comparison with and possibly a

means of relating it to language. But until such purely formal patterns

of culture are discovered and laid bare, we shall do well to hold the

drifts of language and of culture to be non-comparable and unrelated

processes. From this it follows that all attempts to connect particular

types of linguistic morphology with certain correlated stages of

cultural development are vain. Rightly understood, such correlations are

rubbish. The merest _coup d'oeil_ verifies our theoretical argument on

this point. Both simple and complex types of language of an indefinite

number of varieties may be found spoken at any desired level of cultural

advance. When it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks with the

Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam.

It goes without saying that the mere content of language is intimately

related to culture. A society that has no knowledge of theosophy need

have no name for it; aborigines that had never seen or heard of a horse

were compelled to invent or borrow a word for the animal when they made

his acquaintance. In the sense that the vocabulary of a language more or

less faithfully reflects the culture whose purposes it serves it is

perfectly true that the history of language and the history of culture

move along parallel lines. But this superficial and extraneous kind of

parallelism is of no real interest to the linguist except in so far as

the growth or borrowing of new words incidentally throws light on the

formal trends of the language. The linguistic student should never make

the mistake of identifying a language with its dictionary.

If both this and the preceding chapter have been largely negative in

their contentions, I believe that they have been healthily so. There is

perhaps no better way to learn the essential nature of speech than to

realize what it is not and what it does not do. Its superficial

connections with other historic processes are so close that it needs to

be shaken free of them if we are to see it in its own right. Everything

that we have so far seen to be true of language points to the fact that

it is the most significant and colossal work that the human spirit has

evolved--nothing short of a finished form of expression for all

communicable experience. This form may be endlessly varied by the

individual without thereby losing its distinctive contours; and it is

constantly reshaping itself as is all art. Language is the most massive

and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of

unconscious generations.

XI

LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

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