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,