Limanora

CHAPTER V
LITERATURE

ALL mere word-mongering was to this people an immoral thing, a shameless waste of the tissue and energy that were needed by the evolution of the race, an offence against its aim and ideal, its progress upwards through the cosmic grades. They were persuaded that it was a base substitution of the shows of life for the reality to make an art of words which should absorb the imagination and the skill of hundreds for their whole lifetime. They would have nothing to do with attention to the appearance and ornamentation of a subject to the neglect of its true spirit. Into the very heart and purpose of life every worker must penetrate. His relation to the progress of the race must be clearly shown. No work that took up any of the time or energy of anyone of the community was to be useless or unfertile.

But this did not mean that language was allowed to take care of itself. It was one of the most diligently tended blossoms of human capacity. No word or phrase, whether spontaneous or invented, was allowed to take root without the fiat of the mature community. Language was more a public institution than even government or justice in a people whose every member was able to be a law to himself. It was not only the great channel of communication; it was the medium and garment of every thought. If it became corrupt, how could the mind itself be saved from its contagion? If it acquired a false tone, how could the falsity fail to enter into the very spirit of the men and women? It was the guardian of law and truth; it was the key to the human heart; it was the ether, the medium, in which the human mind lived, moved, and had its being.

How could such a potent factor in human progress be left to the caprices of accident, or of single persons, or even of a family? It had more influence over the spirit than all their sciences put together, for it was more universal in its use than any one of them; and it subtly tinged all of them, whilst it was almost the breath of the mind which dealt with them. It might be the life or the poison of the whole race. He who was the sole guide of language would be the master of Limanora, not in the shallow sense of a ruler, but in that of the complete arbiter of its destinies. He would be the despot of the Limanoran mind and might subtly throw it back centuries, if it pleased him.

A people so experienced and wise as this would have ruined the whole ideal of their existence if they had allowed the most public of the functions of their civilisation to move at the caprice of individuals. As soon as the purgation of the race had been completed it became plain that their language must be purified too. Hundreds of words and phrases and idioms had had soaked into them the infiltrations of the evil minds which were now banished. Worse than all, language had been the commonest and safest ambush of malignity and deceit; it had been a perpetual trap for the innocent and unwary; it had been a labyrinth, in which even the ablest and purest-minded often lost their way when following the lead of some great and noble thought.

The first aim of the elders was to clear it of coarse or vulgar suggestion. But, as they proceeded, they found their horizon widen; and the intricacies, ambiguities, and pitfalls showed themselves the most serious evils of all. It became absolutely necessary, if they were to have a clear and unrefractive medium of expression, to give a definite meaning to every word, and to have one word for every meaning or shade of meaning. The task extended itself through years. But then they knew that, until it was thoroughly done, their science would be like shifting clouds, and their progress would be over quicksands. If their language was treacherous, their civilisation was but a mirage. So they toiled on sustained by the hope that they were making sure their footsteps in the pursuit of truth.

When their work was done, they found it was only begun. For it took a generation to make the new and purified language the natural medium of the whole people, and by that time new sub-meanings had crept into most of the common words, and new shadings had discoloured most of the everyday phraseology. The new and less used words, and the purely technical and scientific words stood where they were. Everything that lived had shifted ground. Everything that was purely artificial and had taken no root had remained as it began, had been in short petrified. It was clear that with living language there must be perpetual vigilance and superintendence. And the whole people had to become a council for the preservation of its purity and translucence. Every citizen set a watch upon his words, as he used them from day to day or as he heard them used, and reported any drift in the sense and any new shade of meaning; and after deliberation in council and careful consideration by the elders a new form was moulded for each new signification. This form had to pass the ordeal of universal use for some time, and if it stood the test, it was finally accepted as part of the language.

Nor was it ever forgotten that the ear and the sense of harmony had as much to do with the acceptance of a word as its fitness to express an idea. Harsh sounds wasted valuable tissue as much as unmeaning syllables. The verbal atrocities of Western science would have made the Limanorans shudder. Dissonance was an offence against the spirit of harmony which pervaded the cosmos; it was as easy to form a melodious word or phrase as one that was grating or stridulous. Euphony, it seemed to them, was one of the first essentials of a language; and it was much pleasanter to be silent than to talk unmusically. There had grown up an instinct in them that moulded their sentences into what Europeans would have called poems. The barest statement of fact ran with a liquid sweetness that drew the ear like a piece of beautiful music. The strictest scientific discourse sounded to me as majestic and melodious as some of the greatest passages in our Western poets. Their most ordinary conversation had the liquid harmony of our finest lyrics without the monotonous rhythm, the jingling rhyme, or the mincing gait. It never struck them that there should be a special art of words apart from that skill which all had by instinct whenever there was a thought to express. If it were a perfectly new thought, a discovery or invention that was still unnamed, then it was the duty of the whole people to make or approve of a word which would exactly fit it. Loose-fitting language soon meant loose, shambling thought, and it was one of their foremost responsibilities as a race to see that no one of them was driven into that. The appearance of a special literary art, for which some were specially gifted, would have told them at once that their language was disorganised and that the first great public need was its reform.

For a time after my arrival in the island I was accustomed to speak with admiration of the great literatures of Europe, one of the few features of our Western civilisation which I felt it no shame to mention. I would launch into glowing praises of the beauty and aptness of the expression, the nobleness of the music, and the majesty and harmony of each work. When I spoke of Homer and Æschylus, of Dante and Milton, of Shakespeare and Goethe, I was unbounded in my admiration of their lofty genius in the management of their material. Questioned as to the character of their thoughts, I contended that there was no need for these to be absolutely new; the greatest merit of such poets was that they took the wisdom of their age or country, or the wisdom of all ages and countries, and expressed it in a way that was inimitable. Their material they had gathered from books or from the experience of their time; and most of their great poems had been analysed by admiring commentators into their original elements; the source from which almost every idea had been taken could be pointed out. But this was only to enhance the value of their work, to increase their greatness. It was one of the commonest observations amongst literary men in the West, when defending themselves against the charge of plagiarism, that there was no such thing as absolute originality of idea or material; the great merit in literature, the test of its lastingness, was the originality or freshness of expression; the rest belonged to the age or people in which it was produced, or to mankind of all ages and nations. And young men and women were encouraged to learn foreign languages, and especially the classical tongues, at all hazards, because translations missed what was distinctive in the great authors; if they would enjoy the true flavour of their originality, they must learn and study the language of the great books for themselves.

I found my efforts to communicate my enthusiasm all in vain. I was met by a look of pity in the eyes of my listeners, and soon came to know the source and meaning of the emotion. They were sorry that I should continue to admire that which was the symptom of a diseased condition, and they commiserated the retrograde state of so many millions of the inhabitants of the globe, who could spend some of the best moments and feelings of their lives on what was merely superficial. They sympathised with the effort to live in a world of thought, a spiritual world, a nobler existence than that of eating and drinking; this was a sign of a yearning for advance. But they grieved that it should take such a mistaken direction, that their fellow-men in the West should glory in what was an evidence of disease. Language was singularly disordered, when only a few could be found throughout the ages with the capacity to use it aptly and musically. Where was the wisdom that guided the people, if it could let this greatest instrument and medium of thought remain so chaotic and infirm that whosoever was skilled in fit and melodious use of it was held to be inspired? Surely it was the first care of the elders and governors to see that the universal means of communication was at least unambiguous and explicit. The highway of thought was left a jungle, primeval and inarticulate as the intercourse of animals; and one who made a clear track through any part of the labyrinth was lauded as divine. The literature of Europe was evidently but the outcome of the incapacity of its people for proper self-government. That only a few should be able to write or speak in so clear and fitting a way was a disgrace to the civilisation. To honour them so greatly as the people did revealed the depths of incapacity into which all had fallen, and the corrupt state of the language.

I urged the marvellous power of suggestion that European words had in the hands of the poets. They bore so many sub-meanings and branches of meaning that the full depths of a poem or great prose work were never sounded. Age after age of students could go on studying it and still find in it new significance, new inspiration. Commentary after commentary had been written on the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, and Shakespeare’s plays, without exhausting all the meaning they had in them. Vast libraries of interpretation of them had accumulated, and yet every new age found opportunity for additions to them. This was due to the subtle under-meanings that touched innumerable keys in the soul, and played upon a vast variety of emotions. An able writer could bring words together so aptly as to affect different minds in different ways. A nebulous significance gathered round his phrases and sentences, and out of this a hundred scholars would make each his own discovery. Mystically lay the thoughts in the depths of his words, ready for the profounder students to fathom. And so every great poem inspired age after age in a thousand different directions. Would this have been the case, if every word had been made to serve but one purpose, if every phrase had been unequivocal in meaning, and every sentence unshaded and perspicuous? It was the play of meaning, the opalescent glimmer of light in language that rendered European poetry so beautiful and undyingly suggestive. It was the twilight of words that gave such majestic and shadowy forms to the ideas and characters and scenes of the great poems of the past. And what would the generations of scholars and teachers have done without these hidden meanings to reveal in their literature, without these intricacies to disentangle, without these dim allusions and adumbrations of sense to make clear? Where would our youth have found their intellectual training, if all our great literature had been transparent and precise in meaning?

I thought I had made out a splendid case for our European tongues. But a glance at the face of my querist served to scatter my vanity to the winds. There was the same inscrutable look of pity in the eyes. Everything I had pleaded, as I thought, so eloquently had only deepened the Limanoran view of the shameful waste of talent which the undefined and perpetually shifting sense of European words produced in the West. There must the ablest minds of most generations wrestle all their lives with the loose-jointed languages they had to employ, and try to get their benediction and inspiration into form for the ages to wrestle with. There must thousands of capable men and women waste their best years in searching for recondite meanings in the works these have produced. There must all the immature minds spend their youth on the hated, barren task of trying to grasp the mirage of sense in the books they learn. What progress would there not have been in Europe if all this talent and energy and time had been saved for the real work of life, if all the best thinkers she produced had been set to the labour of true discovery? It was little wonder that her civilisation was practically unprogressive, when so much of it was built on the quicksands of her language. All the shades and suggestions of meaning were but pitfalls wherein most of her men and women foundered on the journey of life. It was with mere shadows and shows that her greatest minds fought; they were not conquering the unknown and undiscovered that their fellow-men might advance in their footsteps. The night encircled them as deeply as before their preternatural efforts. How could the blind lead the blind in a land covered with mists and full of pitfalls?

I had still a few arrows in my quiver, I thought. No one could deny the beauty of the literary art and the training it gave to the sense of what was fair and noble. Where will one find anything so melodious as our great poems? Where anything so harmonious as the prose of our finest stylists? A beautiful lyric can hold a nation entranced. A fine piece of prose can stir thousands to admiration. What could be more ennobling than the effect of our greatest poems on the youth of our nations, what more refining than the study of our great prose-writers?

Again I knew how far beside the mark I had shot. Style was but the effort of a language to throw off its diseases, an acknowledgment of the gross imperfections that burdened it and made it a clog on the progress of thought. If a language were what it ought to be, a precise means of intercourse between soul and soul, a true medium of intellectual energy, then ought the race that uses it to be completely unconscious of anything like style. We never know we breathe, or how we breathe, till some stoppage makes breathing difficult; we never realise we have a heart whose pulsations are essential to life, till it beats irregularly, and alarms us with the prospect of disease in it. So it is with speech, the instrument of communication among men, the ether of thought; did it perform all its functions in a healthy and perfect way, we should pay little or no attention to it; were words unambiguous and precise, every man would speak and write in the best of all styles, that natural and transpicuous method of expression which fixes the whole mind of the listener or reader, not on the means of conveyance, but on the energy that passes through it. Speech should be no more than one of the unpremeditated, unguided functions of our system; as soon as it calls for attention, it is deranged; as long as we are unconscious of it, it is healthful and strong, acting in every way as it should, without shadow or broken light, without indefiniteness of meaning or mistaken suggestion.

Nor should a language even in its commonest thoroughfares be devoid of music. How false must be the rendering of a thought, if for the sake of melody he who is called a poet should have to reject all but musical expressions in a language which has little music in it! How artificial must be the labours of this professional word-monger, when he must sit amongst the débris of his vocabulary, and pick and choose with weary exertion the words that will fit into his poem! With most of his language unsuited to his purpose, as being invented or moulded by unmusical people, he is like a mosaic-worker who has to make his work out of common stone, or out of fragments of pottery thrown into the rubbish-heap of the ages. Most languages sound like the rasping of a file over iron, or the shooting of débris over a precipice, or at best the crackle and hiss of fireworks. And it is not surprising; for their individual words are made out of anything that is ready to hand by men who care nothing for the sound of them, whether it is harsh or melodious. Now and again if a word or phrase becomes current out of the range of literary products, it will get its harsh grating syllables ground off, or rounded and polished in the torrent of common speech. Thus are prepared the only elements of the language that are fit for the fine mosaic-work of Western poets. They rescue these time-smoothed pebbles from their gross or vulgar surroundings and place them in a setting that will make them seem beautiful for a time.

It is only for a time; again the fair structure they have made falls into ruin, and fragments are whirled into the eddies of everyday speech and abandon their beauty of form and meaning for something their original maker would never recognise. Then begins the old process; the débris of forgotten works, rounded and smoothed in the current of time, serves as the rubble to be concreted into the artistic works of a new age. Alas for the artists who have such a task before them! Out of the rubbish heap of the past they must mould what will please the new times. And where is there room for true harmony in the result of such a process? The materials depend for their form on the caprice of chance; the artists depend for the form they give on the caprice of the age in which they work, certain to be antiquated by the next new fashion. As long as a literary product depends on its form for its lasting effect, it must be comparatively ephemeral; for form is nothing if it does not suit the fancy of the age to which it appeals, and the fancy of one age conflicts with most others. Artificial means may seem to keep it alive, an ecclesiastical or political movement, the aid of an extraneous art, or the ambition of scholars and critics; but the life is only galvanic, and not from the heart of the people. No true music can come out of that which is essentially unmusical.