Limanora the island of progress
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