Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/429

XI.] commonplace. A look or tone often sheds more light upon character or intent than a flood of words could do. Humour, banter, irony, are illustrations of what tone, or style, or perceived incongruity can accomplish in the way of impressing upon words a different meaning from that which they of themselves would wear. That language is impotent to express our feelings, though often, perhaps, pleaded as a form merely, is also a frequent genuine experience; nor is it for our feelings alone that the ordinary conventional phrases, weakened in their force by insincere and hyperbolical use, are found insufficient: apprehensions, distinctions, opinions, of every kind, elude our efforts at description, definition, intimation. How often must we labour, by painful circumlocution, by gradual approach and limitation, to place before the minds of others a conception which is clearly present to our own consciousness! How often, when we have the expression nearly complete, we miss a single word that we need, and must search for it, in our memories or our dictionaries, perhaps not finding it in either! How different is the capacity of ready and distinct expression in men whose power of thought is not unlike! he whose grasp of mind is the greatest, whose review of the circumstances that should lead to a judgment is most comprehensive and thorough, whose skill of inference is most unerring, may be, much more than another of far weaker gifts, awkward and clumsy of speech. How often we understand what one says better than he himself says it, and correct his expression, to his own gratification and acceptance. And if all the resources of expression are not equally at the command of all men of equal mental force and training, so neither are they, at their best, adequate to the wealth of conception of him who wields them; that would be but a poorly stored and infertile mind which did not sometimes feel the limited capacity of language, and long for fuller means of expression.

But again, the variety of expression of which the same thought admits is an insuperable difficulty in the way of the identification we are opposing. To recur once more to an illustration of which we have already made us—I form and utter, for instance, the thought, fish like water. How