Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 122.djvu/67

Rh the whole art of music, indeed, but a protest against language, an attempt to evolve a higher mode of expression? All art in fact proceeds from this same dissatisfaction. It is an endeavor to supersede language with something better. To this statement literature itself is only an apparent exception. Literature, especially in its purest form, poetry, is an attempt to purge language of everything except its music and its pictures, an attempt to think by means of sound and light. The poets—where they have been genuine creators and not mere word-mongers—have always insisted, accordingly, that theirs is the art of striking out words; have always stood, if not for the abolition of language, at any rate for its drastic abbreviation.

This is a paradox only to prosaic minds. The man of prosaic mind thinks that composition is a matter of so arranging words that they shall convey a meaning that is the sum of their separate meanings. But the poet knows better. He knows that it is a matter of so ordering them that they shall suggest verbally inexpressible meanings between the lines; that they shall, quite literally, set spirits to dancing from sentence to sentence, flashes of intellectual electricity to leaping from page to page, faces to peeping forth at the reader from behind the letters like children from behind tree-trunks.

Literature is indeed omission not in the negative sense of leaving things out, but in the positive sense of making the omitted thing conspicuous. Language, accordingly, in the hands of its masters, may be more properly called the scaffolding of expression than the expression itself. To confuse language with expression, therefore, is like confusing the magician's wand with the spirits it calls up. If pedants had not been guilty of precisely this confusion, the movement for the abolition of language might never have been necessary. It is the pedants and the prosaic people generally who transform from cynicism to truth the saying that language was given man to conceal his thoughts.

That this in sober truth is the function of words seems to be the opinion of the youngest of the arts, wherein language survives much as the vermiform appendix survives in the human body, the moving picture. The moving picture of to-day is but an amoeba to the moving picture of to-morrow; yet already it has abolished, in the aggregate, billions of words. What it will do in the future, who dares predict? It sometimes seems as if, with its advent, mankind were definitely committed to the method of thinking in pictures. Should this prove true, the cinematograph may well turn out to be the most momentous invention since the invention of letters. In it, for the first time in feasible form, humanity has an instrument of expression fairly adequate to the dynamic and flowing quality of life. Already its wide use is working a revolution in the mental habits of man- kind. What though that revolution, up to now, has been mainly destructive! Imaginatively handled, it will enter a creative phase. Indeed, the shifting from abstract to concrete methods of thought which it implies may conceivably bring, in the sphere of human knowledge, changes comparable to those already wrought in the realm of natural knowledge by the abandonment of the deductive for the inductive method.

With this reference to science we touch on one of the most fascinating aspects of our subject. It may sound strange to speak of the scientist as a pioneer in the movement for the abolition of language. Yet such indubitably he is. His relation to words was never better put, I sometimes think, than in one of Jonathan Swift's most whimsical