Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 122.djvu/70

64 if you have never done so, and you will be startled at the scope and variety of your spiritual vocabulary.

No one ever had fuller faith in this theory of the transcendental meaning and economy of words than Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass. Humpty's character was not as well rounded as his shape, and his verbal practices accordingly are far from impeccable. But they are certainly exhilarating in their quality of creative brevity.

'There's glory for you !'he exclaimed, as he finished expounding to Alice the doctrine of unbirthday presents.

'I don't know what you mean by "glory,"' Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. 'Of course you don't—till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"

'But "glory" does n't mean "a nice knock-down argument,"' Alice objected.

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.'

'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master—that's all.'

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. 'They've a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they're the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That's what I say!'

'Would you tell me, please,' said Alice, 'what that means?'

'Now you talk like a reasonable child,' said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. 'I meant by "impenetrability" that we've had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you'd mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don't mean to stop here all the rest of your life.'

'That's a great deal to make one word mean,' Alice said in a thoughtful tone.

'When I make a word do a lot of work like that,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'I always pay it extra.'

Humpty Dumpty treated words as if they were alive just as poets and children and people close to nature always do. He spoke a super-language—as even ordinary people do in the ultimate sincerities of life. If the great world in its larger human relations only did likewise, language in its scholastic and lexicographic sense would have been kept in its place, would never have attained its present autocratic power, would never, therefore, have provoked by its abuses the movement for its own abolition. As it is, that movement is an instinctive recognition of the truth that an arbitrary code of signs, however useful, or even miraculous, as a tool for the adaptation of means to ends, is futile for the purpose of expressing reality. The revolt against language is an attempt, in fact, to recover something that was lost when letters were invented. The invention of letters was a fall, as well as an ascent, of man. The movement for the abolition of language is a revolution, a return, an atavism, if you wish; a confession that civilization has been on a wrong scent, that the birds, in some respects at least, have kept closer to the central track of evolution than has man.

While human communication remained exclusively gesticular and vocal, there was no danger of its losing its dynamic and dramatic quality, and that danger remained slight, even with written symbols, so long as they were