Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/44

 38 Philosophies of Style in the passage already cited, has called attention to the fact that language reacts on thought a fact previously pointed out by DeQuincey in his essay on style. The reaction is certainly very real. Sometimes, indeed, the thought seems to derive from the lan- guage. John Drinkwater says that Swinburne wrote poetry " of un- mistakable beauty and integrity, that . . . was created out of the life of language itself, words growing, as it were, into a dual being of vision and form. " From the point of view of the literary artist, words are material crying out for form. Poe tells us how "The Raven" developed from the word "nevermore," the story being a "pretext" for its continuous use. Lafcadio Hearn writes that poems or sentences which he had composed during sleep containing words "which never existed in any language" were "really very fine. " If such poems or sentences had meaning, as of course they did for Hearn, then one cannot say that the words represent the meaning; they simply are the meaning. These are of course ex- treme cases. But it is not unusual for thought and language that is, the ultimate and perfect language to come into existence at the same time; and it is of course a commonplace that what seems to be a defect of language turns out to be a defect of thought as well. The thought is transformed as it becomes literature. It is often said that the material of poetry and of some prose is emotion, for which language is made the vehicle of communication. But is it, in fact, the author's intention to transfer crude emotion, to stimulate in the mind of the reader the feeling which he himself has? The author feels oppressed by a sense of the worthlessness of existence, or the futility of striving, and he desires that we should know it; or he loves a pretty girl, and wants to arouse a corresponding feeling in the mind of the loved one. No doubt these desires are present in the mind of the writer; but in so far as he is an artist the ultimate feeling to be aroused is not love, or sorrow, or a sense of the futility of all things, but a delight in something beautiful, the aesthetic emotion. Wordsworth says that poetry takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity. Now this surely does not mean that the idea of emotion arises in conscious- ness, that one recollects that he had such and such an emotion. He must mean that the emotion itself reappears reappears in tranquillity! Is there not a contradiction in terms? And what are we to think of the "madness" that seizes the poet? Is this