It is not true, then, that language is, as Vinet characterizes it, “_la pensée devenue matière_”; for the very expression involves a contradiction. Words are nothing but symbols,--imperfect, too, at best,--and to make the symbol in any way a measure of the thought is to bring down the infinite to the measure of the finite. It is true that our words mean more than it is in their power to express,--shadow forth far more than they can define; yet, when their capacity has been exhausted, there is much which they fail, not only to express, but even to hint. There are abysses of thought which the plummet of language can never fathom. Like the line in mathematics, which continually approaches to a curve, but, though produced forever, does not cut it, language can never be more than an _asymptote_ to thought. Expression, even in Shakespeare, has its limits. No power of language enables man to reveal the features of the mystic Isis, on whose statue was inscribed: “I am all which hath been, which is, and shall be, and no mortal hath ever lifted my veil.”
“Full oft Our thoughts drown speech, like to a foaming force Which thunders down the echo it creates; Words are like the sea-shells on the shore; they show Where the mind ends, and not how far it has been.”
Notwithstanding all this, however, there is truth in the lines of Boileau:
“Selon que notre idée est plus ou moins obscure, L’expression la suit, ou moins nette, ou plus pure; Ce que l’on concoit bien s’énonce clairement, Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément.”
In spite of the complaints of those who, like the great poets we have quoted, have expressed in language of wondrous force and felicity their feeling of the inadequacy of language, it is doubtless true, as a general thing, that impression and expression are relative ideas; that what we clearly conceive we can clearly convey; and that the failure to embody our thoughts is less the fault of our mother tongue than of our own deficient genius. What the flute or the violin is to the musician, his native language is to the writer. The finest instruments are dumb till those melodies are put into them of which they can be only the passive conductors. The most powerful and most polished language must be wielded by the master before its full force can be known. The Philippics of Demosthenes were pronounced in the mother tongue of every one of his audience; but “who among them could have answered him in a single sentence like his own? Who among them could have guessed what Greek could do, though they had spoken it all their lives, till they heard it from his lips?” So with our English tongue; it has abundant capabilities for those who know how to use it aright. What subject, indeed, is there in the whole boundless range of imagination, which some English author has not treated in his mother tongue with a nicety of definition, an accuracy of portraiture, a gorgeousness of coloring, a delicacy of discrimination, and a strength and force of expression, which fall scarcely short of perfection itself? Is there not something almost like sorcery in the potent spell which some of these mighty magicians of language are able to exercise over the soul? Yet the right arrangement of the right words is the whole secret of the witchery,--a charm within the reach of any one of equal genius. Possess yourself of the necessary ideas, and feel them deeply, and you will not often complain of the barrenness of language. You will find it abounding in riches,--exuberant beyond the demand of your intensest thought. “The statue is not more surely included in the block of marble, than is all conceivable splendor of utterance in ‘Webster’s Unabridged.’” As Goethe says: