Besides their chime in the ear, and the images that they put before the mind's eye, words have, for their last and greatest possession, a meaning.They carry messages and suggestions that, in the effect wrought, elude all the senses equally.For the sake of this, their prime office, the rest is many times forgotten or scorned, the tune is disordered and havoc played with the lineaments of the picture, because without these the word can still do its business.The refutation of those critics who, in their analysis of the power of literature, make much of music and picture, is contained in the most moving passages that have found utterance from man.Consider the intensity of a saying like that of St.Paul:- "For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."Do these verses draw their power from a skilful arrangement of vowel and consonant? But they are quoted from a translation, and can be translated otherwise, well or ill or indifferently, without losing more than a little of their virtue.Do they impress the eye by opening before it a prospect of vast extent, peopled by vague shapes? On the contrary, the visual embodiment of the ideas suggested kills the sense of the passage, by lowering the cope of the starry heavens to the measure of a poplar-tree.Death and life, height and depth, are conceived by the apostle, and creation thrown in like a trinket, only that they may lend emphasis to the denial that is the soul of his purpose.Other arts can affirm, or seem to affirm, with all due wealth of circumstance and detail;they can heighten their affirmation by the modesty of reserve, the surprises of a studied brevity, and the erasure of all impertinence; literature alone can deny, and honour the denial with the last resources of a power that has the universe for its treasury.It is this negative capability of words, their privative force, whereby they can impress the minds with a sense of "vacuity, darkness, solitude, and silence," that Burke celebrates in the fine treatise of his younger days.In such a phrase as "the angel of the Lord" language mocks the positive rivalry of the pictorial art, which can offer only the poor pretence of an equivalent in a young man painted with wings.But the difference between the two arts is even better marked in the matter of negative suggestion; it is instanced by Burke from the noble passage where Virgil describes the descent of AEneas and the Sibyl to the shades of the nether world.Here are amassed all "the images of a tremendous dignity"that the poet could forge from the sublime of denial.The two most famous lines are a procession of negatives:-Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram, Perque domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna.
Through hollow kingdoms, emptied of the day, And dim, deserted courts where Dis bears sway, Night-foundered, and uncertain of the path, Darkling they took their solitary way.
Here is the secret of some of the cardinal effects of literature;strong epithets like "lonely," "supreme," "invisible," "eternal,""inexorable," with the substantives that belong to them, borrow their force from the vastness of what they deny.And not these alone, but many other words, less indebted to logic for the magnificence of reach that it can lend, bring before the mind no picture, but a dim emotional framework.Such words as "ominous,""fantastic," "attenuated," "bewildered," "justification," are atmospheric rather than pictorial; they infect the soul with the passion-laden air that rises from humanity.It is precisely in his dealings with words like these, "heated originally by the breath of others," that a poet's fine sense and knowledge most avail him.
The company a word has kept, its history, faculties, and predilections, endear or discommend it to his instinct.How hardly will poetry consent to employ such words as "congratulation" or "philanthropist," - words of good origin, but tainted by long immersion in fraudulent rejoicings and pallid, comfortable, theoretic loves.How eagerly will the poetic imagination seize on a word like "control," which gives scope by its very vagueness, and is fettered by no partiality of association.All words, the weak and the strong, the definite and the vague, have their offices to perform in language, but the loftiest purposes of poetry are seldom served by those explicit hard words which, like tiresome explanatory persons, say all that they mean.Only in the focus and centre of man's knowledge is there place for the hammer-blows of affirmation, the rest is a flickering world of hints and half-lights, echoes and suggestions, to be come at in the dusk or not at all.
The combination of these powers in words, of song and image and meaning, has given us the supreme passages of our romantic poetry.
In Shakespeare's work, especially, the union of vivid definite presentment with immense reach of metaphysical suggestion seems to intertwine the roots of the universe with the particular fact;tempting the mind to explore that other side of the idea presented to it, the side turned away from it, and held by something behind.
It will have blood; they say blood win have blood:
Stones have been known to move and trees to speak;Augurs and understood relations have By maggot-pies and choughs and rooks brought forth The secret'st man of blood.
