multa_ and
_grato_ take their gender from the nouns, even though the quality they
designate fails to do so. Their gender is therefore non-representative
and purely formal; it marks an intra-linguistic accommodation. The
medium has developed a syntactical structure apart from any intrinsic
significance thereby accruing to its elements. Artificial concordance in
gender does not express gender: it merely emphasises the grammatical
links in the phrases and makes greater variety possible in the
arrangement of words.

[Sidenote: Difficulty in subduing a living medium.]

This example may prepare us to understand a general principle: that
language, while essentially significant viewed in its function, is
indefinitely wasteful, being mechanical and tentative in its origin. It
overloads itself, and being primarily music, and a labyrinth of sounds,
it develops an articulation and method of its own, which only in the
end, and with much inexactness, reverts to its function of expression.
How great the possibilities of effect are in developing a pure medium we
can best appreciate in music; but in language a similar development goes
on while it is being applied to representing things. The organ is
spontaneous, the function adventitious and superimposed. Rhetoric and
utility keep language going, as centrifugal and centripetal forces keep
a planet in its course. Euphony, verbal analogy, grammatical fancy,
poetic confusion, continually drive language afield, in its own
tangential direction; while the business of life, in which language is
employed, and the natural lapse of rhetorical fashions, as continually
draw it back towards convenience and exactitude.

[Sidenote: Language foreshortens experience.]

Between music and bare symbolism language has its florid expansion.
Until music is subordinated, speech has little sense; it can hardly tell
a story or indicate an object unequivocally. Yet if music were left
behind altogether, language would pass into a sort of algebra or vocal
shorthand, without literary quality; it would become wholly indicative
and record facts without colouring them ideally. This medium and its
intrinsic development, though they make the bane of reproduction, make
the essence of art; they give representation a new and specific value
such as the object, before representation, could not have possessed.
Consciousness itself is such a medium in respect to diffuse existence,
which it foreshortens and elevates into syn