wait for automatic musical tendencies to ferment in his mind, proving it
to be fertile in devices, comparisons, and bold assimilations. Yet
inspiration alone will lead him astray, for his art is relative to
something other than its own formal impulse; it comes to clarify the
real world, not to encumber it; and it needs to render its native
agility practical and to attach its volume of feeling to what is
momentous in human life. Literature has its piety, its conscience; it
cannot long forget, without forfeiting all dignity, that it serves a
burdened and perplexed creature, a human animal struggling to persuade
the universal Sphinx to propose a more intelligible riddle.
Irresponsible and trivial in its abstract impulse, man's simian chatter
becomes noble as it becomes symbolic; its representative function lends
it a serious beauty, its utility endows it with moral worth.

[Sidenote: It may be apt or inapt, with equal richness.]

[Sidenote: Absolute language a possible but foolish art.]

These relations, in determining the function of language, determine the
ideal which its structure should approach. Any sort of grammar and
rhetoric, the most absurd and inapplicable as well as the most
descriptive, can be spontaneous; fit organisms are not less natural than
those that are unfit. Felicitous genius is so called because it meets
experience half-way. A genius which flies in the opposite direction,
though not less fertile internally, is externally inept and is called
madness. Ineptitude is something which language needs to shake off.
Better surrender altogether some verbal categories and start again, in
that respect, with a clean slate, than persist in any line of
development that alienates thought from reality. The language of birds
is excellent in its way, and those ancient sages who are reported to
have understood it very likely had merely perceived that it was not
meant to be intelligible; for it is not to understand nature to reduce
her childishly to a human scale. Man, who is merged in universal nature
at the roots of his being, is not without profound irrational intuitions
by which he can half divine her secret processes; and his heart, in its
own singing and fluttering, might not wholly misinterpret the birds. But
human discourse is not worth having if it is mere piping, and helps not
at all in mastering things; for man is intelligent, which is another way
of saying that he aspires to envisage in thought what he is dea