ling with
in action. Discourse that absolved itself from that observant duty would
not be cognitive; and in failing to be cognitive it would fail to redeem
the practical forces it ignored from their brute externality, and to
make them tributary to the Life of Reason. Thus its own dignity and
continued existence depend on its learning to express momentous facts,
facts important for action and happiness; and there is nothing which so
quickly discredits itself as empty rhetoric and dialectic, or poetry
that wanders in dim and private worlds. If pure music, even with its
immense sensuous appeal, is so easily tedious, what a universal yawn
must meet the verbiage which develops nothing but its own irridescence.
Absolute versification and absolute dialectic may have their place in
society; they give play to an organ that has its rights like any other,
and that, after serving for a while in the economy of life, may well
claim a holiday in which to disport itself irresponsibly among the fowls
of the air and the lilies of the field. But the exercise is trivial;
and if its high priests go through their mummeries with a certain
unction, and pretend to be wafted by them into a higher world, the
phenomenon is neither new nor remarkable. Language is a wonderful and
pliant medium, and why should it not lend itself to imposture? A
systematic abuse of words, as of other things, is never without some
inner harmony or propriety that makes it prosper; only the man who looks
beyond and sees the practical results awakes to the villainy of it. In
the end, however, those who play with words lose their labour, and
pregnant as they feel themselves to be with new and wonderful universes,
they cannot humanise the one in which they live and rather banish
themselves from it by their persistent egotism and irrelevance.

CHAPTER VI

POETRY AND PROSE

[Sidenote: Force of primary expressions.]

There is both truth and illusion in the saying that primitive poets are
sublime. Genesis and the Iliad (works doubtless backed by a long
tradition) are indeed sublime. Primitive men, having perhaps developed
language before the other arts, used it with singular directness to
describe the chief episodes of life, which was all that life as yet
contained. They had frank passions and saw things from single points of
view. A breath from that early world seems to enlarge our natures, and
to restore to language, which we have sophisticated, all its
magnifice