Chapter X: Language and the Natural Arts of Space and Time

Extract

‘Behold at last the poet’s sphere!
But who,’ I said, ‘suffices here?
For, ah! so much he has to do;
Be painter and musician too!
. . . .
No painter yet hath such a way,
Nor no musician made, as they;
And gather’d on immortal knolls
Such lovely flowers for cheering souls.
Beethoven, Raphael, cannot reach
The charm which Homer, Shakespeare, teach.’

ARNOLD, Epilogue to Lessing’s Laocoön.

Nevertheless, the sensuous sound element does remain as the substratum of articulate language, and as language issues from the lips it issues in the same time sequence as does pure sound, for example, in music. But here is the unique difference which separates language fundamentally from the other four arts. As language issues from the lips, the pure ‘timeness’ of it, as we might say, is immediately transmuted and absorbed in the conventionalized connotation which is arbitrarily given to the differentiated sounds. Hence in the thought-process of intellecting the world by language the actual space-time world is translated first into pure time, that is, into sound, but is immediately, in the very act as it were, retranslated by the conventionalization of sound into its former space-time structure within the world of mind.