KINETIC AND POTENTIAL SPEECH
KINETIC AND POTENTIAL SPEECH
Definitions, like mythologies, wear out. It is then important to replace them. Aladdin’s wife had a choice, but we have none. We must change our old lamps for new, or sit in the dark. A natural philosopher who retained the mythological definition of thunder could not speak of lightning to young men who had learnt of electricity without an air of irrelevance of which he might be quite unconscious. Not so his listeners, who would brush his explanations impatiently aside as soon as they knew the beliefs on which he based them. Whenever historians or critics seem irrelevant, we are safe in assuming a difference between their definitions and our own. When they seem irrelevant to many people beside ourselves, we can go further and assume that their definitions are either worn out or not yet accepted. Sometimes, of course, they are without definitions either old or new, but then they need not trouble us, for they disappear like cuttle-fishes in the darkness of their own ink. There is at the present day a widespread dissatisfaction with historians of literature. It is impossible not to feel that their dicta do not matter, that their sense of perspective is wrong or uncertain, that their books are of no use to us except as bibliographies. A new definition of literature is needed, that shall give them some scale, some standard to which they can refer. For without such standard or scale, they can do no more than gossip, or judge poetry by its passion, by its sense, by its smoothness, or by any other half-remembered scrap from a definition that is no longer adequate.
If we would get rid of these irrelevancies, and write histories of literature that shall deal with the matter of which they propose to treat, we must find a new standard of values, and to find that we must make a new definition. We must have a statement of the nature of literature applicable not to the books of one nation of one time only, but to those of all nations and of all times. It must supply us with terms in which we can state the aims of widely different schools and writers, with regard to their medium and not to any accidental quality. If it is to do that we must escape from the prejudices of our own time (which may be invisible to us) by seeking our formula in a definition of the medium common to all writers, a statement of the function of words in combination.
To make such a statement I have borrowed two epithets from the terminology of physical science. Energy is described by physicists as kinetic and potential. Kinetic energy is force actually exerted. Potential energy is force that a body is in a position to exert. Applying these terms to language, without attempting too strict an analogy, I wish to define literature, or rather the medium of literature, as a combination of kinetic with potential speech. In this combination the two are coincident. There is no such thing in literature as speech purely kinetic or purely potential. Purely kinetic speech is prose, not good prose, not literature, but colourless prose, prose without atmosphere, the sort of prose that M. Jourdain discovered he had been speaking all his life. It says things. An example of purely potential speech may be found in music. I do not think it can be made with words, though we can give our minds a taste of it in listening to a meaningless but narcotic incantation, or a poem in a language that we do not understand. The proportion between kinetic and potential speech and the energy of the combination varies with different works and the literature of different ages. There is no literature to which it is impossible to apply the formula. Let us try to clarify it by example and particularisation.
It may be asked, what of ballad poetry in which there is much so stated as to approach purely kinetic speech? Does not the admitted power of a sea-song, a song whose words are utterly trivial, disprove our assertion? It does not; for to such songs or chanties the music to which they are sung has given a quality of potential speech, without which they would be worthless and speedily forgotten. In that case the words and the melody respectively represent kinetic and potential speech. It has been very truly said that a prima-donna can turn the alphabet to poetry by the emotional power of her voice.
It may further be asked by any one who has not clearly apprehended my meaning (and this would be more than excusable), Do I mean to suggest that literature is not literature unless it contains a double meaning? and, if so, do I not find in allegory the most perfect example of the simultaneous existence of kinetic and potential speech? This would indeed be a reductio ad absurdum. I must answer, that allegory (though it may represent the result of an early guess at the nature of art) is not necessarily poetry. There is, indeed, a gross and obvious duality of meaning in such a work as The Faërie Queene. The tale written on the paper enables us to reconstruct another. But that other might have been written with no greater difficulty. It does not aid, and may clog with external preoccupations, the tale that we sit down to read. It is an impertinent shadow, a dog that keeps too closely at our heels. Hazlitt rebukes those who think that the allegory of The Faërie Queene will bite them. We are more afraid that it will lick our hands, and all we ask is, that it will allow itself to be forgotten. An acrostic sonnet may be a good sonnet, but we are not likely to perceive its excellence if we are intent upon the initial letters of the lines. No; allegory may be a rude attempt to copy in things said the duality of poetic speech. The old delight in conscious allegory may be comparable to the modern delight in conscious symbolism. But we must not forget for a moment that the resemblance is only one of analogy. When Spenser writes of Mammon’s cave:
“Both roof, and floor, and walls were all of gold
But overgrown with rust and old decay,