For words, like Nature, half reveal,
And half conceal the soul within.”
De Quincey truly remarks that all our thoughts have not words corresponding to them in our yet imperfectly developed nature, nor can ever express themselves in acts, but must lie appreciable by God only, like the silent melodies in a great musician’s heart, never to roll forth from harp or organ.
“The sea of thought is a boundless sea,
Its brightest gems are not thrown on the beach;
The waves that would tell of the mystery
Die and fall on the shore of speech.”
“Thought,” says the eloquent Du Ponceau, “is vast as the air; it embraces far more than languages can express;—or rather, languages express nothing, they only make thought flash in electric sparks from the speaker to the hearer. A single word creates a crowd of conceptions, which the intellect combines and marshals with lightning-like rapidity.”
The Germans have coined a phrase to characterize a class of persons who have conception without expression,—gifted, thoughtful men, lovers of goodness and truth, who have no lack of ideas, but who hesitate and stammer when they would put them into language. Such men they term men of “passive genius.” Their minds are like black glass, absorbing all the rays of light, but unable to give out any for the benefit of others. Jean Paul calls them “the dumb ones of earth,” for, like Zacharias, they have visions of high import, but are speechless when they would tell them. The infirmity of these dumb ones, is, however, the infirmity, in a less degree, of all men, even the most fluent; for there are thoughts which mock at all attempts to express them, however “well-languaged” the thinker may be.
It is not true, then, that language is, as Vinet characterizes it, “la pensée devenue matière”; for the very expression involves a contradiction. Words are nothing but symbols,—imperfect, too, at best,—and to make the symbol in any way a measure of the thought is to bring down the infinite to the measure of the finite. It is true that our words mean more than it is in their power to express,—shadow forth far more than they can define; yet, when their capacity has been exhausted, there is much which they fail, not only to express, but even to hint. There are abysses of thought which the plummet of language can never fathom. Like the line in mathematics, which continually approaches to a curve, but, though produced forever, does not cut it, language can never be more than an asymptote to thought. Expression, even in Shakespeare, has its limits. No power of language enables man to reveal the features of the mystic Isis, on whose statue was inscribed: “I am all which hath been, which is, and shall be, and no mortal hath ever lifted my veil.”