Literature has to do with written words, not with spoken words. Spoken words have only a limited range. They have a sort of immortality conferred on them, when they find their place in literature. Thus there is difference between. speech and literature. Literature is a permanent record and it is personal in character. lt is the voice of one individual, not several individuals that speaks to us in literature. The writer expresses his personal feelings and thoughts in literature, but they must have universal truth. Language has an important bearing upon literature. Literature is the personal use or exercise of language. Language is the vehicle of thought. Now there is a question whether language can be superimposed. It is true that poor thought can be dressed up in fine words but all the same we detect the poor thought. The fact is that thought and expression are inseparable. The one is made to suit the other. There is the story of a learned Arabic scholar handing over his matter to a country-curate to touch it and polish it. The curate damaged his matter by polishing it.
So in great writers, thought and expression are equally matched. What may appear as lavish richness of style or over-elaboration in Shakespeare or Cicero is but an adequate rendering of thought. ln great writers expression is dictated by thought. Cicero’s is the voice destined to proclaim great things. His rich, majestic diction and his elaboration are but the natural expression of his thought. Nor should he forget that genius takes pains with the medium of expression. Some amount of elaboration will naturally go with the expression of deep, stirring or tumultuous thoughts as we find in Shakespeare’s tragedies.
It is wrong to think that language is something coming from without, or that it can be superimposed upon thought. Language is the skin and body of thought. We must look to the adequacy of language to thought, and this is the characteristic of a great writer. A mediocre writer may try to conceal his poor thought in flamboyant language but his poor thought does not go undetected. lf we think that his language is richer than his thought, it betrays lack of judgment or discernment in us. It has been said that men of genius take pains with their thoughts and their language. They never let language run ahead of their thought, otherwise they will be no great writers. We may mention here Demosthenes who studied Thucydides over and over, before he formed his style. Gibbon was not satisfied with the first draft of his history till he developed the style to suit his subject. Richness of style and elaborateness are not faults in a great writer. They are demanded by the subject he deals with.
In a nutshell, “literature is the personal use or exercise of language. That this is so is proved from the fact that one author uses it so differently from another. While the many use language as they find it, the man of genius uses it indeed, but subjects it withal to his own purposes and moulds it according to his own peculiarities. The throng and succession of ideas, thoughts, feelings, imaginations, speculations, which pass within him, the abstractions the juxtapositions, the comparisons, the discriminations, the conceptions, which are so original in him, his views of external things, his judgments upon life, manners, and history, the exercises of his wit, of his humour, of his depth, of his sagacity all these innumerable and incessant creations, the very production and throbbing of his intellect, does he image forth . . . in a corresponding language, which is as multiform as this inward mental action itself, and analogous to it, the faithful expression of his intense personality, attending on his inward world of thought as its very shadow, so that we might as well say that one man’ s shadow is another’s as that the style of a really gifted mind can belong to any but himself. lt follows him about as a shadow. His thought and feeling are personal, and so his language is personal.” (Newman)
William Henry Hudson has lucidly elaborated the chief features of literature. According to him, “first, there is the intellectual element—the thought which the writer brings to bear upon his subject, and which he expresses in his work. Secondly, there is the emotional element—the feeling (of whatever kind) which his subject arouses in him, and which in turn be desires to stimulate in us. Thirdly, there is the element of imagination (including its light form which we call fancy), which is really the faculty of strong and intense vision, and by the exercise of which he quickens a similar power of vision in ourselves. These elements combine to furnish the substance and the life of literature. But, however rich may be the materials yielded by experience, however fresh and strong may be the writer’s thought, feeling and imagination, in dealing with them, another factor is wanting before his work can be completed. The given matter has to be moulded and fashioned in accordance with the principles of order, symmetry, beauty, effectiveness; and thus we have a fourth element in literature, the technical element, or the element of composition and style.”
The essential characteristic of literature is that it produces aesthetic pleasure by manner in which theme is handled. Beyond its intellectual and emotional content and beyond its fundamental quality of life, it appeals to us by reason of its form. This means that literature is a fine art and like all fine arts. It has its own laws and conditions of workmanship. Literature always communicates experience of the writer. These experiences of the author’s mind at once affect the reader’s mind because of the intercommunication of style and thought. His experience may be actual of a sort of day-dreaming, but imagination can transform it into something, for the reader. By means of his imagination, the writer can continue the existence of his experience and communicate it to the reader as if he has recently caught it out of the flux of life.
“In order to achieve this, the writer must arouse me acre imagination in his reader, and control it in such a manner that the reader may also imitate the experience. This he achieves by means of words which should act as symbols of his experience, so that it can be properly represented to the reader. The writer must translate his experience into such symbolic equivalence of language, that the symbol may be translated back again by the reader’s imagination into a similar experience. lt is here that the skill of the artist lies. Literature thus expresses and communicates experience by means of language. lt is the expression in language for its own sake, of experience for its own sake. It is beautiful when it achieves this aim. In it, the experience of receiving the communication, and the experience communicated are indistinguishable.”
