The Essence of Poetry 15not now care to pursue. The intellectual sense in its precision
must have been a secondary element which grew more dominant
as language evolved along with the evolving intelligence.
For the reason why sound came to express fixed ideas, lies
not in any natural and inherent equivalence between the sound
and its intellectual sense, for there is none, — intellectually any
sound might express any sense, if men were agreed on a conven-
tional equivalence between them; it started from an indefinable
quality or property in the sound to raise certain vibrations in the
life-soul of the human creature, in his sensational, his emotional,
his crude mental being. An example may indicate more clearly
what I mean. The word wolf, the origin of which is no longer
present to our minds, denotes to our intelligence a certain living
object and that is all, the rest we have to do for ourselves:
the Sanskrit wordvr.ka, “tearer”, came in the end to do the
same thing, but originally it expressed the sensational relation
between the wolf and man which most affected the man’s life,
and it did so by a certain quality in the sound which readily
associated it with the sensation of tearing. This must have given
early language a powerful life, a concrete vigour, in one direction
a natural poetic force which it has lost, however greatly it has
gained in precision, clarity, utility.
Now, poetry goes back in a way and recovers, though in
another fashion, as much as it can of this original element. It does
this partly by a stress on the image replacing the old sensational
concreteness, partly by a greater attention to the suggestive force
of the sound, its life, its power, the mental impression it carries.
It associates this with the definitive thought value contributed
by the intelligence and increases both by each other. In that way
it succeeds at the same time in carrying up the power of speech
to the direct expression of a higher reach of experience than
the intellectual or vital. For it brings out not only the definitive
intellectual value of the word, not only its power of emotion and
sensation, its vital suggestion, but through and beyond these aids
its soul-suggestion, its spirit. So poetry arrives at the indication
of infinite meanings beyond the finite intellectual meaning the
word carries. It expresses not only the life-soul of man as did