Tools of Thought
I
WE who use the English language do not speak with words alone. We say, for instance, ‘James hit John’; but what a different situation may be depicted by merely transposing the terms! Hidden between the words are principles and meanings entirely outside the dictionary.
This modern speech of ours works according to mechanical principles. In a machine the cogs and cams and levers must be set together in a certain order. If they are not assembled according to the well-drawn design, the apparatus will produce a different set of motions or will entirely fail to operate. It is the same with an English sentence. The words depend for their meaning upon the order in which they occur. There is a set plan by which the nouns and verbs and adjectives fall in and mesh together in order to produce a train of thought. Reverse the order of a simple sentence — subject, predicate, and object — and you at once reverse the meaning. Take out a word and put it somewhere else and the sentence says a different thing. If any term is operating at the wrong point, the sentence will tell an untruth or wholly depart from sense. It might be called the place system of expression, because the meaning depends upon how the words are arranged with regard to one another.
In the building of machinery, the machine design is a thing in itself and is antecedent to the assembling of the parts. This, too, is the way of our modern English. For our use in writing or speaking there are certain standard designs for sentences and parts of sentences. A statement is built according to a blank form or a mould of meaning. Different effects and wholly opposite results may be had by a rearrangement of the same working parts. If you wish to be understood you must select the standard form that fits your purpose and then let each word fall into its proper compartment.
When we study Latin we are amazed and puzzled by the elaborate system of word endings. We try to understand what they are for; we ask ourselves whether there was ever any practical common sense in such a complicate invention. But it is a difficulty that works both ways. An antique Roman, taking up our way of speech without being familiar with the meanings that dwell in our word sequences, would be just as puzzled. And no dictionary, with its definitions of mere words, would ever help him out of his difficulty.
Such a language befits a machine age and a machine universe. English is a language that goes directly at its work — subject, predicate, and object. If a man has anything to say, it will say it. And since it is a machine language it will not allow you to play with words.
As a means of human intercourse, such a method might seem hopelessly mechanistic — unsympathetic and unpliable. In principle and spirit it would appear to be far removed from the light play of fancy and the finer adumbrations of the soul. But this is a view that will bear second thought. Wherever we look in this universe we see mechanisms doing their work. Whether we search the remotest reaches of space or train the mind’s eye upon the appalling perspectives of the infinitely little, we still find the motions of machinery. The spiritual has got to find expression in terms of the material life. Poetry must stand with one foot on the things that are. English will, after all, say as well as any other language that something does something; and that is all that we have to say anyway.
Knowledge is nourished by comparisons. Even a little Latin and less Greek may be a worth-while possession if it draws our attention to the fact that ours is not the only way of speech.
Let us, with a little Latin on the one hand and a little English on the other, put the two tongues to a simple test. Take an English sentence out of the newspaper and break it up into its elements by writing each word on a separate square piece of cardboard. Then mix the words thoroughly. Put them in a bag and shake them up; when they have been shaken give the bag a toss and throw the disorganized sentence materials about on the floor.
Even though the statement has been of the simplest kind, such as ‘James hit John,’ there is no science of words by which the sentence could bo reconstructed and the true facts obtained. It would be evident that somebody had been hit, but there is no rule of English by which a detective could ever find out which was the hitter and which the hittee.
In the Latin this is all quite different. Even a street urchin of the classic days would have been able to tell from the widely scattered words which of the two men swung out with his list and which one received the blow. A word ending would serve as a label to designate the one who acted, and a different word ending would show that the other was acted upon. The position of the words on the floor would make no difference in the reading.
If the sentence were a little more complicated, — as, for instance, ‘The lame man hit the tall boy,’ — there would be still more confusion among the English terms once they were thrown out of their machine-like order. By no linguistic science under the sun would it be possible to determine which of the two was tall and which one was a cripple. But a Roman would here have no difficulty. A glance at the scattered parts of speech would at once inform him of the whole state of affairs. One adjective would have an ending to show that it belonged to the subject of the sentence and the other would have a different ending to make it appertain to the object. In the patois of the grammarians, the adjectives would ‘agree’ with the nouns. Latin is an inflected language, having word endings by which the words make cross references to one another, while English operates upon the principle of contact between the parts.
This, then, is the whole case regarding English as a tool of thought. The mechanism must not be tampered with. The words need to stand in a row and find a meaning in their ways of contact. An English sentence is something more than the sum of its words. Throw the parts into a pile and the sense disappears because the machine has been wrecked. The words are still there, but the language is gone. The tools remain, but the knowledge that they held together has escaped.
This brings to an end the more or less learned explanation with which this article has had to begin. I intended to tell about a little adventure of my youth which might be no less instructive than amusing; and I had no more than started when it became evident that I should positively have to say something about the nature of our socalled English grammar. Now that this point has been covered I can proceed with my story without having to stop later and try to hold my reader with one hand while I drag in a treatise on language with the other.
II
When I was a young man of twenty I spent many of my evenings sitting in a hall bedroom — a highly moral way of life that was wholly due to a shortage of money. As most of us know, there is a kind of money that is for paying purposes only; you receive it as pay and you give it out as pay, but you never have any to spend or to save. My money was of that kind; it was money of low degree, without real purchasing power.
As this was in electric-lighted Chicago, one of the first of our nightblooming cities, a live young man would have been quite justified in going out and trying to establish a line of credit for himself along the gayer and more theatrical thoroughfares; but it is a thing that cannot be done. Cities after dark are not run on credit. Whatever credit facilities they may have in daytime, they start in at sundown to demand tickets — and what is a ticket but money that has been parted with beforehand? In such a state of affairs there is little that the young man living in a hall bedroom may do. Nothing, in fact, except to take a turn around his chair and then sit down by his own bedside again.
The only feminine touch in my existence consisted of a clean towel, carefully folded and pressed each day, and laid across the top of the wash pitcher by a sad and impecunious widow. I seldom met her, and when I did she had little to say to me. She was so upright that she was speechless. I came and went at stated hours; and as the long evening wore on I would get less and less sleepy every minute. I could see right through those solid walls and follow the crowds to the very theatre door; but there imagination would have to stop. What was beyond became vague and indefinite, as if imagination could not really go into details without a ticket.
Night life in a hall bedroom is not very exciting. It is no place for a young man who is neither sick nor ailing, nor even tired. Heaven did not make him to be immured in a cubicle and to eke out his days as a prisoner of poverty.
I do not know how it may be with others, but with me something always has to be done. Under the circumstances it occurred to me that I was nearing my twenty-first birthday and had never learned to smoke. This mistake I soon corrected by means of a bag of fine-cut and an inexpensive pipe. And then, instead of merging my personality with the wooden furniture and becoming a mere inmate of a bedroom, I sat down and fell a-thinking. I wrapped myself round in smoke and watched the fragrant emanations float off and come to rest in peaceful, level layers between floor and ceiling; and the more I smoked and looked into the true nature of things, the more I saw that a bedroom could lend itself to deep and philosophic study.
Naturally I fell to thinking about the nature of language. The art of speech was a subject that had always interested me. It seemed to have at bottom some great and simple truths. No grammar that I had looked into ever seemed to arrive at any of them. And now, as a bear will suck his paw in winter for lack of any better sustenance, I kept gazing at the newspaper in abstract speculation upon the nature of language and the mystery of its workings.
Suddenly, as though I had broken down a partition wall in the black mines of knowledge and let in a flood of light, I saw that the English language was founded on the place system. And with this new insight — which I shall never forget because it was my first real step in self-education — I got the idea of making a language machine. This would consist of a large supply of words written on square pieces of cardboard and thrown together in a box face down. When a word was drawn forth at random, certain marks on the edges would call for whatever part of speech went with it, according to the laws of English; this word would call for another, and so on until a statement of considerable length had been built up. The edges of the cards, right and left, had to be provided with marks or notches which would fit together by a sort of Yale-lock system and thus bring the hidden parts of speech into their logical and grammatical combinations.
This would seem to be a very complicate undertaking; but it proved to be quite simple. The main statement of a proposition consists of a noun, a verb, and a noun — which is to say, subject, predicate, and object or complement. The only two limbs of a sentence are the adjective phrase or clause and the adverbial, and these are brought to pass by means of prepositions, relative pronouns, relative adverbs, and conjunctions. A preposition calls for a noun after it, while a relative pronoun is just the opposite, calling for a noun before it and a verb to follow. Thus symmetrically does the machine work. Now if we remember that the adjective phrase always comes immediately after the noun to which it belongs, while an adjective comes normally before the noun, and that nothing can ever come between the noun and either of these modifiers, we have the whole scheme complete. As everything has its set place, this leaves the adverb and the adverbial phrase or clause free to come in at any point at all — which they do in actual use.
It was, as I have said, all very simple; and I marked each part of speech accordingly on the right and left edges of the card. Thus any word that I drew out of the reservoir would automatically gather about it, by grammatical accretion, all the words of a complete and grammatical statement. I would only need to turn the complete statement face upward to find what the machine had to say.
III
In actual practice, the thing worked to perfection. It would always say something; and, while I might not always agree with its opinions, there was at least an idea to engage my thought and attention. I especially enjoyed the building up of complex sentences with their novel and astonishing conclusions; in order to do this I would simply slip a conjunction between two complete statements. LTpon turning over the row of words I would find the machine saying, quite soberly, ‘The deep horse sank upward.’ And upon turning over the conjunction and its appended statement I would find the seemingly logical conclusion, ‘although my girl drank nails.’ Without batting an eye it would tell me about a square hat, a tall worm, or a flat cloud; and if this was not enough it would willingly go into further details.
At times it would surprise me by speaking plain sense; and then, instead of relapsing into the merely impossible, it would turn out a very good piece of Shakespeare. Who that has any apprehension at all has not been stopped in his tracks by some such remark as that in Lear: ‘Croak not, black angel; I have no food for thee.’ What imagination has not been pushed to illicit lengths by some such fancy as that in A Midsummer-Night’s Dream: ‘Tedious and brief! That is, hot ice and wondrous strange snow.’ Any normal person must see at once that this snow, in order to fulfill the specifications, would have to be black as well as hot — and that is quite an undertaking for any respectable mind, if you ask my opinion. And when Shakespeare entirely lets go any hold upon Main Street realities and turns his mind loose, we find him speaking cheerfully of ‘ Pigrogromitus, of the Vapians passing the equinoctial of Queubus’; and he will let the clown remark to Sir Andrew, ‘Malvolio’s nose is no whipstock. My lady has a white hand, and the Mermidons are no bottle-ale houses.’ If anyone can figure out the logical sequence in this set of events he will be doing quite well.
In like reaches of intellect my machine would make wood to melt, the sky to flow, and the ocean to split and crack, all in the most assured and casual way. I could quote a great deal more of both Shakespeare and it if I did not think the matter would sound lightminded and trivial; and if anyone doubts what I have said, it merely shows that he has not made a complete study of Shakespearean nonsense.
I remember that my machine once said to me, with almost a scintilla of sense, ‘The narrow preacher ate large books, but a blue lath was broken.’ Another time it turned its mind to some thoughts about a short, sad orator, and when I turned it all over and observed the adverbial phrase I found he was the man who ‘pushed much rain under the face.’
All this, of course, was a considerable relief to a young man who was sitting in a so-called furnished room and hoping for something to happen. All I had to do was to link the tools of thought together according to the marks on the back, and immediately something would turn up.
Even when the vein of thought turned out to be neither good nor bad there was another element of charm in it. Darwin had a feeling for it when he exclaimed, toward the close of The Descent of Man, ‘Language — that wonderful engine which affixes signs to all sorts of objects and qualities, and excites trains of thought which would never arise from the mere impression of the senses, or, if they did arise, could not be followed out.’ Darwin, bringing this in to mark the arrival of the psychozoic era, the highest peak of evolution, speaks of language as ‘ half art and half instinct’; and he not only thinks that it evolved, but says that it was itself an instrument that reacted on the brain and became in turn a cause of mental development. To my mind, language seems undoubtedly to be a product of evolution in the sense that it has all the symmetry and coherence of a well-designed animal, with a complete set of limbs and necessary organs all attached to a backbone or main line of thought. It is like an animal, too, in having vestigial parts — useless relics of a grammar that is past. As human beings have muscles that once wiggled the cars, and the python and the whale have little bones left over from the day when they went on legs, so English has not quite shed the complicate grammar that it had when it was Anglo-Saxon, and, like Greek and Latin, worked by means of a set of inflections. The subjunctive mood is little more than the vermiform appendage of English speech. The preface to Webster assures us that it is slowly passing out — a thing we should expect, according to Darwin’s theory. Hence it may be allowable for any man to decide for himself whether he is going to study what little the grammarians know about grammar, or simply wait forevolution to do its work.
In inventing the language machine, I had in view, of course, a structure of iron and steel which would automatically grind out sentences after the manner of the Mergenthaler typesetting machine. This would be entirely feasible by using the very same Mergenthaler principle of marks and notches on the edges of pieces of sheet brass. Such a piece of brass, representing a part of speech and traveling along a slot, would attract to itself an aggregation of other parts of speech all properly arranged. It would thus turn out complete statements without copy, instead of mere words built up of type. These statements, coming out of the reservoir of everyday words with a due allowance of highbrow terms, would make it possible to produce complete books, especially of the more literary kind, without the use of an author. Of course its basic ideas, coming out of the regular run-of-the-mine words, would sometimes be commonplace and sometimes too original; but by the use of literary breaker boys the material could be gone over and some of the harder sayings thrown back into the machine. Such a machine could turn out volumes according to the symbolist school, or new-thought treatises, or even the more advanced variety of free verse, and it would fit itself at once to any new school of writing that would be cropping up and demanding genius for its production.
In writing, as well as in painting, it is the creator’s own self, his unrestricted personality, that he ought to keep in mind, and not the picture or the subject that is being handled. All that is secondary. And right here is the strong point of my machine. It was daring, original, caring not a fig for the conventions or what some people call sense. It had personality and was always expressing it.
I even went so far as to think of an auxiliary machine which would invent original words — terms constructed according to the laws of euphony out of the usual twenty-six letters. This I did not think out to the end, though there would no doubt be use for it. Such a machine would be very useful in inventing new names for girls, a line of work that puts a constant strain upon the American intellect.
I do not know how far this thing might have gone had there not come a change, a mutation, in my way of life. I had come to Chicago, at the age of twenty, to perfect myself in the art of the free-line wood engraver, a calling in which a man would spend a laborious day in making a mere half-thimbleful of Turkish boxwood shavings. That was plenty to turn out in a day; a fine workman would be able to get along on much less. Before the profession pays, a young fellow must learn to run his furrows with infallible skill, and take each little chip and shaving from exactly the right place. It is almost a breath-taking accuracy that is required, and until the young fellow has achieved something like perfection his work is not going to be worth much. I had been slowly and steadily evolving into a wood engraver when one day the proprietor informed me that he had decided to raise my wages. And when he did so I moved.
My employer had contracted to turn out a harness catalogue, which I was to engrave entire — and this just at the time when I was becoming somewhat of a free-line picture engraver and able to do things in the manner of Closson or of Cole.
Alas, where is wood engraving now? And where, for that matter, is there such a thing as a harness?