To write according
to a theory is not really to write: at the most, it is _making
literature_.
The question of the unity of language is always reappearing, because,
put as it is, there can be no solution to it, owing to its being based
upon a false conception of what language is. Language is not an arsenal
of ready-made arms, and it is not _vocabulary_, which, in so far as it
is thought of as progressive and in living use, is always a cemetery,
containing corpses more or less well embalmed, that is to say, a
collection of abstractions.
Our mode of settling the question of the model language, or of the unity
of the language, may seem somewhat abrupt, and yet we would not wish to
appear otherwise than respectful towards the long line of literary men
who have debated this question in Italy for centuries. But those ardent
debates were, at bottom, debates upon aestheticity, not upon aesthetic
science, upon literature rather than upon literary theory, upon
effective speaking and writing, not upon linguistic science. Their error
consisted in transforming the manifestation of a want into a scientific
thesis, the need of understanding one another more easily among a people
dialectically divided, in the philosophic search for a language, which
should be one or ideal. Such a search was as absurd as that other search
for a _universal language_, with the immobility of the concept and of
the abstraction.
Pages:
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246