[Mister Underhill]

As a companion to the above, there’s this bit from “On Fairy-Stories”, which celebrates the inventive power of language as opposed to the restrictions it imposes:

But Language cannot, all the same, be dismissed [in an inquiry into the origins of fairy-stories]. The incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in our world coeval. The human mind, endowed with the powers of generalization and abstraction, sees not only green-grass, discriminating it from other things (and finding it fair to look upon), but sees that it is green as well as being grass. But how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty that produced it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in Faerie is more potent. And that is not surprising: such incantations might indeed be said to be only another view of adjectives, a part of speech in a mythical grammar. The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into a swift water. If it could do the one, it could do the other; it inevitably did both. When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter's power—upon one plane; and the desire to wield that power in the world external to our minds awakes. It does not follow that we shall use that power well upon any plane. We may put a deadly green upon a man's face and produce a horror; we may make the rare and terrible blue moon to shine; or we may cause woods to spring with silver leaves and rams to wear fleeces of gold, and put hot fire into the belly of the cold worm. But in such “fantasy,” as it is called, new form is made; Faerie begins; Man becomes a sub-creator. An essential power of Faerie is thus the power of making immediately effective by the will the visions of “fantasy.”

What I dig about this passage is that the evocative and beautiful prose that the prof uses to frame his paean to the power of Language (I love the unironical reverence in that capital “L”) speaks as much to his thesis as do his arguments.

[ March 05, 2003: Message edited by: Mister Underhill ]