The dance of life / Havelock Ellis.

  • Ellis, Havelock, 1859-1939.
Date:
1923
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The dance of life / Havelock Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    burne, now various later poets ; the same thing happens with prose, but the rhythm of the signature is less easy to hear. As a writer slowly finds his own centre of gravity the influence of the rhythm of other writers ceases to be perceptible except in so far as it coincides with his own natural movement and tempo. That is a familiar fact. We less easily realise, perhaps, that not only the tunes but the notes they are formed of are, in every great writer, his own. In other words, he creates even his vocabulary. That is so not only in the more obvious sense that out of the mass of words that make up a lan¬ guage every writer uses only a limited number, and even among these has his words of predilection.1 It is in the meanings he gives to words, to names, that a writer creates his vocabulary. All language, we know, is imagery and metaphor ; even the simplest names of the elementary things are based on resemblances that suggested them¬ selves to the primitive men who made language. It is not otherwise with the aboriginal man of genius who uses language to express his new vision of the world. He sees things charged with energy, or brilliant with colour, or breathing out perfume, that the writers who came before him had overlooked, and to designate these things he must use names which convey the qualities he has per¬ ceived. Guided by his own new personal sensations and 1 I once studied, as an example, colour-words in various writers ('Contemporary Review, May, 1896), finding that every poet has his own colour-formula. Variations in length of sentence, and peculiarities of usage in metre, have often been studied. Reference is made to some of these studies by A. Niceforo, Metodo Statistico e Documenti Litterari,” Revista d’Italia, Aug. 1917.