a translation.  Literary expression is personal and concrete, but this does not mean that its significance is altogether bound up with the accidental qualities of the medium.  A truly deep symbolism, for instance, does not depend on the verbal associations of a particular language but rests securely on an intuitive basis that underlies all linguistic expression.  The artist’s “intuition,” to use Croce’s term, is immediately fashioned out of a generalized human experience—­thought and feeling—­of which his own individual experience is a highly personalized selection.  The thought relations in this deeper level have no specific linguistic vesture; the rhythms are free, not bound, in the first instance, to the traditional rhythms of the artist’s language.  Certain artists whose spirit moves largely in the non-linguistic (better, in the generalized linguistic) layer even find a certain difficulty in getting themselves expressed in the rigidly set terms of their accepted idiom.  One feels that they are unconsciously striving for a generalized art language, a literary algebra, that is related to the sum of all known languages as a perfect mathematical symbolism is related to all the roundabout reports of mathematical relations that normal speech is capable of conveying.  Their art expression is frequently strained, it sounds at times like a translation from an unknown original—­which, indeed, is precisely what it is.  These artists—­Whitmans and Brownings—­impress us rather by the greatness of their spirit than the felicity of their art.  Their relative failure is of the greatest diagnostic value as an index of the pervasive presence in literature of a larger, more intuitive linguistic medium than any particular language.

[Footnote 198:  Provided, of course, Chinese is careful to provide itself with the necessary scientific vocabulary.  Like any other language, it can do so without serious difficulty if the need arises.]

Nevertheless, human expression being what it is, the greatest—­or shall we say the most satisfying—­literary artists, the Shakespeares and Heines, are those who have known subconsciously to fit or trim the deeper intuition to the provincial accents of their daily speech.  In them there is no effect of strain.  Their personal “intuition” appears as a completed synthesis of the absolute art of intuition and the innate, specialized art of the linguistic medium.  With Heine, for instance, one is under the illusion that the universe speaks German.  The material “disappears.”

Every language is itself a collective art of expression.  There is concealed in it a particular set of esthetic factors—­phonetic, rhythmic, symbolic, morphological—­which it does not completely share with any other language.  These factors may either merge their potencies with those of that unknown, absolute language to which I have referred—­this is the method of Shakespeare and Heine—­or they may weave a private, technical art fabric of their own, the innate art of