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But, leaving these victims of vanity, let us, with new hope, observe how nature, by worthier impulses, has ensured the poet's fidelity to his office of announcement and affirming, namely by the beauty of things, which becomes a new and higher beauty when expressed. Nature offers all her creatures to him as a picture-language.
One would say, that, as soon as men had the first hint that every sensible object, animal, rock, river, air, nay, space and time, subsists not for itself, nor finally to a material end, but as a picture-language, to tell another story of beings and duties, other science would be put by, and a science of such grand presage would absorb all faculties; that each man would ask of all objects, what they mean: Why does the horizon hold me fast, with my joy and grief, in this center?
Why hear I the same sense from countless differing voices, and read one never quite expressed fact in endless picture-language?
And after the artist had killed a character, the author could preach over his corpse. Thus there would be an agreeable reversion to picture-language, the earliest way of writing, and the latest. The ends of the ages would meet in a romance written on these lines:
I tremble to think what would have happened if, by one of those contretemps which sometimes occur even in real life, the cartoons had got interchanged. And caricatures such as these influence the elections! The most childish nonsense, written in the picture-language so dear to children! And on such ineptitudes the destinies of the nation are supposed to turn!
But in the year 1798 a French general by the name of Bonaparte happened to visit eastern Africa to prepare for an attack upon the British Indian Colonies. He did not get beyond the Nile, and his campaign was a failure. But, quite accidentally, the famous French expedition solved the problem of the ancient Egyptian picture-language. And behold! he found a stone which greatly puzzled him.
This view is further confirmed, and the predominance of this notion of likeness in primitive times further illustrated, by the fact that our system of presenting ideas to the eye originated after the same fashion. Writing and printing have descended from picture-language.
The writing of Persepolis did not show any pictures at all. They consisted of v-shaped figures that were repeated endlessly and suggested nothing at all to the European eye. Nowadays, when the puzzle has been solved we know that the original script of the Sumerians had been a picture-language, quite as much as that of the Egyptians.
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