‘Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.’

Dichten = condensare.

I begin with poetry because it is the most concentrated form of verbal expression. Basil Bunting, fumbling about with a German-Italian dictionary, found that this idea of poetry as concentration is as old almost as the German language. ‘Dichten’ is the German verb corresponding to the noun ‘Dichtung’ meaning poetry, and the lexicographer has rendered it by the Italian verb meaning ‘to condense’.

The charging of language is done in three principal ways: You receive the language as your race has left it, the words have meanings which have ‘grown into the race’s skin’; the Germans say ‘wie einem der Schnabel gewachsen ist’, as his beak grows. And the good writer chooses his words for their ‘meaning’, but that meaning is not a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably. [...]

NEVERTHELESS you still charge words with meaning mainly in three ways, called phanopoeia, melopoeia, logopoeia. You use a word to throw a visual image on to the reader’s imagination, or you charge it by sound, or you use groups of words to do this. (ABC of Reading)

IT doesn’t, in our contemporary world, so much matter where you begin the examination of a subject, so long as you keep on until you get round again to your starting-point. As it were, you start on a sphere, or a cube; you must keep on until you have seen it from all sides. Or if you think of your subject as a stool or table, you must keep on until it has three legs and will stand up, or four legs and won’t tip over too easily. (ABC of Reading)

A general statement is valuable only in REFERENCE to the known objects or facts.

Even if the general statement of an ignorant man is ‘true’, it leaves his mouth or pen without any great validity. He doesn’t KNOW what he is saying. That is, he doesn’t know it or mean it in anything like the degree that a man of experience would or does. Thus a very young man can be quite ‘right’ without carrying conviction to an older man who is wrong and who may quite well be wrong and still know a good deal that the younger man doesn’t know.

One of the pleasures of middle age is to find out that one WAS right, and that one was much righter than one knew at say seventeen or twenty-three. (ABC of Reading)

ANY general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it. If Mr. Rockefeller draws a cheque for a million dollars it is good. If I draw one for a million it is a joke, a hoax, it has no value. If it is taken seriously, the writing of it becomes a criminal act. [...]

An abstract or general statement is GOOD if it be ultimately found to correspond with the facts.

BUT no layman can tell at sight whether it is good or bad.

Hence (omitting various intermediate steps) … hence the almost stationary condition of knowledge throughout the middle ages. Abstract arguments didn’t get mankind rapidly forward, or rapidly extend the borders of knowledge. (ABC of Reading)

No man is equipped for modern thinking until he has understood the anecdote of Agassiz and the fish:

A post-graduate student equipped with honours and diplomas went to Agassiz to receive the final and finishing touches. The great man offered him a small fish and told him to describe it.

Post-Graduate Student: ‘That’s only a sunfish.’

Agassiz: ‘I know that. Write a description of it.’

After a few minutes the student returned with the description of the Ichthus Heliodiplodokus, or whatever term is used to conceal the common sunfish from vulgar knowledge, family of Heliichtherinkus, etc., as found in textbooks of the subject.

Agassiz again told the student to describe the fish.

The student produced a four-page essay. Agassiz then told him to look at the fish. At the end of three weeks the fish was in an advanced state of decomposition, but the student knew something about it.

By this method modern science has arisen, not on the narrow edge of mediaeval logic suspended in a vacuum. (ABC of Reading)

In the works of Dickens George Orwell saw a face:

It is the face of a man about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is a1ways fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry-in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.

No face shines through the novels of James Joyce, and this is disturbing. He is cut off from his own creation, as he is cut off from God's, and he has no comment to make about either. He cannot be enlisted in the cause of Irish nationalism, Fascism or Communism, though--like Shakespeare, a man legitimately faceless because he wrote plays and not novels--he has been invoked in the name of every ideology. Perhaps, among novelists, only Flaubert approaches him for self-effacement. But, to the novel-reader brought up in a cosier tradition, such self-effacement looks like hauteur, the nose in the air, the swollen head, the snob, It ought not to look like that, Joyce's aim was the ennoblement of the common man, and this could best be achieved by letting the common man speak for himself. To watch over one's hero, coddle him, discuss him with the reader, offer him praise or pity--is not this perhaps the real posture of superiority, the imitation of God? We are given Leopold Bloom and Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker without apology and without the intermediacy of attitudes imposed on the reader. We have to make up our own minds as to whether we like them or approve of their actions (Bloom's masturbation, for instance, or Earwicker's incestuous fantasies); ultimately, liking and approbation do not apply--we become concerned with the harder discipline of love. The priest is the agent of solemn ceremonies, and we are never drawn to look at his face or consider what thoughts and feelings move behind it, Joyce, without blasphemy, saw his function as priestlike the solemnisation of drab days and the sanctification of the ordinary. It is this preoccupation, even obsession, with the ordinary that should endear him to ordinary readers. Nobody in his books is rich or has high connections. There is no dropping of titled names, as there is in the novels of Evelyn Waugh, and we enter no place more exalted than a pub or a public library. Ordinary people, living in an ordinary city, are invested in the riches of the ages, and these riches are enshrined in language, which is available to everybody. Given time, Joyce will flow through the arteries of our ordinary, non-reading, life, for a great writer influences the world whether the world likes it or not, and the blessing of the ordinary must eventually transfigure it. We see Gerard Manley Hopkins in cornflake advertisements ('gold-toasted, sugar-tossed, lighter-than-air, a crisp, they crunch and crackle') and we hear Joyce's interior monologues in the 'think-tape' of television plays and documentaries, even hear something of his word-play in radio shows. But 'Introibo ad altare Dei' is the first spoken statement in Ulysses, and we are wisest if we get up early and deliberately go to the great comic Mass, rather than merely let its deformed and thinned echoes trickle through to us. It is not a Black Mass, even though Guinness is drunk and bawdy songs punctuate the golden liturgy; it is a solemnisation without solemnity. (Re Joyce)