Flowers of Speech

Man never invents, he only finds and imitates and in his findings and imitations what a variety! Daffodils and dahlias of speech with fragrance and colour and meaning. There is Carlyle with his everlasting exclamations and tricks of capitalization and punctuation; Macaulay with his antithetical turn of sentences and flow of a rich stream of words; Browning with his characteristically cacophonic rhythmic sentences; and Ruskin with his happy blending of poetic-prose words. Along with these stylists march others as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf who bring to words the three-dimensional qualities plus the fourth which is beginning to be common, namely the quality of spaciousness or timelessness.

What a legion of writers from the Minstrel Singers to the present age and all with personalities uniquely their own! All that they see and hear and feel is transmuted into the rich ore of experience, made real and alive through the glow of language. A new freedom dawns on them, the freedom of language that comes to a free and open heart playing on a happy, child-like mind. Theirs are words, and yet not words, because they break through the shackles of conventions and go through original and daring paths. The abstract and the concrete, the proper and the common, the noun and the verb, so interchange themselves, that no tape or foot-rule of syntax or grammar can ever satisfactorily measure the capacities of their word-structures or the architectonic realm of sentences. Theirs is the sublime perch, from which they never descend, and when they do they do it with a purpose. The words they use are new words, or old words used newly and differently, so as to burnish with vividness. Shades of meaning characterise their writings and reveal their subtle experiences of life, with a facility of grace and workmanship as to defy analysis or the semblance of imitation. Great writings as they are, they can never be written twice in the self-same manner bythe same writer. They are unique experiences worth sharing, worth having. And we see Shakespeare and Milton so inspirited by life’s dramatic turns as to make their life as much as their works, glow with a new significance. They cast away syntax as trappings of a bygone age and stamped their writings with the impress of the age they lived in, in words of memorableness, sense wedded to sound, pleasing and beautiful.

There is nothing to surpass words with associations or wings of fancy. They bring before the mind the world of Wonder and joy and grandeur. At a moment’s bidding the words transport us to happy realms of thought and imaginings. So powerful, so mesmeric are words that writers of worth use words to please, to soothe, to placate. They are too full with the Spirit of Life to want to dabble with words or make huge blotches of them. They make confusion less confounded, more bearable, because they have been through life’s tribulations themselves. Life’s worth the fight and, the men of vision that they are, the, write with a purpose or a mission and bring, within the realm of man, the unattainable. No man reading them is ever the same. How can he be when such writers transport him to a world which they alone know is the habitat of all of peace and goodwill. But this world is denied to those who bicker and quarrel or kill Abel. The good things of life are the monopoly of all who want them–but how few want them, full as they are with the unwholesome things which they feel is life but which in reality is a negation. To writers is given this gift, the key to Ideal, the World of Self-realisation, the Realm of Nirvana.

Words are things more alive than most live things. They pulsate with life and get across the public through the breadth of communicative ease. The rhythm, the symphony, the whole make-up or pattern of the sentences have such charm and finesse with the aura of suggestion about them, that writers use words to telling effects, reviving cold, moribund words and words of long disuse or degradation. Remove a word or a comma from any of the great passages and you see the world of difference it makes. The beauty is gone and with it the joy of expression. There is sense devoid of charm. The passage becomes third-rate. The rose becomes a round of briars and oasis once more becomes a desert. Life is gone and the corpse is left. And we see traces of this corpse-like style in those who want the substance, the meaning as they call it and are strangers to the elusive thing called style. It is almost like wearing a thing because others are doing it, not one whit interested in wearing the things that one likes...and this mass-productiveness of writing, of cheap, tawdry writing makes for a poor democracy and life. The good things of life are given the go by in the name of bread and butter. What a fall!

Poetry which was the language of the ancients can be ours as well, if only we know what poetry and life are all about. Poetry we know is not necessarily the vehicle of sense (as prose is) and yet we cannot say that poetry is lacking in sense because, it has a sense all its own, and which only poetry lovers know. Poetry is too subtle an instrument to carry the high explosives of satire thought and when it does (as with Dryden and Pope), it becomes unwieldy. Modern experiments in poetry fail to bring the happy feelings and memories that Tennyson, Bridges, and Brooke brought to their poetry because modern poets (with a few exceptions like Eliot, Auden and Lewis) are going the way of the zig-zag, tortuous way, of surrealistic thought-feelingness and crude experimentation continues, in which words, sound and meaning go overboard lock, stock and barrel! Quite in keeping with our Age of Sham and Mr. Know-Alls!

Poetry is the vehicle of feeling raised to the Nth power and made possible for communication through the cross-sectioned experiences of sound-colour-touch, working in synthesis. Mere sensations at first, they localise themselves in well-chosen diction with a super or climax image dominating and all other images etched in their places. And this Miracle of Growth or Language is possible through the mighty self within us all and which we can either utilise for life or misuse at our coat. This gradual growth in language and power is apparent when one wants life and wants it abundantly. For others who are living surface-lives theirs is a barren path. But it is given only to a few to live by the spirit and to see themselves galvanised into activity and activate all they come across…And thus we see words live and continue to live when they have the life-force of movement. The young live and the old die but youth and old age are mere labels on this earth which the eternal spirit from whom we take our being preserves for all time….and it is this that goaded Milton to concentrate on the Noble and the True and the Ever Beautiful before he took on himself the task of the infinite in his magnum opus. It is this that gave Gerard Manly Hopkins the verse of sentence-structure and word-coinage that is characteristic of the Welsh language….but the mountain sheep enjoy a rarer air than the plains-sheep….and the Egdon Heath of Hardy is a powerful influence in the lives of the Wessex people in the novel. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound gives a width and grandeur that we see in Tolstoy’s novel of War and Peace breadth or in a Dostoevskean novel. Thomas Mann Buddenbrook is another great novel built on the structure of words and more words–a million words or more, cemented with the, experience of life itself. And it is needless to say, that the language of poetry, though not in use in novels or dramas of today, yet influences the novelist as much as the dramatist to bring out their full force and we have only to dip into the “myriad-minded” genius Shakespeare to see that he is greater than Shaw because he lives by the spirit of which Matthew Arnold found a surer and ever surer stay in poetry. Then we see in words the strength of the ages (and in poetry more so) and not even the passing of time can dim them. They thrill with a hundred and one memories of origin, usage, variation, shade. The long-lived words move slowly and steadily (as the matured people do); and the young see themselves at first rough, unpolished but then refined. The short-lived words are those that die because they have no roots in life’s experiences and because those who bring them into vogue are slipshod about them. They are like the Beatles….that make a noise and are heard no more. We have only to fall into the History of Words to see what words have fallen out of use and how they have died in infancy….in child-birth as it were because they had not the nourishment of life. They are thrown as slangs or colloquialisms and are difficult of refinement or common usage. They are words that have had their day and now rest in peace in the cemeteries of dictionaries of obsolete words or in the dug-outs of Logan Pearsall Smiths.

Whether we call on Hemingway, Steinbeck or Lawrence we will see in the well-known writers the use of words and phrases that bristle with an activity and a movement that is both dexterous and expressive. A re-reading of favourite passages will reveal what charm lies hidden under the written words and how they transform the life of the reader or hearer from the humdrum life of cold realism to the sublime heights of novelty and warmth of imagination. Words are used with such infinite variations and gradations that they bring out the long-drawn ease of calm philosophicalness or the swift hurriedness of mad despair. Dr. Samuel Johnson cried over the last scene of Lear and felt for Lear and Cordelia with a feeling that was real as it was cathartic. Charles Darwin loved words but later he meaned that words ceased to have the effect they once had on him. He felt the atrophy of his aesthetic sense in the rush for scientific knowledge and it is a truism that when thought is predominant, feeling is at itslowest. Faith is a great healer and only those who see in the written or spoken word a healing influence know how beautifully soon they are healed. The therapeutic power of words is too well-known to need comment or explanation and it is this that makes Cardonal Newman refer to the Living Voice of the teacher and which civilised Europe and the States now realise. Television is good but not so good as the living person...with a living voice. The magnetic aura of the written or spoken word must be intimate or there is no effect. Literature is not a science nor is a criticism and the fact that we have many critics (unless they arc unsound in mind or body) only goes to prove that literature has many voices and all are gold and nothing on earth can destroy the use of words or the individuality of man whatever be the state or the condition of the people. Spontaneity is better than sophistication and even the sophisticated writers do have their human moments and what a level of greatness they achieve when they come to this spring of life! No more do we see them as different, unknown, strange or queer. We become then and feel like them and there is nothing to disagree about. They bring out their universality as well as ours. And we see this pronouncedly in the greats of all ages and climes. Whether they be Chaucer, Kalidu orSadi makes no difference; we see them as human and lovably so. They breathe into words the breath of life and lo! all is near and dear. They use words like the magicians of old...delving in myths and symbols...and words symbolise the thing. The hymns and the holy books are replete with words of rich import and though they are old books they are ever new because the Spirit of Man is never old….Use words therefore with care and love. They are the gold coins that Shakespeare and the Greats used to advantage. They are the flowers of speech–the only live things in the world of dead matter, and which make common man so extraordinary. They revive music, love, health, beauty, pathos. They are the nectar and ambrosia of the soul. They are worth having near, worth living with. They are the life-blood of a master-spirit and outlive us...with fragrance and memory!