Many years ago when I was learning Spanish a word in that tongue puzzled me. My Spanish teacher was not a scholar; he knew nothing about it. I felt sensitively fluttering over its surface the atmosphere of another race, the thinking of a different people. Later I found it came from the East, from Persia. It meant master. Then I understood. It had been brought to Spain by the Moors. It had pride, dignity, patriarchal sternness, a peculiar harsh browed aloofness to my ear that Spanish words did not have. It was a memory incorporated in daily speech of Spain of the four hundred years of Moorish rule.
It belongs in the Court of the Lions of the Alhambra. It is draped, turban-crowned. It has nothing in common with the pale, long-faced, ascetic, Spaniard who created the Inquisition.
I think it was an Arab poet who declared words are the thin, embroidered veil in which we wrap thoughts. Races have loved them. In their structure, after the crumbling of ages, may still be felt the stress of composite emotions, ancient, semi-cosmic loves. Words are as near reality as anything life possesses. There are words that for me keep peculiar qualities. The word Delhi, for instance, is a carved pendant made of amethyst. It is richly hued, lovely. It could not be any kind of jewel save pendant. Nor made of anything save amethyst. The word Agra, on the contrary, is a stone-white cameo, hard, sharp, cold of line.
It is not impossible that words, in effort to catch plastic beauty, may possess extentions not readily catalogueable; that they may build (for sensation) with vowels, with consonants interwoven like a fugue, with guarded emphasis of recurrent letters, similar sound-pictures that echo the sensation of objects of art, rebuild them, in short, in the mind, in a different medium.
We have not explored all the properties of words any more than of matter. There are shores waiting for Columbus. We can not determine exactly their psycho-plasm, so to speak. We do not know all the phosphoric, ancient visions that enveloped them, and still cling to them. Their boundaries are always changing. They can not be definitely measured. They possess degrees of being potently visible. For incalculable time the souls of races have wrapped them with love. They have borne intact, to today, the dreams of the world.
In England, in days of Shakespeare, words were fat, red-blooded, unctuous. In America they have been growing leaner and leaner. We lack greatly the rich variety of the older country. Our speech has lost a kind of vigor, sweetness, substantiality. As late as Stevenson, this quality remained in English prose. It has never been transplanted, successfully, to America.
We are losing, too, some of our fine, former pride in Saxon strength, which is our heritage. We are less faithful to ideals. We are falling away from its precepts. We are losing sight of belief in the desirability of its future power over our race. We are turning rather briskly toward foreign gods, toward false standards.
We are losing, too, the homely faith and friendliness of English social life, which is something whose strength we can not estimate; its merriment, uncomplaining courage, in the heart. We have nothing to substitute, or worse, things not our own.
They who loved words best, and perhaps understood best their varying values, were decadent Greek and Roman writers, who looked upon them as gems, who knew all their tints, their shades, and certain French writers, a little later (roughly estimating) than 1830. Callimichus loved them in the ancient world. He spoke of them as the Arab loved and spoke of Saïf, the sword. Something clean, cruel, powerful, decisive, uncompromising. Mallarmé, of the moderns, I think has loved them best. Hokusai, the Japanese print-maker, cried with sincerity: Write me down as the old man who is mad about line. With equal sincerity I exclaim: Write me down as the woman who is mad about words.
Cubism, so-called, does not necessarily belong to plastic art, nor verse. A new mind which may be termed cubism of the spirit has come; a spirit of destruction largely, brought about by the increasing passion of the individual for self, expression of self, assertion of self. The three points of time, that led to this, widely separated, different as they are, were (first) Christ and his teachings; (second) the Eighteenth Century in revolt against government forms and established standards; and the present, its equally great revolt against reverence of all kinds, its deification of the ego, its passion for destruction and the dawning scientific mind. This has brought a condition which might be termed the golden age of the commonplace, when people who can neither write nor think, paint nor carve, dance nor make music, insist upon the sacredness, the necessity of expression. The ego of the individual is enlarged. This is one cause of the increase in crime. It is inflamed. Everyone is convinced he has rights that bear no relation to his ability. Moral fiber is breaking. Ambition and talent are not the same.