There is a curious idea in some minds that fine language consists of long words difficult to understand. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Most of the great words—the words of power, as the old Kabalists called them—are short words, words in common use. And how common is the sound of them in the mouth of the preacher! Not long ago I heard an intelligent and cultured man reading one of the many beautiful passages from the English Bible:—
“Ye dragons, and all deeps;
Fire and hail, snow and vapour;
Stormy wind fulfilling his word;
Mountains and all hills;
Fruitful trees and all cedars, ...”
and he read it as though it were a draper's sale bill. And yet it needs but a very little imagination for such a passage to become a series of vivid pictures. Fire, hail, snow, vapour, hills, mountains, cedars, dragons and deeps—every word is “a word of power” if only there is no hurry, if only each word as it comes is given time to call up the picture of the real thing before the inward eye.
And you may hear children of fourteen and fifteen who have passed examinations in “English” recite line after line of, say, Matthew Arnold's The Forsaken Merman with a glib self-assured colourlessness due solely to the fact that no teacher has ever taught them respect for simple words. And what simpler words could there be than these, for example—
“Where great whales come sailing by,
Sail and sail, with unshut eye,
Round the world, for ever and aye”?
Simple, common words; yet if there is that leisurely attention to each one as it comes what an exhilarating picture arises of the great sea-beasts, and of “the round ocean and the living air.”
I am not pleading for the stylist's concentration on words which exalts them above the things they body forth. The most vivid and beautiful description of dawn in the English language—
“Night's candles are burned out, and jocund morn
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops”
though spoken by the most sensitively vibrant voice in the world, can never come near the real dawn breaking across real mountains. But the point is that those two lines composed of simple English words have power, if we pay them respect, to create the dawn within the mind, and to supply the spirit with that beauty which is its very breath.
If this patience with words, this respect for the familiar fine things of our native tongue, this desire to make them yield up their strength and beauty, if this has nothing to do with healthy living I don't know what has. William Wordsworth's—