While most of us would at first sight find fault with Mr G.K. Chesterton's sweeping advice -

"And don't believe in anything
That can't be told in coloured pictures,"

many would probably end by endorsing it. But we should do so only because we were able to give a very wide and varied meaning to "coloured pictures."

No one ever made a coloured picture of the "wild west wind"; but there are plenty of coloured pictures in which there is no mistaking its presence. We all believe in wireless telegraphy (now that it is an accomplished fact) which is, in itself, untranslatable into colour or line; but its mechanism can be photographed, and its results in the world of men and ships are in all the illustrated papers. Music, which is pure sound, is to some the surest path to the Reality behind this outward show things; yet to some at least of such music is indeed form and colour, even though the colours be beyond the rainbow. For in truth, everything worth believing in, all those things, those ideas, which renew the springs of our life, have form and they have colour. Even to the colour-blind one word differeth from another in glory.

This is no idle fancy, no mere subject for academic debate: it is the most practical subject in the world. For even as the body is fed not by food alone but by the living air, so is the spirit nourished not alone by right action but by inspiring ideas. Ideas are pictures; and the best ideas are coloured pictures.

Hence the great value of words. It is idle to speak of "words, idle words," as though they were the transient froth on the permanent ocean of thought. They are the vehicle, the body of thought. If the thought be shallow or silly, the words will indeed be "idle." But if the idea be inspiring the words will be the channel of that inspiration.

The greater part of this power in words is lost to us to-day. Everything tempts us to hurry over words. We talk too quickly to be able to pay that respect to words which they deserve; and we read the newspaper, the magazine, the novel, the play, the poem, with the same disastrous haste. We devour the words but lose their essence. Hence there is a grave danger that through this neglect we shut out one of the main streams by which our life must be fed if it is not to shrink into mere fretful existence.

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 -

"And vital feelings of delight
Shall rear her form to stately height"

is only a metrical expression of a great and practical truth. You do not need to be a "Christian Scientist" to know that ideas and emotions can affect the stoop of the shoulders or the lines of the mouth. Other people besides "Eugenists" have observed that ugly or mean-spirited parents seldom have beautiful children.

But though the power of ideas is a commonplace, and though psychologists tell us how much we may improve mental concentration by letting the words of any sentence call up each its own picture, what they a omit to do is to recognise the need of the human spirit for beauty. You can concentrate your thought on the list of pickles in a grocer's price list: it is doubtless a good exercise. But the same exercise directed to some great phrase, such as Emerson's Trust thyself: ever' heart vibrates to that iron string; or some vivid lyrical image such as All the trees of the field shall clap their hands, or even a complete poem of simple words but permanent beauty, such as that one of Wordsworth's beginning I wandered lonely as a Cloud; this will not only improve concentration and sharpen memory: it will enrich the mind with ever-available sources of inspiration, courage and joy.

Edgar J. Saxon.