The essential point is that somebody
must be at work adding new symbols and new circumlocutions to a
language.
All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry. If we paused for a
moment to examine the cheapest cant phrases that pass our lips every
day, we should find that they were as rich and suggestive as so many
sonnets. To take a single instance: we speak of a man in English social
relations 'breaking the ice.' If this were expanded into a sonnet, we
should have before us a dark and sublime picture of an ocean of
everlasting ice, the sombre and baffling mirror of the Northern nature,
over which men walked and danced and skated easily, but under which the
living waters roared and toiled fathoms below. The world of slang is a
kind of topsy-turveydom of poetry, full of blue moons and white
elephants, of men losing their heads, and men whose tongues run away
with them--a whole chaos of fairy tales.
* * * * *
A DEFENCE OF BABY-WORSHIP
The two facts which attract almost every normal person to children are,
first, that they are very serious, and, secondly, that they are in
consequence very happy. They are jolly with the completeness which is
possible only in the absence of humour.
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