know a three-year-old boy who calls an auto- mobile a "cadeúga." It is, both to him and in point of fact, an excellently descriptive term, based, like many a word in the pristine days of speech, on the sound the thing makes. But you can't go to the telephone and ask for a "cadeú- ga" with any valid hope of seeing it appear. And since the world with which the young ad- venturer must communicate prefers to call the affair a motor, or a car, or a machine (incom- parably less exact and fitting terms), he will. in- fallibly drop his own fresh and vivid coinage, and conform. The tangential energy of the individual beats its wings in vain against the centripetal force of the community, and every infant an- archist in speech yields at last to the usage of that world by which, if he is to live, he must be understood. All this, of course, has larger implications. Ex- pression in art can no more escape the demands of intelligibility, than expression in every-day speech. The poet writes in order to communicate, and to communicate he, too, must be understood. And the language of poetry in the broader sense, poetic forms and conventions of whatever sort, is established by long usage, like speech itself. It may, from the point. of view of either rhyme or -94- |