in health. Finally, among the drawbacks of illness as
matter for literature there is the poverty of the
language. English, which can express the thoughts of
Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the
shiver and the headache. It has all grown one way.
The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shake-
Speare, Donne, Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a
sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and
language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made
for him. He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking
his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the
other (as perhaps the inhabitants of Babel did in the
beginning) so to crush them together that a brand new
word in the end drops out. Probably it will be something
laughable. For who of English birth can take liberties
with the language? To us it is a sacred thing and therefore
doomed to die, unless the Americans, whose genius is so
much happier in the making of new words than in the
disposition of the old, will come to our help and set
the springs aflow. Yet it is not only a new language that
we need, primitive, subtle, sensual, obscene, but a new
hierarchy of the passions; love must be deposed in
favour of a temperature of 104; jealousy give place to
the pangs of sciatica; sleeplessness play the part of villain,
and the hero become a white liquid with a sweet taste—
that mighty Prince with the moths’ eyes and the feathered
feet, one of whose names is Chloral.
But to return to the invalid. ‘I am in bed with influenza,’
he says, and actually complains that he gets no sympathy.
‘I am in bed with influenza’—but what does that
convey of the great experience; how the world has changed
its shape; the tools of business grown remote; the sounds
of festival become romantic like a merry-go-round heard
across far fields; and friends have changed, some putting
on a strange beauty, others deformed to the squatness of
toads, while the whole landscape of life lies remote and