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the fundamental function and limitations of prose, as compared with those of poetry. Yet one had scarcely digested this timely wisdom, before, in the self-same quarter, one was asked, with iterated and reiterated fervor, to fall down and worship a living instance of what was called supreme mastery over prose style, glaringly incompatible with the wholesome doctrine expounded in the preceding essay. The majority of readers are passive recipients to whatever they read in print, especially if it be printed in publications supposed to be influential; and illogical fervor, if fervent enough, is quickly contagious among the susceptible and receptive. Hence I do not doubt that, while the sound but quietly written essay is already forgotten, save by the person who wrote it and a few others who cordially agreed with it, the fervid admiration of anything but a good example of style that followed is gaining fresh converts every day, and will long retain them in that condition. Obviously, no help is to be looked for from reviewers or critical journals, when authors whose writing is the very reverse of lucid, and who consider themselves free to defile the well of English whenever it pleases them, are eulogized in language that would almost be excessive if applied to Gibbon, Goldsmith or Lamb.

It is rarely, if ever, that eccentricity in one of the arts is unaccompanied by a similar manifestation in the other arts, or that a confusion of the limitations of each of them is not at the same time being exhibited. I should say the mischief began when painting, modern painting at least, took precedence of literature in popular taste. In the hope, I suppose, of not being driven out of the field altogether, and in obedience to the perhaps unconscious instinct of self-preservation, several writers then began to write pictorially, and labored to be as picturesque as

pictures themselves. As a matter of fact, painting must always be under obligation to, and draw its inspiration from, literature, literature being the greatest, fullest, and most commanding of the arts. The pre-Raphaelite painters freely acknowledged the influence the poetry of Keats had exercised over them; and Tennyson, always instinctively abreast of the currents of his time, gradually wrote as pictorially as possible, though he had from the very outset shared in some degree with Keats the influence exercised by poetry over painting. No charge, however, could fairly be made against Tennyson for being too picturesque in his poetry. But, with writers of lower degree, and with prose writers on an extensive scale, the phenomenon of imitation was plainly discernible. No longer satisfied with "proper words in the proper place," they first filled their pages with patches of strong color, and ended by employing every strong epithet they could think of, appealing to the example of Ruskin, whom they only travestied, since Ruskin, as a rule, used color in his prose writings only to give natural expression to his thoughts or descriptions. Poets also, even genuine poets, betook themselves to writing prose of this highly colored character; and the critics rapidly followed suit, and gushed, as the phrase is, over the luscious result; both poet and critic forgetting that neither Wordsworth, nor Byron, nor Scott, nor Coleridge required or had recourse to so extraneous and foreign an auxiliary to decorate their prose. I remember John Addington Symonds, a few years before his death, saying that he greatly regretted having himself succumbed to the prevailing foible among prose writers, naming one well-known author whom he warmly commended for having uniformly resisted it.

The picturesque mode of writing has by no means passed away; and the

paint-pot still stands side by side with the inkstand on the writing-table of only too many authors. But another of the arts has more recently competed with painting for the mischievous privilege of spoiling the prose writings of the time. Painting is less intellectual and more sensuous than literature, and accordingly was welcomed as an ally by an age too indolent or too busy to be intellectual, but not too lazy or too much occupied to be sensuous. Music is yet more sensuous and emotional than painting; and the two have operated jointly in vitiating the prose writing of-what a word!-our "stylists." Over the writing-tables of such authors should be prominently displayed the words of Vauvenargues:

Pour savoir si une pensée est nouvelle, il n'y a qu'à l'exprimer bien simplement.

(In order to know if a thought is new, one has only to express it quite simply.)

What is this but to say the same thing, and to propound the same standard concerning good style in writing, as Swift, in the words already cited from him.

To these quotations may perhaps be usefully added here what Nietzsche says in one of his intermittent moments of lucidity:

The misfortune of lucid writers is that people think them superficial, and consequently take no trouble in reading them; while the chance for obscure writers is that the reader has to labor hard in order to understand them, and credits them with contributing the pleasure he derives from his own diligence.

A reader of to-day must have a restricted field of book-perusal, who would have any difficulty in naming some prominent and much belauded authors, whom the above "cap" would fit exactly.

Whenever a

perversion of sound taste becomes general, a phrase is invariably invented to justify it, and to render it still more popular; and the crowd readily echo and adopt it, humbly assuming that, since it is used by persons supposed to have some mark of superiority, it embodies a legitimate thought. Hence the catch phrases "word-painting" and "prosepoetry" that have been current of late years, and that have done so much to lead the conclusions of the average reader astray. It is not the business of words to paint, any more than it is the office of paint to speak, or to write. "Word-painting" is an expression invented to excuse, intended to extol, a thoroughly bad style of writing, and would have shocked Greek or Roman prose-writers, have excited the astonishment of Thucydides, amazed Livy or Seneca, and moved Tacitus to disdain. It would have been repudiated by Addison, satirized by Steele, and dismissed in an epigram by Gibbon. It is nothing more than the name for bastard writing and a mongrel style.

"Prose-poetry" has been equally current in the literary and critical jargon of the time. How can there possibly be such a thing as prose-poetry? It is just as impossible as white-black or left-right. There can be poetic prose, and there can be prosaic verse; but that is a totally different matter. Yet, partly from a desire to seem to be original and say something new, though it has long ceased to seem the one or to be the other, people, seeing in the elegant phraseology of the day, that it "caught on," adopted it; and many of them apparently imagine that, in using it, they are saying something original, though what was spurious coinage at first, has long since lost the external face-polish that coins, whether spurious or sound, commonly wear when they are first issued from the mint. The amount of bad prose that

has been written, and admired, during of dead authors the excellence of the last few years, under the patron

age of the phrases "prose-poetry" and "prose-poems," is enormous. But their number is no justification of them; though no doubt it is true that what a great Latin classic says, "Quod multis peccatur inultum est"-"What is done by everybody escapes reprehension," and has hardened them in their muddying of the well of English undefiled. Into the well out of which we have all drunk they unremorsefully cast mud and rubbish snatched up from the roadside.

One wonders sometimes whether the perpetrators of these offences against good writing and good sense have ever read, or even heard of Lessing's Laocoon, and wishes they could be compelled to read it from the first word to the last. In it they would learn that each of the arts has its limitations and its special function; that it is not the function of Literature to paint, nor of Painting to write; and that Architecture, Sculpture and Music are subject to the same law. All these Arts can co-operate and assist each other, but only by each of them preserving its individuality and maintaining its dignity.

It would not be either fair or accurate to abstain from adding that there are living writers both of poetry and prose against whom the charge of defiling the English language and outraging English style could not in the smallest degree be urged. But one never hears them cited as supreme masters of English prose or verse. That distinction, such as it is, is assigned to writers who "o'erdo Termagant," "out-Herod Herod," and "tear a passion to tatters." It would be invidious to name good writers still with us, and equally so to name living ones who are the most conspicuous offenders against really good writing. One must therefore appeal to the long line

whose prose style has never been contested; such as Addison, Steele, Sterne, Smollett, Gibbon, Leigh Hunt, de Quincey, Newman, Ruskin (with certain reservations), Matthew Arnold; all of whom managed to express their thoughts without posturing and attitudinizing, but in the "simple and sincere" manner which even the sublime Milton affirms must pervade all good writing, whether poetry or prose. That Shakespeare was of the same opinion is obvious to any one who understands the directions of Hamlet to the players; for the same law holds good even more strongly in writing than in acting. Hamlet tells the players of a speech he had once heard that was "excellent," adding "one said there was 'no sallet' in it to make it savory, nor no matter in the phrase that might indite the author of affectation," but "an honest method, as wholesome as sweet, and by very much more handsome than fine." When Wordsworth, Scott, Byron, or Shelley, wrote prose, they gave their readers no "word-painting," and no "prose-poetry," but what it professed to be, good, honest, straightforward prose, forcible, and full of matter, but lucid and unaffected. Let all those who, scornful of passing plaudits, write either verse or prose, do likewise, though they will assuredly not be hailed in leading articles as "the greatest living masters of English prosestyle." Such a phrase, when applied to authors who, whether men of genius or not, habitually write obscurely and with deliberate eccentricity, is an outrage on the well of English undefiled.

The decay of familiarity with Greek and Latin has probably had much to do with the deterioration of style in many English authors of to-day; and the emancipation of the individual from the trammels of authority, advantageous, perhaps, in some respects, alike for the individual and society,

which set in with the French Revolution, has, likewise, largely ministered to the mischief. Already, even in George Sand's time, it was growing in French letters, since we find her saying, "Soyez correct; c'est plus rare que d'être eccentrique. Plaire par le mauvais gout est devenu plus commun que de recevoir la croix d'honneur." Yet the sense of form, so lamentably absent from the great qualities of our own race, is far from extinct in France, which makes one wish that English writers, practically ignorant of the dead languages, could be compelled to read nothing but French prose for a certain number of years. Then, perhaps, our eccentric tumblers and acrobats in writing would, as Shakespeare says, "learn that honorable stop, not to outsport discretion."

One of the greatest prose writers of antiquity has used the phrase, in describing a good style, Clarescit urendo -that is to say, the greater writers brighten as they burn. The so-called masters of style to-day are distressingly, and avowedly, fuliginous.

One can hardly do better than close one's remarks with examples of good prose style, so that one's meaning may be made yet more clear. One of the marks of a good style is the ease with which it lends itself to translation into another tongue. Many of my readers will be familiar with the final passage of the Life of Agricola, his father-inlaw, by Tacitus, in the original. But to many it will be inaccessible in the Latin tongue. This is how it surrenders itself to our own language:

If there be any habitation for the spirits of just men, if, as the philosophers aver, great souls perish not along with the bodily life, mayst thou rest in peace, and recall us, who were dear to thee, away from weak regrets and womanish tears back to the thought of thy virtues, which are no subject for sorrow or for sighing! Not with the

fleeting breath of praise would we do thee honor, but with life-long admiration, and the effort, if strength be given us, to emulate thee. Thus shall each man that is of thy kin do thee truest service and prove his piety. To thy widow and thy daughter I would say this: Keep sacred the memory of the husband and the father by pondering all that he said or did, each of you in your heart; and let the lineaments and the expression of his character rather than of his person be enshrined there. Not that I would say aught against the portraits that are fashioned of marble or of bronze; but these material things are as much subject to the law of decay and death as the features they represent; the soul's image is imperishable, and that you may embody and express not in gross matter, by the craftsman's hand, but in the spiritual nature of your inmost self. All of Agricola that we loved, all that we admired, abides and will abide in the hearts of men, in the endless course of time, in the pages of fame. Many a hero of old has gone down into oblivion like the common herd: the story of Agricola has been transmitted to those who come after, and he shall live.

The same test may be applied to the translation by Jowett of the Funeral Oration delivered by Pericles over the Athenians who fell in a great and glorious war. Of original examples in our tongue, Newman offers innumerable instances, whether in his inquiry, What is Literature? or in others of his faultless works. The essay of Addison on Westminster Abbey may always be read with pleasure and advantage. To turn to such is to find refreshment for the mind and solace for good taste, and serves to protect a discriminating reader against the eccentricities and self-conscious attitudinizing of too many living writers and their amazing eulogists, who surely must know that the "eccentrics" in literature have never been assigned a lasting place in it, except as eccentrics and curiosities. Eccentricity, which is

a form of spurious originality, is so which is true of the common and the

easy. But, as Horace said long ago, "Difficile est proprie communia dicere,"

The National Review.

uncommon alike.

Academicus.

I.

"SALLY": A STUDY.*
BY HUGH CLIFFORD, C.M.G.

"Dive? I should think so!" said his host to Jack Norris. "You just watch the little beggar dive!"

It was early morning, and the two men were stripping for a swim on board one of the big house-boats which lie eternally at their moorings on the right bank of the river near Thames Ditton. The place was littered with sweaters, towels, flannels, boat-cushions, books, newspapers, pipes, and the varied accumulations of rubbish such as only a house-boat full of bachelors can collect when it lacks even the feminine influence of a charwoman. Without, seen through the wide oblong windows, the tawny waters ran cool and inviting under the glad sunshine of a bright summer morning. From a spring-board rigged in the bows men from time to time took running headers: in the middle of the narrow fairway five or six heads were bobbing, while arms and legs in number to correspond splashed gallantly. The cheery clamor of the bathers carried far over the water.

Presently another head broke through the surface of the river some twenty yards up-stream,-a head to which the wet hair clung sleek and black as the fur of an otter,-and from it came a cry of defiance, the tone of which was somehow strangely familiar as it smote upon Jack Norris's ears.

Hugh Clifford's striking story "Saleh," recently published in Blackwood's Magazine, is a sequel to "Sally: A Study," which appeared in the same magazine in 1903-4. The two are so closely connected that it has seemed best to reprint the first, which perplexed many readers, when first published, by its apparent VOL. XLI. 2134

LIVING AGE.

The swimmers answered the challenge with discordant chorus, and began to splash up against the current, with straining arms and legs, in the direction of the man who had uttered it. The latter waited until his pursuers had nearly surrounded him, were almost upon him, and then dived neatly, leaving barely so much as a ripple behind him. Two or three men went down headlong in pursuit, to reappear in a minute or SO baffled and panting. A moment later, first one and then another were drawn under, with gurgles and splutterings of protest, by an invisible hand that had gripped them by the heels. With renewed splutterings each in turn came to the surface, laughing and shouting, breathing forth threats of instant retribution. Dashing the water from their eyes, they looked around, vainly seeking for some sign of their antagonist's whereabouts, calling upon him by name the while with humorous mock-wrath.

"Sally" they cried. "Sally, you young ruffian! Sally! Sally! Sally, you villain! We'll pay you out properly when we catch you!"

Again the head, with its close covering of straight limp hair, came to the surface, far down river this time, and well out of the reach of its pursuers. Again that queer challenging cry came from it, and set Norris tingling with

incompleteness. "Saleh" will follow. Less, perhaps, as fiction than as a study by one who has had the best opportunities for observing, "Sally" and "Saleh" are dramatic representations of the effect of western civilization upon Oriental character.- EDITOR OF THE Living AGE.

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