I
A good prose style says Prof. Dr. Otto Jespersen in his great work,
“Growth and Structure of the English Language,” “is everywhere a late
acquirement, and the work of whole generations of good authors is
needed to bring about the easy flow of written prose.” The learned
_Sprachwissenschaftler_ is here speaking of Old English, or, as it
used to be called when you and I were at the breast of enlightenment,
Anglo-Saxon. An inch or so lower down the page he points out that what
he says of prose is by no means true of verse—that poetry of very
respectable quality is often written by peoples and individuals whose
prose is quite as crude and graceless as that, say of the Hon. Warren
Gamaliel Harding—that even the so-called Anglo-Saxons of Beowulf’s
time, a race as barbarous as the modern Jugo-Slavs or Mississippians,
were yet capable, on occasion, of writing dithyrambs of an indubitable
sweet gaudiness.
The point needs no laboring. A glance at the history of any literature
will prove its soundness. Moreover, it is supported by what we see
around us every day—that is, if we look in literary directions.
Some of the best verse in the modern movement, at home and abroad,
has been written by intellectual adolescents who could no more write
a first-rate paragraph in prose then they could leap the Matterhorn
—girls just out of Vassar and Newnham, young army officers, chautauqua
orators, New England old maids, obscure lawyers and doctors, newspaper
reporters, all sorts of hollow dilettanti, male and female. Nine-tenths
of the best poetry of the world has been written by poets less than
thirty years old; a great deal more than half of it has been written
by poets under twenty-five. One always associates poetry with youth,
for it deals chiefly with the ideas that are peculiar to youth, and
its terminology is quite as youthful as its content. When one hears of
a poet past thirty-five, he seems somehow unnatural and even a trifle
obscene; it is as if one encountered a graying man who still played
the Chopin waltzes and believed in elective affinities. But prose,
obviously, is a sterner and more elderly matter. All the great masters
of prose (and especially of English prose, for its very resilience and
brilliance make it extraordinarily hard to write) have had to labor
for years before attaining to their mastery of it. The early prose of
Abraham Lincoln was remarkable only for its badness; it was rhetorical
and bombastic, and full of supernumerary words; in brief, it was a
kind of poetry. It took years and years of hard striving for Abe to
develop the simple and exquisite prose of his last half-decade. So with
Thomas Henry Huxley, perhaps the greatest virtuoso of plain English who
has ever lived. His first writings were competent but undistinguished;
he was almost a grandfather before he perfected his superb style.
And so with Anatole France, and Addison, and T. B. Macaulay, and
George Moore, and James Branch Cabell, and Æ.__, and Lord Dunsany,
and Nietzsche, and to go back to antiquity, Marcus Tullius Cicero. I
have been told that the average age of the men who made the Authorized
Version of the Bible was beyond sixty years. Had they been under thirty
they would have made it lyrical; as it was, they made it colossal.
The reason for all this is not far to seek. Prose, however powerful
its appeal to the emotions, is always based primarily upon logic,
and is thus scientific; poetry, whatever its so-called intellectual
content is always based upon mere sensation and emotion, and is thus
loose and disorderly. A man must have acquired discipline over his
feelings before he can write sound prose; he must have learned how to
subordinate his transient ideas to more general and permanent ideas;
above all, he must have acquired a good head for words, which is to
say, a capacity for resisting their mere lascivious lure. But to
write acceptable poetry, or even good poetry, he needs none of these
things. If his hand runs away with his head it is actually a merit.
If he writes what every one knows to be untrue, in terms that no sane
adult would ever venture to use in real life, it is proof of his
divine afflation. If he slops over and heaves around in a manner never
hitherto observed on land or sea, the fact proves his originality.
The so-called forms of verse and the rules of rhyme and rhythm do not
offer him difficulties; they offer him refuges. Their purpose is not
to keep him in order, but simply to give him countenance by providing
him with a formal orderliness when he is most out of order. Using
them is like swimming with bladders. The first literary composition
of a quick-minded child is always some sort of jingle. It starts out
with an inane idea—half an idea. Sticking to prose, it could go
no further. But to its primary imbecility it now adds a meaningless
phrase which, while logically unrelated, provides an agreeable concord
in mere sound—and the result is the primordial tadpole of a sonnet.
All the sonnets of the world, save a few of miraculous (and perhaps
accidental) quality, partake of this fundamental nonsensicality. In all
of them there are ideas that would sound idiotic in prose, and phrases
that would sound clumsy and uncouth in prose. But the rhyme scheme
conceals this nonsensicality. As a substitute for the missing logical
plausibility it provides a sensuous harmony. Reading the thing, one
gets a vague effect of agreeable sound, and so the logical feebleness
is overlooked. It is, in a sense, like observing a pretty girl,
competently dressed and made up, across the footlights. But translating
the poem into prose is like meeting and marrying her.