Prose is the language of what we call real life, and it is only in prose
that an illusion of external reality can be given. Compare the whole
process and existence of character in a play of Shakespeare and in a
novel of Balzac. I choose Balzac among novelists because his mind is
nearer to what is creative in the poet's mind than that of a novelist,
and his method nearer to the method of the poet. Take King Lear and take
Père Goriot. Goriot is a Lear at heart, and he suffers the same
tortures and humiliations. But precisely where Lear grows up before the
mind's eye into a vast cloud and shadowy mountain of trouble, Goriot
grows downward into the earth and takes root there, wrapping the dust
about all his fibers. Lear may exchange his crown for the fool's bauble,
knowing nothing of it; but Goriot knows well enough the value of every
bank-note that his daughters rob him of. In that definiteness, that new
power of "stationary" emotion in a firm and material way, lies one of
the great opportunities of prose.
The genius of prose is essentially different from the "genius of
poetry;" and that is the reason why writers like De Quincy and Ruskin
trespassed, as thieves do, on forbidden ground. It is much better to
pick forbidden fruit and to eat thereof, and be as stealthy as the
traveler in Blake's deliciously wicked poem who steals from the unloved
lover the woman he loves:
Soon after she has gone from me
A traveller came by,
Silently, invisibly:
He took her with a sigh.
The moral of it is "Never seek to sell thy love;" but such writers as
those I have referred to tread fallen fruit ruthlessly under foot and
therefore ought to be thrust out of the garden they have robbed. Both
tried to write prose as if they were writing verse, and both failed;
Ruskin ruined by his fatal facility and De Quincy by his cultivating
eloquence in rhetoric. Certain prose writers have written lyrical prose,
because their genius at times drove them to do so, and with an absolute
success. One finds such passages in Shakespeare and Blake and Pater and
Lamb; in certain pages of Balzac and of Flaubert and of Meredith and of
Conrad. Yet, in what I must call lyrical prose, there is a certain
rhythm, but not that of rhymed verse; that is to say, if the inspiration
were the same, the mediums are different: the rhythm of prose that has
no meter and the rhythm of verse that has meter.
Take, for instance, Peacock, who was neither a great prose writer nor a
great poet, but whose novels are unique in English, and are among the
most scholarly, original and entertaining prose writings of the century.
A strain too learned for a shallow age,
Too wide for selfish bigots, let his page
Which charms the chosen spirits of the time
Fold itself up for the serener clime
Of years to come, and find its recompense
In that just expectation.
So Shelley praises him, who was certainly aware of Peacock's clever
scraps of rhyming that are like no other verse; the masterpiece being
the comically heroic _War-Song of Dinar Valor_, which the author defines
as "the quintessence of all war songs that were ever written, and the
sum and substances of all the appetences, tendencies and consequences of
military." This learned wit, his satire upon the vulgarity of progress
(in which he is one with Baudelaire and one with Meredith) are more
continuously present in his prose than in his verse; yet his characters
are caricatures, they speak a language that is not ours; they are given
sensational adventures, often comical in the extreme; and in these pages
plenty of nonsense and of laughter and of satire and of serious prose
with an undercurrent of bitter cynicism. He treats all his creatures
cruelly, and I can not help seeing the reason why Richard Garnett
admired his prose so much: that there is something curiously alike and
unlike in their humor.
Garnett himself told me, as I always thought, that _The Twilight of the
Gods_ was far and away the best book he had written. In France Marcel
Schwob and André Gide have done certain things comparable in their way
with these learned inventions, these ironic "criticisms of life," these
irreverent classical burlesques in which religion, morality, learning,
and all civilization's conventions, are turned topsy-turvy, and
presented in the ridiculousness of their unaccustomed attitude. But no
modern man in England has done anything remotely comparable with them,
and neither Schwob nor André Gide has heaped mockery so high as in
_Abdullah the Adite_, and remained as sure a master of all the
reticences of art and manners. This learned mockery has an undefinable
quality, macabre, diabolical, a witchcraft of its own, which I can find
in no other writer.
To return to the question of rhythm, the rhythm of prose, for one thing,
is physiological, the rhythm of poetry is musical. There is in every
play of Ibsen a rhythm perfect of its kind, but it is the physiological
rhythm of prose. The rhythm of a play of Shakespeare speaks to the blood
like wine or music: it is with exultation, with intoxication, that we
see or read _Antony and Cleopatra_ or even _Richard II_; it gives us
exactly the same intoxication and the same exultation when we hear
Vladimir de Pachmann play the piano, when we hear Wagner's _Tristan._
But the rhythm of a play of Ibsen is like that of a diagram in Euclid;
it is the rhythm of logic, and it produces in us the purely mental
exaltation of a problem solved.