Essays from 'The Guardian'

STUDENTS OF ENG

deceased masters of English, as itself a document or standard, in the matter of prose style. The essential difference between poetry and prose-"that other beauty of prose"-in the words of the motto he has chosen from Dryden, the first master of the sort of prose he prefers:-that is Mr. Saintsbury's burden. It is a consideration, undoubtedly, of great importance both for the writer and the critic; in England especially, where, although (as Mr. Saintsbury rightly points out, in correction of an imperfectly informed French critic of our literature) the radical distinction between poetry and prose has ever been recognized by its students, yet the imaginative impulse, which is perhaps the richest of our purely intellectual gifts, has been apt to invade the province of that tact and good judgment, alike as to matter and manner, in which we are not richer than other people. Great poetr

ll other aims, to laws of a structure primarily reasonable. Not that that reasonable prose structure, or architecture, as Mr. Saintsbury conceives it, has been always, or even generally, the ideal, even of those chosen writers here in evidence. Elizabethan prose, all too chaotic in the beauty and force which overflowed into it from Elizabethan poetry, and incorrect with an incorrectness which leaves it scarcely legitimate prose at all: then, in reaction against that, the correctness of Dryden, and his followers

generally as depend upon second thoughts. A collection of specimens of English poetry, for the purpose of exhibiting the achievement of prose excellences by it (in their legitimate measure) is a desideratum we commend to Mr. Saintsbury. It is the assertion, the development, the product of those very different indispensable qualities of poetry, in the presence [8] of which the English is equal or superior to all other modern literature-the native, sublime, and beautiful, but often wild and irregular, imaginative power in English poetry from Chaucer to Shakespeare, with which Professor Minto deals, in his Characteristics of English Poets (Blackwood), lately reprinted. That his book should have found many readers we can well understand, in the light of the excellent qualities which, in high degree, have gone to the ma

eds be limited to the superficialities of things, with a kind of narrowness amounting to a positive gift. What that mental attitude was capable of, in the way of an elegant, yet plain-spoken, and life-like delineation of men's moods and manners, as also in the way of determining those moods and manners themselves to all that was lively, unaffected, and harmonious, can be seen nowhere better than in Mr. Austin Dobson's Selections from Steele (Clarendon Press) prefaced by his careful "Life." The wel

s subjectivities-into books. What a survival of one long-past day, for instance, in "A Ramble from Richmond to London"! What truth to the surface

e of his private economy, and made him give me an account of the cha

this is what he sees at the early daily service then common in some City churches. Among those who were come only to see or be seen, "there were inde

great or little, finds what it has in common, and directly shows itself up. The natural strength of such literature will, of course, be in the line of its tendencies; in transparency, variety, and directness. To the unembarrassing matter, the unembarrassed style! Steele is, perhaps, the most impulsive writer of the school [12] to which he belongs; he abounds in felicities of impulse.

teristic of the brother and sister who were ever so successful in imparting to others their own enjoyment of books and people. The tragic circumstance which strengthened and consecrated their natural community of interest had, one might think, something to do with the far-reaching pensiveness even of their most humorous writing, touching often the deepest springs of pity and awe, as the way of the highest humour is-a way, however, very different from that of the humorists of the eighteenth century. But one cannot forget also that Lamb was early an enthusiastic admirer of Wordsworth: of Wordsworth, the first characteristic power of the nineteenth century, his essay on whom, in the Quarterly Review, Mr. Ainger here reprints. Would that he could have reprinted it as originally composed, and ungarbled by Gifford, the editor! Lamb, like Wordsworth, still kept the charm of a serenity, [14] a precision, unsurpassed by the quietest essayist

s many excellences as possible-opposite excellences, it may be-those other beauties of prose. A busy age will hardly educate its writers in correctness. Let its writers make time to write English more as a learned language; and completing that correction of style which had only gone a certain way in the last century, raise the general level of language towards their own. If there be a weakness in Mr. Saintsbury's view, it is perhaps in a tendency to regard style a little too independently of matter. And there are

ng, but can paint and gild anything whatever to order; whereas the artist, whom I am acknowledging, has his great or rich visions before him

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