ENGLISH PROSE STYLE.

"The other harmony of prose."-Dryden.

A YEAR or more ago it was reported, perhaps falsely, that a

great French writer, whose command of his own tongue was only equalled by his ignorance of the English language and literature, gave in some semi-public form his opinion of the difference between French and English prose and verse. A perfect language, he opined, should show a noteworthy difference between its style in prose and its style in verse: this difference existed in French and did not exist in English. I shall give no opinion as to the truth of this axiom in general, or as to its application to French. But it is not inappropriate to begin an essay on the subject of English prose style by observing that, whatever may be its merits and defects, it is entirely differentdifferent by the extent of the whole heaven of language-from English verse style. We have had writers, including some of genius, who have striven to make prose like verse and we have had other writers, including some of genius, who have striven to make verse like prose. Both in so doing have shown themselves to be radically mistaken. The actual vocabulary of the best English style of different periods is indeed almost entirely common to verse and to prose, and it is perhaps this fact which induced the distinguished person above referred to,

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and others not much less distinguished, to make a mistake of confusion. The times when the mere dictionary of poetic style has been distinct from the mere dictionary of prosaic style (for there have been such) have not been those in which English literature was at its highest point. But between the syntax, taking that word in its proper sense of the order of words, of prose and the syntax of verse; between the rhythm of prose and the rhythm of verse; between the sentence- and clause-architecture of prose and the sentence- and clause-architecture of verse, there has been since English literature took a durable form in the sixteenth century at least as strongly marked a difference in English as in other languages.

Good poets have usually been good writers of prose; but in English more than in any other tongue the prose style of these writers has differed from their verse style. The French prose and the French verse of Victor Hugo are remarkably similar in all but the most arbitrary differences, and the same may be said, to a less extent, of the prose and the verse style of Goethe. But Shelley's prose and Shelley's verse (to confine myself to examples taken from the present century) are radically different in all points of their style and verbal power; and so are Coleridge's prose and Coleridge's verse. The same is eminently true of Shakspere, and true to a very great extent of Milton. If it is less true of Dryden and of Pope (it is often true of Dryden to a great degree), that is exactly in virtue of the somewhat un-English influence which, though it benefited English prose not a little, worked upon both. In our own days prose style has become somewhat disarranged, but in the hands of those who have any pretence to style at all, its merits and its defects are in great part clearly traceable to discernment on the one hand, to confusion on the other, of the separate and distinct aims and methods of the prose-writer and the poet.

It should scarcely be necessary to say that no attempt is made in this essay to compile a manual of English prose-writing, or to lay down didactically the principles of the art. The most that can be done or that is aimed at is the discovery by a running critical and historical commentary on the illustrations which follow, and on the course of English prose generally, what have been the successive characteristics of its style, what the aims of its writers, and what the amount of success that they have attained. There is nothing presumptuous in the attitude of the student, whatever there may be in the attitude of the teacher. Nearly ten years ago, at the suggestion of Mr. John Morley, I attempted in the Fortnightly Review a study of the chief characteristics of contemporary prose. Since then I have reviewed many hundreds of new books, and have read again, or for the first time, many hundreds of old ones. I do not know that the two processes have altered my views much they certainly have not lessened my estimate of the difficulty of writing good prose, or of the merit of good prose when written. During these ten years considerable attention has undoubtedly been given by English writers to style: I wish I could think that the result has been a distinct improvement in the quality of the product. If the present object were a study of contemporary prose, much would have to be said on the growth of what I may call the Aniline style and the style of Marivaudage, the first dealing in a gorgeous and glaring vocabulary, the second in unexpected turns and twists of thought or phrase, in long-winded description of incident, and in finical analysis of motive. Unexpectedness, indeed, seems to be the chief aim of the practitioners of both, and it lays them perhaps open to the damaging question of Mr. Milestone in Headlong Hall. When we hear that a bar of music has "veracity," that there is a finely-executed "passage" in a marble chimney-piece, that someone is "part of the con

science of a nation," that the "andante" of a sonnet is specially noteworthy, the quest after the unexpected has become sufficiently evident. But these things are not directly our subject, though we shall find other things remarkably like them in the history of the past. For there is nothing new in art except its beauties, and all the faults of French naturalism and English æstheticism were doubtless perfectly well known to critics and admired by the uncritical in the days of Hilpa and Shalum.

For reasons obvious enough, not the most or the least obvious being the necessity of beginning somewhere, we begin these specimens with the invention of printing; not of course denying the title of books written before Caxton set up his press to the title of English or of English prose, but simply fixing a term from which literary production has been voluminous and uninterrupted in its volume.

In the earlier

examples, however (up, it may be said, to Lyly), the character of the passages, though often interesting and noteworthy, is scarcely characteristic. All the writers of this period are, if not actually, yet in a manner, translators. The work of Malory, charming as it is, and worthy to occupy the place of honour here given to it, is notoriously an adaptation of French originals. Latimer and Ascham, especially the former, in parts highly vernacular, are conversational where they are not classical.

It was not till the reign of Elizabeth was some way advanced that a definite effort on the part of writers to make an English prose style can be perceived. It took for the most part one of two directions. The first was vernacular in the main, but very strongly tinged with a peculiar form of preciousness, the origin of which has been traced to various sources, but which appears clearly enough in the French rhétoriqueurs of the fifteenth century, from whom it spread to Italy, Spain, and England.