Part 6 (1/2)

Poetic prose, however, should not be used on every occasion, but only when an ecstasy is to be expressed. And, above all, it should be avoided--and this is how prose poetry got into disrepute--in expressing sentimental emotions, commonplace ideas, and the merely popular. When we read in eloquent prose, the grand eulogies on the flag, on the purity and redeeming virtues of mother-love, on the dignity of toil, on the glory of dying for one's country, on the goodness of G.o.d, etc., themes which have been celebrated so often that they are nauseous to us because nothing new is said, then we see how ridiculous prose poetry may become.

But as Pater says--impa.s.sioned prose has become the special and opportune art of the modern world, and it can exert all the varied charms of poetry down to the rhythm.

”The muse of prose-literature,” says Ma.s.son, ”has been hardly dealt with. We see not why, in prose, there should not be much of that license in the fantastic, that measured riot, the right of whimsy, that unbalanced dalliance with the extreme and the beautiful, which the world allows, by prescription, to verse. Why may not prose chase forest-nymphs and see little green-eyed elves, and delight in peonies and musk-roses, and invoke the stars, and roll mists about the hills, and watch the sea thundering through caverns and das.h.i.+ng against the promontories? Why, in prose, quail from the grand or ghastly in the one hand, or blush with shame at too much of the exquisite on the other? Is Prose made of iron?

Must it never weep, never laugh, never linger to look at a b.u.t.terfly, never ride at a gallop over the downs?”

Yet George Moore, a great poet in prose himself, tells us in his _Avowals_ that the greatness of English genius does not appear in its prose, but in its poetry, i. e., in verse. The greatness of English genius _is_ in its poetry, but in the poetry of its prose as well as in the poetry of its verse. It appears in the ordinary dialect of its novels and prose plays.

As a matter of fact, poetic prose has always been used. It is found in the earliest as well as the later literature of every nation. The Bible, Oriental Literature, the medieval romances, early Saxon prose are full of it. It made a reappearance with renewed force in the romantic movement that spread over England, Germany and France in the latter part of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries. In an age like the romantic, when the right to live and express emotions was pleaded, poetic prose, seeking restraint from metre, was especially appropriate. George Brandes has studied this movement in his _Main Currents_. Many of the leading writers of the romantic period used impa.s.sioned prose. Saintsbury has found much poetry even in the prose of John Wilson, who is not much read, one who was to some extent an enemy of the romantic movement, and Saintsbury reprints in his _Specimens of English Prose Style_, Wilson's _The Fairy's Funeral_.

America has contributed greatly to the development of prose poetry.

Hawthorne, Poe and Emerson were the first great masters in prose poetry we have had, and I doubt if as poets they have been surpa.s.sed by any of our metrical verse writers. One of the finest poems in American literature is undoubtedly Hawthorne's reflections of his lonely life in the Ivory Tower, when he revisited his old chamber in Salem where he spent so many years. The famous pa.s.sage from his diary, quoted in all big biographies, is as great a poem, though in prose.

Emerson's essays are studied with prose poems. I shall mention only one, the address to the poet, at the conclusion of the essay on ”The Poet.”

The Hawthorne pa.s.sage is as follows:

Salem, Oct. 4th. Union Street (Family Mansion).--. . . . Here I sit in my old accustomed chamber, where I used to sit in days gone by. . . . Here I have written many tales,--many that have been burned to ashes, many that doubtless deserved the same fate. This claims to be called a haunted chamber, for thousands upon thousands of visions have appeared to me in it; and some few of them have become visible to the world. If ever I should have a biographer, he ought to make great mention of this chamber in my memoirs, because so much of my lonely youth was wasted here, and here my mind and character were formed; and here I have been glad and hopeful, and here I have been despondent. And here I sat a long, long time, waiting patiently for the world to know me, and sometimes wondering why it did not know me sooner, or whether it would ever know me at all,--at least, till I were in my grave. And sometimes it seemed as if I were already in the grave, with only life enough to be chilled and benumbed. But oftener I was happy,--at least, as happy as I then knew how to be, or was aware of the possibility of being. By and by, the world found me out in my lonely chamber, and called me forth,--not, indeed, with a loud roar of acclamation, but rather with a still, small voice,--and forth I went, but found nothing in the world that I thought preferable to my old solitude till now. . . . And now I begin to understand why I was imprisoned so many years in this lonely chamber, and why I could never break through the viewless bolts and bars; for if I had sooner made my escape into the world, I should have grown hard and rough, and been covered with earthly dust, and my heart might have become callous by rude encounters with the mult.i.tude. . . . But living in solitude till the fulness of time was come, I still kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of my heart. . . .

I used to think I could imagine all pa.s.sions, all feelings, and states of the heart and mind; but how little did I know!

. . . Indeed, we are but shadows; we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream,--till the heart be touched.

That touch creates us,--then we begin to be,--thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of eternity. . . .

And the Emerson poem in prose is given herewith:

O poet! a new n.o.bility is conferred in groves and pastures, and not in castles or by the sword-blade any longer. The conditions are hard, but equal. Thou shalt leave the world, and know the muse only. Thou shalt not know any longer the times, customs, graces, politics, or opinions of men, but shalt take all from the muse. For the time of towns is tolled from the world by funereal chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy. G.o.d wills also that thou abdicate a manifold and duplex life, and that thou be content that others speak for thee. Others shall be thy gentlemen, and shall represent all courtesy and worldly life for thee; others shall do the great and resounding actions also. Thou shalt lie close hid with nature, and canst not be afforded to the Capitol or the Exchange. The world is full of renunciations and apprentices.h.i.+ps, and this is thine; thou must pa.s.s for a fool and a churl for a long season. This is the screen and sheath in which Pan has protected his well-beloved flower, and thou shalt be known only to thine own, and they shall console thee with tenderest love. And thou shalt not be able to rehea.r.s.e the names of thy friends in thy verse, for an old shame before the holy ideal. And this is the reward; that the ideal shall be real to thee, and the impressions of the actual world shall fall like summer rain, copious, but not troublesome to thy invulnerable essence. Thou shalt have the sole land for thy park and manor, the sea for thy bath and navigation, without tax and without envy; the woods and the rivers thou shalt own, and thou shalt possess that wherein others are only tenants and boarders. Thou true land-lord!

sea-lord! air-lord! Wherever snow falls or water flows or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial s.p.a.ce, wherever is danger, and awe, and love,--there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldst walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ign.o.ble.

FOOTNOTES:

[86:A] See the selections in _Pastels in Prose_ (1890), and the sympathetic introduction by William Dean Howells.

[88:A] See _The Chapbook_, April, 1921, London. _Poetry in Prose_, Three Essays by T. S. Eliot, Frederic Manning, Richard Aldington.

CHAPTER V

PROSE PRECEDES VERSE HISTORICALLY

One of the frequent sayings in the text books of literary history is that the literature of a nation always begins with poetry in verse, and that good prose is a later development. England and Greece are especially cited as examples, since Homer lived before Herodotus and the author of _Beowulf_ before King Alfred.

Scholars follow one another often like sheep. When a man of prominence utters an idea, it is taken up by a disciple and soon becomes a convention. The academic critics and professors usually enshrine the idea and it becomes a heresy to question it. The best ill.u.s.tration of this is the almost universal adherence given to the idea that verse poetry came before prose, a view first set forth by the geographer Strabo in speaking of Homer in the beginning of his _Geography_. His views were not entertained, I believe, by Plato or Aristotle. The pa.s.sage is worth quoting as I know of no other in literature that has raised so much confusion and misapprehension as to the nature of poetry:

Prose discourse--I mean artistic prose--is, I may say, an imitation of poetic discourse; for poetry as an art first came upon the scene and was first to win approval. Then came Cadmus, Pherecydes, Hecataeus and their followers, with prose writing in which they imitated the poetic art, abandoning the use of metre, but in other respects preserving the qualities of poetry. Then subsequent writers took away, each in his turn, something of these qualities, and brought prose down to its present form, as from a sublime height. In the same way we might say that comedy took its structure from tragedy, but that it also has been degraded from the sublime height of tragedy to its present ”prose-like” style, as it is called.

_Geography_, 1. 2. 6.

Most critics have accepted this view. Scaliger, however, in the middle of the sixteenth century repudiated it. He asked whether the first so-called poems, the metrical records in temples, antedated everyday speech.