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, b 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. |