prose-writer may be read by whoso wills. | a supply of legitimate ornament which few At times it has seemed as if the weeds writers have ever had at command. would grow up with the good seed and Tastes, I suppose, will always differ as to choke it. Mr. Swinburne has fallen into the error, not unnatural for a poet, of forgetting that the figures and the language allowable in poetry are not also allowable in prose. The dangerous luxury of alliteration has attracted him only too often, and the still more dangerous licence of the figure called chiasmus has been to him even as a siren, from whose clutches he has been hardly saved. But the noticeable thing is that the excellences of his prose speech have grown even stranger and its weaknesses weaker since he began. In the essay on Blake, admirable as was much thereof, a wilful waste of language, not unfrequently verging on a woful want of sense, was too frequently apparent. In the notes on his poems, and in "Under the Microscope," just as was most of the counter-criticism, it was impossible not to notice a tendency to verbiage and a proneness, I will not say to prefer sound to sense, but unnecessarily to reinforce sense with sound. But at the same time, in the Essays and Studies," and the essay on Chapman, no competent critic could fail to notice, notwithstanding occasional outbreaks, the growing reticence and severity of form, as well as the increasing weight and dignity of meaning. Mr. Swinburne, as a prose-writer, is in need of nothing but the pruning-hook. Most of his fellows are in want chiefly of something which might be worth pruning.

66

It is obviously impossible in the present article to notice minutely all even of the more prominent names in contemporary prose. Some there are among the older of our writers who yet retain the traditions of the theological school of writing, to which style owes so much. A good deal might be said of Cardinal Manning's earlier style (for his progress in this hierarchy has hardly corresponded with his promotion in the other), as well as of Dr. Newman's admirable clearness and form, joined as it is, perhaps unavoidably, to a certain hardness of temper. Mr. Disraeli's stylistic peculiarities would almost demand an essay to themselves. They have never perhaps had altogether fair play; for novel-writing and politics are scarcely friends to style. But Mr. Disraeli has the root of the matter in him, and has never been guilty of the degradation of the sentence, which is the crying sin of modern prose; while his unequalled felicity in the selection of single epithets (witness the famous "Batavian graces" and a thousand others) gives him¦

the question whether his ornamentation is not sometimes illegitimate. The parrotcry of upholstery is easily raised. But I think we have at last come to see that rococo work is good and beautiful in its way, and he must be an ungrateful critic who objects to the somewhat lavish emeralds and rubies of the "Arabian Nights." Of younger writers, there are not many whose merits it would be proper to specify in this place; while the prevailing defects of current style have been already fully noticed. But there is one book of recent appearance which sets the possibilities of modern English prose in the most favourable light, and gives the liveliest hope as to what may await us, if writers, duly heeding the temptations to which they are exposed, and duly availing themselves of the opportunities for study and imitation which are at their disposal, should set themselves seriously to work to develop pro virili the prose resources of the English tongue. Of the merely picturesque beauty of Mr. Pater's "Studies in the History of the Renaissance," there can be no necessity for me to say anything here. In the first place it cannot escape the notice of any one who reads the book, and in the second, if there be any truth in what has been already said, the present age by no means needs to be urged to cultivate or to appreciate this particular excellence. The important point for us is the purely formal or regular merit of this style, and this is to be viewed with other eyes and tested by other methods than those which are generally brought to bear by critics of the present day. The main point which I shall notice is the subordinate and yet independent beauty of the sentences when taken separately from the paragraph. This is a matter of the very greatest importance. In too much of our present prose the individual sentence is unceremoniously robbed of all proper form and comeliness. If it adds its straw to the heap, its duty is supposed to be done. Mr. Pater has not fallen in this error, nor has he followed the multitude to do evil in the means which he has adopted for the production of the singular "sweet attractive kind of grace" which distinguishes these studies. A bungler would have depended, after the fashion of the day, upon strongly coloured epithets, upon complicated and quasi-poetic cadences of phrase, at least upon an obtrusively voluptuous softness of thought and a cumbrous protraction of

sentence. Not so Mr. Pater. There is not to be discovered in his work the least sacrifice of the phrase to the word, of the clause to the phrase, of the sentence to the clause, of the paragraph to the sentence. Each holds its own proper place and dignity while contributing duly to the dignity and place of its superior in the hierarchy. Let any reader turn to pp. 15, 16, or pp. 118, 119, of the book, and see, as he cannot fail to see, the extraordinary mastery with which this complicat ed success is attained. Often the cadence of the sentence considered separately will seem to be and will in truth be quite different from that of the paragraph, because its separate completeness demands this difference. Yet the total effect, so far from being marred, is enhanced. There is no surer mark of the highest style than this separate and yet subordinate finish. In the words of Mr. Ruskin, it is "so modulated that every square inch is a perfect composition."

master of style must stand or fall. For years, almost for centuries, French prose has been held up as a model to English prose-writers, and for the most part justly. Only of late has the example come to have something of the helot about it. The influence of Victor Hugo-an influence almost omnipotent among the younger generation of French literary men - has been exercised in prose with a result almost as entirely bad as its effect in verse has been good. The rules of verse had stiffened and cramped French poetry unnaturally, and violent exercise was the very thing required to recover suppleness and strength; but French prose required no such surgery, and it has consequently lost its ordered beauty without acquiring compensatory charms. The proportions of the sentence have been wilfully disregarded, and the result is that French prose is probably now at a lower point of average merit than at any time for two centuries.

It is this perfection of modulation to That an art should be fully recognized which we must look for the excellence as an art, with strict rules and requirethat we require and do not meet with in ments, is necessary to attainment of excelmost of the work of the present day, and lence in it; and in England this recogniit is exactly this modulation with which tion, which poetry has long enjoyed, has all the faults that I have had to comment hardly yet been granted to prose. No upon in the preceding pages are incon- such verses as we find by scores in such sistent. To an artist who should set be- books as Marston's satires would now fore him such a model as either of the suggest themselves as possible or tolerpassages which I have quoted, lapses able to any writer of Marston's powers; into such faults would be impossible. He but in prose many a sentence quite as inwill not succumb to the easy diffuseness tolerable as any of these verses is conwhich may obliterate the just proportion stantly written by persons of presumably and equilibrium of his periods. He will sound education and competent wits. not avail himself of the ready assistance The necessities of the prose-writer are, of stereotyped phraseology to spare him- an ear in the first place: this is indispenself the trouble of casting new moulds and sable and perhaps not too common. In devising new patterns. He will not im- the second place, due study of the best agine that he is a scene-painter instead of authors, as well to know what to avoid as a prose-writer, a decorator instead of an what to imitate. Lastly, care, which perarchitect, a caterer for the desires of the haps is not too much to demand of any many instead of a priest to the worship of artist, so soon as he has recognized and the few. He will not indulge in a style has secured recognition of the fact that which requires the maximum of ornament he is an artist. Čare is indeed the one in order to disguise and render palatable thrice-to-be-repeated and indispensable the minimum of art and of thought. He will not consider it his duty to provide, at the least possible cost of intellectual effort on the part of the reader, something which may delude him into the idea that he is exercising his judgment and his taste. And, above all, he will be careful that his sentences have an independent completeness and harmony, no matter what purpose they may be designed to fulfil. For the sentence is the unit of style; and by the cadence and music, as well as by the purport and bearing, of his sentences, the

property of the prose-writer. It is preeminently necessary to him for the very reason that it so easy to dispense with it, and to write prose without knowing what one does. Verse, at least verse which is to stand, as Johnson says, "the test of the finger if not of the ear," cannot be written without conscious effort and observation. But something which may be mistaken for prose can unfortunately be produced without either taste, or knowledge, or care. With these three requisites there should be no limit to the beauty and to the variety

of the results obtained. The fitness of | English for prose composition will hardly be questioned, though it may be contended with justice that perhaps in no other language has the average merit of its prosé been so far below the excellence of its most perfect specimens. But the resources which in the very beginning of the practice of original composition in fully organized English could produce the splendid and thoughtful, if quaint and cumbrous, embroideries of "Euphues" and the linked sweetness of the " Arcadia," which could give utterance to the symphonies of Browne and Milton, which could furnish and suffice for the matchless simplicity of Bunyan, the splendid strength of Swift, the transparent clearness of Middleton and Berkeley, the stately architecture of Gibbon, are assuredly equal to the demands of any genius that may arise to employ them.

Rude boy!

Will the day ever dawn when brothers will be heard to speak as befits their humble station? Will sisters ever succeed in extracting from those chubby lips anything approaching to respectful language? Will Beatrix ever prevail with Tom? We should say not.

To begin with, Bee is half-hearted about it. When there is no one else present, no spectator to see, no auditor to hear, she is ready to be Bet, Betty, Bee, anything and everything the boys choose to call her. She assists in their projects, overlooks their shortcomings, stand in the breach when the schoolroom revolts from the dining-room, and is a useful, humble, and efficient companion.

But down-stairs the scene changes.
Beatrix expects to be Beatrix.

frowns him down accordingly; whereas poor Charlie regards it as a feat worthy of mention, and wonders what his sister would be at!

She would, when there, fain exact from Jack, Tom, and Charlie, a degree of subIt is therefore the plain duty of every servience, and likewise an amount of critic to assist at least in impressing upon reticence, which the poor lads do not unthe mass of readers that they do not re-derstand, and are not disposed to submit ceive what they ought to receive from the to. She thinks it mean of Charlie to tell mass of writers, and in suggesting a mul- aloud that she has been galloping baretiplication and tightening of the require-backed on the pony all the afternoon, and ments which a prosaist must fulfil. There are some difficulties in the way of such impression and suggestion in the matter of style. It is not easy for the critic to escape being bidden, in the words of Nicholas Or Jack is the delinquent. He comBreton, "not to talk too much of it, having plains, in no undertones certainly, that so little of it," or to avoid the obvious jest of Betty had forgotten to send his macinDiderot on Beccaria, that he had written antosh to be dried, after wearing it out in "ouvrage sur le style où il n'y a point de style." For, unluckily, fault-finding is an ungracious business, and in criticising prose as prose the criticism has to be mostly faultfinding, the pleasanter if even harder task of discriminating appreciation being as a rule withheld from the critic. But I can see no reason why this state of things should continue, and I know no Utopia which ought to be more speedily rendered topic, than that in which at least the same censure which is now incurred by a halting verse, a discordant rhyme, or a clumsy stanza, should be accorded to a faultilyarranged clause, to a sentence of inharmonious cadence, to a paragraph of irregular and ungraceful architecture.

GEORGE SAINTSBURY.

From Blackwood's Magazine.
BEE OR BEATRIX.

"HOLLOA! Betty is gorgeous! Isn't she? Rather!"

the rain. He did not mind her taking the macintosh, but she ought to have sent it to the kitchen when she came in.

Jack has a generous nature, and his complaint is just. It is therefore perfectly incomprehensible to him that Bee should crimson up to the eyes, as she gracefully lounges over her embroidery by Lady Adela's side, and that she should seize the moment when they meet alone in the gallery afterwards, to reproach him for his rudeness and stupidity.

Had he grudged her the use of his coat? Had he not gone without, himself, and got drenched, and never said a word about it? It is too bad to find fault with him for only wishing to have it dried; she knew they were going out in the boat after dinner, and that was why he cared; and if she did the same thing again, he would just hide the macintosh, and that was all about it.

Beatrix cannot make them comprehend.

She has only been emancipated from schoolroom bondage a few months ago,

and it seems to her that she has overleapt | staircase is illuminated by a radiant visa great barrier. ion, a picture.