Great poetry and great prose,
it might be found, have most of their qualities in common. But [5]
their indispensable qualities are different, or even opposed; and it
is just the indispensable qualities of prose and poetry respectively,
which it is so necessary for those who have to do with either to bear
ever in mind. Order, precision, directness, are the radical merits
of prose thought; and it is more than merely legitimate that they
should form the criterion of prose style, because within the scope of
those qualities, according to Mr. Saintsbury, there is more than just
the quiet, unpretending usefulness of the bare sermo pedestris.
Acting on language, those qualities generate a specific and unique
beauty--"that other beauty of prose"--fitly illustrated by these
specimens, which the reader needs hardly be told, after what has been
now said, are far from being a collection of "purple patches."
Whether or not he admits their practical cogency, an attentive reader
will not fail to be interested in the attempt Mr. Saintsbury has made
to give technical rules of metre for the production of the true prose
rhythm. Any one who cares to do so might test the validity of those
rules in the nearest possible way, by applying them to the varied
examples in this wide [6] survey of what has been actually well done
in English prose, here exhibited on the side of their strictly
prosaic merit--their conformity, before all other aims, to laws of a
structure primarily reasonable.
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