n'a pas but only ce qu'il a. In his case, and despite the long sentences (which are alternated with quite short ones), "what he has" is a certain combination of dignity and ease, which will be found to be not common elsewhere in his time, and hardly to exist before him. But we should notice in Clarendon, as in his contemporaries, Walton and Howell, to whom we are coming, as in Owen Felltham and other forerunners of the plain style; as we shall notice still more in the generation (born in or about 1630) who followed them, that we are losing something, though it may be difficult to define that something in terms which will be generally admitted. It is not rhythm as such, for—although we may come to the loss even of that prose without rhythm is scarcely prose at all. But it is rhythm which reduces itself to its lowest terms, rhythm which does not indeed hamper or impair the meaning by positive ugliness of sound, which even supplies it with a convenient vehicle of fairly harmonious expression, but which neither adds to it, as the greatest masters of the ornate style do, indefinite and splendid bonuses of sheer musical delight, nor even sets it, as they and others less great attempt to do, and often succeed in doing, to a less lavish and abounding but still additional accomplishment of prose melody. Balance and antithesis positively assist comprehension (though with the danger, which we shall see fully illustrated later, of sometimes giving to nonsense an air of comprehensibility), so balance and antithesis are admitted. But we discern few other devices of art.

That this is sometimes unfortunate can hardly be denied. It looks as if Clarendon had tried to work himself into a higher strain in treating the character of King Charles. He was evidently himself much moved, and he has achieved moving expression. But there are two unlucky breakdowns in the passage, both of which are due, not merely to anti-climax of thought, but to a still greater anti-climax of expression and arrangement:

And, after all this, when a man might reasonably believe that less than a universal defection of three nations could not have reduced a

great king to so ugly a fate, it is most certain that in that very hour when he was thus wickedly murdered in the sight of the sun, he had as great a share in the hearts and affections of his subjects in general —was as much beloved, esteemed, and longed for by the people in general of the three nations, as any of his predecessors had ever been. To conclude, he was the worthiest gentleman, the best master, the best friend, the best husband, the best father, and the best Christian that the age in which he lived produced. And if he were not the best king, if he were without some parts and qualities which have made some kings great and happy, no other prince was ever so unhappy, who was possessed of half his virtues and endowments, and so much without any kind of vice.

Here there is much that is quite good-practically of the best-but the two italicised clauses, which should have wound up and completed the harmony with burst of trumpet or dying fall of lyre, are quite wretched things, blunted gossip-phrase, without selection, appropriateness, or cadence of any sort. There is no such glaring blot in the pendant character of Cromwell, but it also does not aspire above a very ordinary quality of rhythm.

Of some other writers just mentioned, Howell requires no notice here because his very principle and canon was a pedestrian familiarity; but more should perhaps be said, if only in a note, of Walton, on the formal qualities of whose style doctors have differed, though hardly any one who can be called a doctor has denied its charm.1

1 The plainer parts of the Complete Angler are incomparably sweet and pleasant narrative-conversation. In the more ambitious, Izaak succumbs to verse, not indeed constantly decasyllabic, but sometimes that, and sometimes the favourite octosyllabic of his earlier years. The diction, also, is rather too definitely poetic :

"Look, under that broad beech-tree I sat down, when I was last this way a-fishing, and the birds in the adjoining grove seemed to have a friendly contention with an echo, whose dead voice seemed to live in a hollow tree, near to the brow of that primrose hill; there I sat viewing the silver streams glide silently towards their centre, the tempestuous sea; yet sometimes opposed by rugged roots, and pebble-stones, | which broke their waves, and turned them into foam : | and sometimes I beguiled time by viewing the harmless lambs, some leaping securely in the cool shade, whilst others sported themselves in the cheerful sun; and saw others craving comfort from the swollen udders of their bleating dams. | As I thus sat, these and other sights had so fully possessed my soul with content, that I thought, as the poet has happily expressed it, etc."

INTERCHAPTER II

1

IN the last (and first) Interchapter, what we had to survey was entirely, or almost entirely, tentative; and, what is more, tentative that for the most part, and almost entirely, did not know what it was attempting, or even that it was making any attempt. Chaucer makes no apology for his early prose as he does for his verse: it is true that his prose is by no means very much in need of any, but consciousness of this is far less likely to have been the reason of the silence than unconsciousness of the existence of any standard, such as was felt, in the other case, to crave or get attainment, or to be, if possible, surpassed. Caxton feels vaguely that French is a "fair language," and that English (at least his English) is not. Pecock and the translators of the Imitation feel that English vocabulary needs a great deal of supplementing. Fisher applies some of the tricks and figures of the traditional rhetoric to the exornation of the vernacular. Once Chaucer, whether knowingly or not knowingly, makes his prose definitely rhythmical, in a wrong direction, by stuffing or dredging it with blank verse. Once again, in a major instance Malory certainly, and others in minor instances probably, adopt a more cunning manipulation of verse-rhythm, so as to make it genuine but beautiful prose. Yet this, like the whole character of his masterpiece—the one masterpiece of the entire Middle English

1 If anybody says here or elsewhere, "You have said all this before," I can only allege the novelty of the whole subject. What is told three times" is perhaps not necessarily "true," or at least more true, for that; but unless the teller is very clumsy, and the hearer preternaturally quick or preternaturally slow, it ought to be more clear. I wish to "couple up" the history as distinctly and in as many different ways as may be legitimately possible.

period in prose-is, as it were, a blessed accident, a chance-medley of man and hour, with gracious result.

1

On the other hand, in the long procession of centuries earlier, though it is hardly possible to point to any achieved pattern of prose-rhythm or of prose, not a little material, and even some method, had been, however unconsciously, amassed. If we have not been able to work out, in such detail as was once hoped, that interesting suggestion as to the influence of Anglo-Saxon verse upon Middle and Modern English prose, there is fortunately no necessity to abandon it as altogether, or even to any great degree, a mistake. I believe it to be the fact that alliteration does play a greater part in our later prose than it did in our earliest, excluding, of course, prose-verse or verse-prose like Elfric's. I believe that trochaic rhythm is more conspicuous in modern English prose of the elaborate kind than it is in modern English verse. And it is certain that what would once have been called the irregularity—what it is better to call the extreme freedom in correspondence—of Anglo-Saxon verse, reflects itself to some extent in that of the kola of modern English prose, while balance and parallelism, and what we have called the telescopic arrangement of clause, certainly appear in the two, and may bear a relation of inheritance. Undoubtedly Anglo-Saxon verse and modern English prose are more like each other than the former is like modern English verse.

But we must not omit to resume once more the characteristics and achievements of Anglo-Saxon prose itself. Its extreme earliness, its use for businesslike and for literary purposes at a time when almost every other European nation took refuge in Latin, is a very remarkable point. The early elaboration, so easy-looking, but by its rarity shown to be so difficult, of a simple narrative style like that of Apollonius, is another. But the most remarkable for our purpose is a third, different from these.

This is the early, the abundant, the quite evidently conscious and deliberate adoption of highly rhythmical 1 V. sup. pp. Io and II note.

prose by these our ancestors.

It is, of course, easy to say,

as has been sometimes said, that this is mainly or merely imitation of a tendency of the Latin of the Dark Ages as we find it in Martianus Capella and Sidonius Apollinaris and Venantius Fortunatus. There is no need to denyas indeed there could hardly be any object in denying— a possible indebtedness of suggestion, for all these writers, and some others like them, were undoubtedly earlier than our Old English prose-poets, while Martianus was certainly, and the others were probably, well known to them. But while these were equally known in other countries, they did not produce the same effect in other vernaculars;1 and what is even more important, the whole character of Old English rhythm is so different from that of Latin that imitation, beyond mere suggestion, is impossible. As to the positive artistic value of such work as Elfric's alliterative and counter-stressed prose, opinions may differ; but I cannot conceive any sober critic denying that the presence of such work, and its proportion in a not very extensive literature, is a phenomenon which must be taken into consideration, especially when we remember what later stages of the same language have done in the seventeenth century and in the nineteenth. I am quite careless of the reproach of vulgar patriotism when I say that we have the most glorious ornate prose in Europe; I think that I am historically secure when I say that we have also the earliest.1

But before these later stages could be reached-long before they actually were-the language itself had to go through processes of disorganisation and reorganisation which made an elaborate prose for a long time impossible. In almost the last moments of the life of pure AngloSaxon-in the closing passages of the Chronicle far into the twelfth century—the old tongue showed its alreadymentioned grasp of simple, straightforward narration. A

1 The chief competitors that might perhaps be adduced as against the two propositions above are Irish, Old High German, and Icelandic. But the last-named does not produce elaborate prose till the twelfth or thirteenth century; the Irish dates are extremely uncertain; and Notker is slightly junior to Ælfric, as well as less advanced.