and Landor show a certain tendency to sink from the polyphonic and symphonic music of the highest kind to the antithetic groups, oratorical or other, of the standard style. It is, at first sight, curious, though not perhaps really surprising,' that hardly anything of the same sort is to be found in the great symphonists of the seventeenth century. We have done, however, no despite to this style, which, in its highest examples, is satisfying if not exactly delectable, or, at least, transporting; and which is undoubtedly the best for the general purposes of prose. But it has been pointed out that, in all but its very best examples, though a not unpleasant rhythmical effect may be got out of the clause-pairs or batches taken together, the rhythmical appeal dwindles through clause, and wordgroup, and word, and syllable, and letter, till it sometimes very nearly vanishes. Although in good English delivery, as in good English writing, the principle of general atonic equality, diversified with crashes and bursts of emphasis, never prevails as it does in French, some progress is made in this direction. The foot-division, inseparable from rhythm and scarcely capable of extension beyond the fifth syllable, becomes merged in long sectionsweeps, which are hardly analysable. And this, increasing as you go lower, constitutes the main difference between the whole of this Fourth class and the fully rhythmed Third.2

Thus rhythmical prose, in its perfection, is distinguished from poetry by subtle but easily recognisable differences of diction, arrangement, and the like, but most of all, and most essentially, by the absence of definite and ostentatious correspondence in rhythmical-metrical character, and of equivalent or definitely corresponding "lines." It is

1 The fact is simply that this style was not yet discovered generally, though there is something much like it, especially in Jonson. Extravagant and often caricatured balance, as in Lyly, and even before him in Ascham, was common; but Dryden had not yet come.

2 It would require, of course, a very elaborate system of sub-classification to take in all the varieties. Some very distinguished and delightful writers, such as Goldsmith, would, in fact, have to be "species by themselves," like Walton above (p. 216) and Lamb below (p. 362). But I do not think that, in a book on the present scale, I am bound to provide excursus of this kind.

separated from the various hybrids of the Ossianic, Blakite, or Whitmanian kind in the same way, though not to the same degree, in more respects than one— especially in the absence of even irregular stichic division. It obeys to the full that universal law of prose which dictates continuous and uninterrupted flow, not merely to the close of the sentence, but (with a difference of course) to the close of the paragraph. Yet it retains, in a greater degree perhaps than some at least of these hybrids, the rhythmical valuation of every word and syllable; and by this retention, as well as by the intense variety of its rhythm, it is further distinguished from the lower kinds of prose proper.

The work of all the writers with whom this chapter has been more specially busy lasted till well into the second half of the nineteenth century, Wilson surviving the dividing line for nearly a lustrum, De Quincey for nearly a decade, and Landor until the century had all but entered upon its last third. But their position as pioneers is quite unaffected by this; and it will not prevent us, any more than the fact that Mr. Ruskin's work had begun long before even Wilson died, from making an arrangement of the remaining subjects, convenient in practice and not really repugnant to chronology.

CHAPTER X

MISCELLANEOUS PROSE, 1820-1860

The coexistence of different styles in 1820-Momentary return to Landor-Comparative merits-The "standard" still prevalent, but with a tendency to degradation-Definition of "slovenliness"-Return to examples-Coleridge again-Jeffrey-Note on italics-Chalmers-Note on Irving-Hazlitt-Lamb-Leigh Hunt-Carlyle-Macaulay-The novelists: Miss Austen and Peacock-Lord Beaconsfield-Dickens-Thackeray-Newman.

ence of

THE space devoted, in the last chapter, to the farthest The coexistdevelopments of rhythmical prose up to date should, different styles of course, misguide no one as to the existence of many in 1820. other kinds during the lifetime of the authors there chiefly discussed; or even as to the practice, actually there noticed, of these same writers in different styles. By far the larger part of Landor's voluminous prose is, like the larger part by far of De Quincey's, written in a variety of the "standard" style; and it may even be said that, for the moment, few took up the new method.

Landor.

It may possibly amuse some readers to repeat an ex- Momentary perience which I made, just before writing these words, in return to re-reading the Conversations straight through. At the distance of a bare half-dozen pages (Works, ii. 171-177) the two following short passages specially caught my eye. Here is the first:

On perceiving the countryman, she [a tigress suckling her young] drew up her feet gently, and squared her mouth, and rounded her eyes, slumberous with content; and they looked, he said, like seagrottoes, obscurely green, interminably deep, at once awaking fear and stilling and compressing it.

Comparative merits,

The other is this:

Where priests have much influence the gods have little; and where they are numerous and wealthy, the population is scanty and miserably poor. War may be, and certainly is, destructive; but war, as thou well knowest, if it cuts off boughs and branches, yet withers not the trunk.

Here Momus may suggest that "and compressing" is otiose in meaning and not exactly an improvement in rhythm; and Zoilus may say that "as thou well knowest " is superfluous and out of keeping. The Judicious Critic will prefer to draw attention to the polar difference between the colour, the tone, and the consequent rhythmical effect of the two, both of them, by the way, occurring in Greek conversations, in both of which Xenophon actually figures. The first has, in its small compass, every characteristic of the new mode-exact and subtle observation of "the streaks of the tulip," careful expression of it in specially selected and coloured words, and arrangement of those words in harmonies, every note of which requires valuation in order to get the full effect. The other, though there is a "figure" in it, appeals to the intellect only; and therefore contents itself with the old balanced and counterparted arrangement, where the clauses zigzag in parallels like the bars of a double rule. I do no despite to this "standard style"; as I have again and again observed, I think it ought to be kept in nine out of ten, if not for ninety-nine out of a hundred, instances; and I differ as strongly as possible with the notion of some, if not most, of our younger critics, that every prose writer should aim at flourish and arabesque, at the mot rayonnant and the epithet fetched from Tarshish, golden or ivoirine, peacockish or perhaps apish, as the case may be. I do not want the concert of the plain of Dura as a constant accompaniment to my daily food of prose. But I certainly would not spare to interpose these things whenever there is time and temper to enjoy them; and I consider them, though not (as some do vainly talk) a greater delight to the senses of the mind than poetry itself, one hardly less.

The vast majority of writers for nearly a couple of

"standard'

"

generations showed themselves to be of no very different The opinion in practice as to one-half of this, though probably still prevalent, few of them would have assented to the other in theory. An eccentric or two, such as Lamb earlier and Carlyle later, excepted, not merely Southey but the vast majority of English prose-men from 1800 to 1840 at least aimed at the standard style. Most people did the same from 1840 to 1860, though a new prophet of rhythm in excelsis like Ruskin might gain a few followers. And the comparison of the Life of Schiller with Carlyle's own later work shows-it is indeed a commonplace of style-criticism -that Carlyle himself might conceivably never have written in any other. For a time the elaborate rhythm is as a

voice sounded in the desert.

But this standard style itself—though, in the hands not merely of Southey but of younger men like Lockhart, it produced work of all but the highest excellence, of the very highest perhaps in its own class-though in those of others, especially of Newman, it took to itself something of the fuller rhythms, and became a thing of incomparable idiosyncrasy and beauty-was yet necessarily subject to that mysterious law of disease and degradation which is observable everywhere—in the young gazelle, in the "piece of bread, Particularly large and wide," and therefore also in prose. Once more the phenomenon which the Byzantine patriarch had formulated in the ninth century repeated itself in the nineteenth, and the clear, plain, simple style "fell to flatness and meanness."

How early this degradation took place, and exactly but with a what its character was, are points on which difference of tendency to degradation. opinion will inevitably arise. I find such difference (of the friendliest kind as before, and without any Athanasian certainty on my own part that he is wrong and I am right) between myself and Sir Henry Craik. In fact, this disagreement is only a sort of corollary of the other, formerly noted, as to Johnson. Sir Henry thinks that eighteenth-century prose (not merely Johnson's, but in general) was "stately," but that "before that century had passed the tradition of stateliness had waned," and that