simplification may be carried so far as out of mere momentum to o'erleap style, as it were, and alight, a little dazed in featureless simplicity. On the other hand a theme may be too simple to simplify. People speak of simplicity as if in itself it were an æsthetic value, like size. Size includes its corollary, scale, and though even without scale it is often extremely impressive-its impressiveness as a compositional effect is due less to the artist than to our creating a relation by unconsciously assuming our own scale as an element of contrast, and any relation is a rudiment of style. I remember some one speaking of the impressiveness of the old Mullet post office at Broadway and Park Row to Eidlitz who replied that a pile of barrels of the same dimensions would have more conveying, as unminimized by senseless modelling, a more unmixed sense of the superiority of size. Thus, possibly, the Pyramids-mountains, certainly-"lord it o'er us", as Sterling says is the Dædalian way.

However, featureless simplicity—either implicit in the theme or the result of exaggerated simplification clearly can't be helped out in this way. Like clarity, simplicity must itself actively contribute to that sense of the whole which it is also the function of style to accentuate in the parts. Converted into active values, both perform a stylistic as well as a rhetorical service in illuminating and vivifying those intrinsic constituents of style in the abstract, order and movement, harmony and rhythm. But surely neither their utility as rhetorical fundamentals, nor their stylistic value, once transformed from conditions into constituents of style, is impeached by denying their entire and exclusive sufficiency for a prose ideal that need in no wise exclude them in including the element of beauty as well. In fine if prose is an art and not merely a craft, one of the essentials of prose style is beauty. Conversely, certainly, any prose of which the burden is, even remotely, related to belles-lettres is irrefutably irrelevant in so far as it is not art, and unless it be science. But I think one may go farther and maintain that all prose in so far as it is literature is entitled to some measure of beauty and bound to the requirements of artin which blend of privilege and obligation it is best sustained by the inspiration, and best forwarded by the guidance, of the spirit of style.

II

ENGLISH PROSE TRADITION

It is singular that the claims of the element of beauty to count as a force in English letters should not today be more widely and cordially recognized in view of the unquestioned tradition of distinctly æsthetic English prose. This tradition has been handed on from one exceptional writer to another in a line curiously paralleling that of the general evolution of our prose into its present prim and prosaic, clear and simple, medium of communication. One must acknowledge nevertheless that aggrandizement of simplicity and clarity as elements of ideal prose style has strong historic, as well as intrinsic, warrant. English prose did not extricate itself from poetry without a struggle, and a struggle during which it was necessary to insist on these qualities as conditions of its individuality, of its raison d'être as prose, but a struggle also, of which it still shows the traces. It lost style as it acquired taste. At least its style, in gaining order, lost movement. Johnson's stateliness is static beside Milton's, however indubitably inorganic Milton's inexorable continuity. Moreover, as Balzac says, "where form dominates, sentiment disappears" and the Augustan age did not succeed in establishing the standards set by Dryden, Defoe and Swift without sacrificing its sentiment even in poetry, and of course even more notably in its prose. Defoe's prose after Sir Thomas Browne's is Amsterdam after Venice. Swift's irony is undoubtedly an active æsthetic element and, permeating the directness and precision of his style, makes it a miracle considered as a vehicle for his bitter genius, but as a medium his manner allowed it no warmth. Days and nights devoted to the study of Addison, supposing Johnson's counsel to have been followed, resulted in ridding prose of the purple patch-admirable achievement, to be sure-but also in extracting its color. The prose of Bacon and Milton, of Browne, of Jeremy Taylor, of Clarendon— was it necessary to jettison all that nobility to get rid of grandiloquence? If prose poetry is primitive and its satisfactions crude, which is certainly true, was the only alternative prosaic prose? There is naturally no gain without some loss, but in this case has not the loss been needlessly excessive? It is no doubt a great gain

to have secured a medium in which the grammarian can converse with the grocer, and Bacon's Essays recast in the diction of Freeman, or even one still more strictly familiar, would advantageously popularize much wisdom. But it is surely possible to pay too high a price for such Benthamite blessings. Moreover they are so apt to come about of themselves, utility being the main principle of natural selection, that it is superfluous to preach them and fatuous to plume ourselves on their possession, as is now so generally done, out of due proportion and in neglect of their cost. "The world has grown grey from thy breath" might have been addressed by the poet to the utilitarian spirit with far greater reason than to the source to which the elevated uses of the world owe their suffusion with the emotion that electrified the world's spiritual elevation into conduct.

No doubt the rise, triumph and subsequent sway of natural science which calls chiefly for exposition-heedless of Ruskin's desire to inoculate it with reverence! has had a powerful indirect influence in establishing our prose standard, having considerably taken over the field of history, for one example. Another example, more whimsical but also more general, is the fact that, through Herbert Spencer, science has itself expounded style, thus directly popularizing the clarity and directness fully adequate to its own uses. But the whole trend of modern general tendency has been to exalt unemotional prose in theory, and to confine practice within its limits, illustrating, and content with illustrating, the virtues of clarity and simplicity. Taste has developed in this direction and it would very likely be temerarious to assert that it could up to date have functioned more wisely than by functioning in the negative way of discountenancing defects rather than in encouraging virtues. The spread of democracy has of itself both augmented its work and rendered it largely rudimentary. The inculcations of culture must wait till its inhibitions are assimilated. Before the potentialities of prose are realized its limitations are to be learned, and appreciation of its character must precede the exploitation of its capacities.

Any illustrative reference to the evolution of our English prose tradition as bearing on prose theory would naturally therefore begin in this way by noting preliminarily the elimination in prose

of

its surviving surplusage of unassimilated poetic amalgam obstructing its own flow and confusing its own order. It would thereupon naturally proceed to eulogize disproportionately the prose resulting from this purification as first exhibited on a general scale in the Augustan age. And its own logic would tempt it to ascribe the faults of Augustan literature, finding none in its style, to its substance. This is the line that, in fact, Arnold followed and the conclusion he reached. And, as his exposition of prose theory, which I have already described as having done more than any other to define the limitations and indicate the character of prose, is nevertheless marked by a tendency to establish its non-poetic character a little too rigidly and thereby render it prosaic, so his practical conclusion, in the matter of the tradition, that the literature of our great prose age was "second-rate and provincial" in spite of an unimpeachable style, seems to me rather literal logic. The author of The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century would perhaps have raised his eye-brows at the conclusion, and I think it would be easy to contest the premises by maintaining that Augustan style had a good deal to do with such inferiority as Arnold felt in the literature. The law of reaction operates as regularly in literature as in the life of which literature, as the expression, follows the impluse, and the age of prose quite inescapably turned prosaic when its turn came. Beauty's lines settled into primness; brilliance, become general, made paste popular; art lost its independent inspiration in adaptation to the mode. Congreve succeeded to Herrick, Pope replaced Donne. When the Town developed its tyranny style in prose sacrificed its state to society. Order was pattern and movement a minuet. Intelligence gave no quarter to the affections. Steele is the only writer of the age who eminently had heart. Everybody wrote well-as today; but also as today-without that tincture of emotion that warms and lifts adequate utterance into æsthetic correspondence with the substance stated. In fine, the age itself, surcharged with manner, formal or familiar, formalized style. Its taste stanched its sentiment, and style without sentiment is music for the deaf. On the other hand from the point of view of substance it seems to me much more can be said for it. Certainly we may say that its style which made its prose easy reading, is not what

makes it always read and read again. In the next age, at all events, prose regained, also in reaction, its ceremony with Johnson and its pageantry with Burke.

I have said that the inhibitions of Arnold's doctrine were particularly fruitful but it is also true that his intimations were not universally approved in all their strictness and that his readers differed a good deal in their ability to follow his applications in their full explicitness. They are to be taken no doubt as literature, not dogma. They were in no wise dogmatically proclaimed. But even his followers felt less interest in the didactic than in the purely critical implications of his views and were more concerned with their suggestiveness and soundness than with their universal imperative; and with their contemporary pertinence rather than with their prophetic importance for the guidance of posterity. If he was too anxious to rescue for poetry some of Ruskin's prose, his suggestion nevertheless disclosed the weakness of Ruskin's emotional effusion. Prose of the centre rather than of the circumference was no doubt the aim and Bossuet's stylistic rhetoric fitting garb for significant and striking intellectual perceptions and conclusions, and even Thiers, who nevertheless had his own kind of fatuity, furnished a commendable contrast to the personal effusion of Kinglake or the mannered brilliance of Macaulay. But while it was true that no one had treated the general subject critically with such stimulating success, it was perfectly plain that the Essays in Criticism, the Lectures on Translating Homer, The Study of Celtic Literature, were not merely in this respect so many post-graduate text-books but the ranking literary literature of their period as well, and that the prose they practised excelled the precision they preached.

Arnold himself had not always written verse when lyrically inspired-he who so eminently could when so minded! Witness, for a single instance, the apostrophe to Oxford-illuminating example of eloquent and elevated fervor, style vibrant with personal feeling, yet perfectly subdued to that conjoined restraint of feeling and freedom of gesture, that fusion of meaning addressed to the reason with the emotion awakened by the beauty and truth thus specifically declared, which is, though surely not prose poetry, as surely poetic prose. And it would be easy, as at this