Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 128.djvu/726

716 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 complicated 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."

It is this perfection of modulation to which we must look for the excellence that we require and do not meet with in most of the work of the present day, and it is exactly this modulation with which all the faults that I have had to comment upon in the preceding pages are inconsistent. To an artist who should set before him such a model as either of the passages which I have quoted, lapses into such faults would be impossible. He will not succumb to the easy diffuseness which may obliterate the just proportion and equilibrium of his periods. He will not avail himself of the ready assistance of stereotyped phraseology to spare himself the trouble of casting new moulds and devising new patterns. He will not imagine that he is a scene-painter instead of a prose-writer, a decorator instead of an architect, a caterer for the desires of the many instead of a priest to the worship of the few. He will not indulge in a style which requires the maximum of ornament in order to disguise and render palatable 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 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.

That an art should be fully recognized as an art, with strict rules and requirements, is necessary to attainment of excellence in it; and in England this recognition, which poetry has long enjoyed, has hardly yet been granted to prose. No such verses as we find by scores in such books as Marston's satires would now suggest themselves as possible or tolerable to any writer of Marston's powers; but in prose many a sentence quite as intolerable as any of these verses is constantly written by persons of presumably sound education and competent wits. The necessities of the prose-writer are, an ear in the first place: this is indispensable and perhaps not too common. In the second place, due study of the best authors, as well to know what to avoid as what to imitate. Lastly, care, which perhaps is not too much to demand of any artist, so soon as he has recognized and has secured recognition of the fact that he is an artist. Care is indeed the one thrice-to-be-repeated and indispensable 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