Essays From 'The Guardian'
Book Description
ESSAYS FROM 'THE GUARDIAN'
By WALTER HORATIO PATER
CONTENTS
1. English Literature: 1-16
2. Amiel's "Journal Intime": 17-37
3. Browning: 39-51
4. "Robert Elsmere": 53-70
5. Their Majesties' Servants: 71-88
6. Wordsworth: 89-104
7. Mr. Gosse's Poems: 105-118
8. Ferdinand Fabre: 119-134
9. The "Contes" of M. Augu...
MoreESSAYS FROM 'THE GUARDIAN'
By WALTER HORATIO PATER
CONTENTS
1. English Literature: 1-16
2. Amiel's "Journal Intime": 17-37
3. Browning: 39-51
4. "Robert Elsmere": 53-70
5. Their Majesties' Servants: 71-88
6. Wordsworth: 89-104
7. Mr. Gosse's Poems: 105-118
8. Ferdinand Fabre: 119-134
9. The "Contes" of M. Augustin Filon: 135-149
I. ENGLISH LITERATURE
FOUR BOOKS FOR STUDENTS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
[3] THE making of an anthology of English prose is what must have
occurred to many of its students, by way of pleasure to themselves,
or of profit to other persons. Such an anthology, the compass and
variety of our prose literature being considered, might well follow
exclusively some special line of interest in it; exhibiting, for
instance, what is so obviously striking, its imaginative power, or
its (legitimately) poetic beauty, or again, its philosophical
capacity. Mr. Saintsbury's well-considered Specimens of English
Prose Style, from Malory to Macaulay (Kegan Paul), a volume, as we
think, which bears fresh witness to the truth of the old remark that
it takes a scholar indeed to make a [4] good literary selection, has
its motive sufficiently indicated in the very original "introductory
essay," which might well stand, along with the best of these extracts
from a hundred or more deceased masters of English, as itself a
document or standard, in the matter of prose style. The essential
difference between poetry and prose--"that other beauty of prose"--in
the words of the motto he has chosen from Dryden, the first master of
the sort of prose he prefers:--that is Mr. Saintsbury's burden. It
is a consideration, undoubtedly, of great importance both for the
writer and the critic; in England especially, where, although (as Mr.
Saintsbury rightly points out, in correction of an imperfectly
informed French critic of our literature) the radical distinction
between poetry and prose has ever been recognized by its students,
yet the imaginative impulse, which is perhaps the richest of our
purely intellectual gifts, has been apt to invade the province of
that tact and good judgment, alike as to matter and manner, in which
we are not richer than other people. 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. Not that that reasonable prose
structure, or architecture, as Mr. Saintsbury conceives it, has been
always, or even generally, the ideal, even of those chosen writers
here in evidence. Elizabethan prose, all too chaotic in the beauty
and force which overflowed into it from Elizabethan poetry,
Publisher | |
Binding | Kindle Edition (57 editions) |
Reading Level | Uncategorized
|
# of Pages | N/A |
ISBN-10 | B00475ATIC |
Publication Date | 10/12/2010 |
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