But as Pater says—impassioned prose has become the special and opportune art of the modern world, and it can exert all the varied charms of poetry down to the rhythm.
"The muse of prose-literature," says Masson, "has been hardly dealt with. We see not why, in prose, there should not be much of that license in the fantastic, that measured riot, the right of whimsy, that unbalanced dalliance with the extreme and the beautiful, which the world allows, by prescription, to verse. Why may not prose chase forest-nymphs and see little green-eyed elves, and delight in peonies and musk-roses, and invoke the stars, and roll mists about the hills, and watch the sea thundering through
caverns and dashing against the promontories? Why, in prose, quail from the grand or ghastly in the one hand, or blush with shame at too much of the exquisite on the other? Is Prose made of iron? Must it never weep, never laugh, never linger to look at a butterfly, never ride at a gallop over the downs?"
Yet George Moore, a great poet in prose himself, tells us in his Avowals that the greatness of English genius does not appear in its prose, but in its poetry, i. e., in verse. The greatness of English genius is in its poetry, but in the poetry of its prose as well as in the poetry of its verse. It appears in the ordinary dialect of its novels and prose plays.
As a matter of fact, poetic prose has always been used. It is found in the earliest as well as the later literature of every nation. The Bible, Oriental Literature, the medieval romances, early Saxon prose are full of it. It made a reappearance with renewed force in the romantic movement that spread over England, Germany and France in the latter part of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries. In an age like the romantic, when the right to live and express emotions was pleaded, poetic prose, seeking restraint from metre, was especially appropriate. George Brandes has studied this movement in his Main Currents. Many of the leading writers of the romantic period used impassioned prose. Saintsbury has found much poetry even in the prose of John Wilson, who is not much read, one who was to some extent an enemy of the romantic movement, and Saintsbury reprints in his Specimens of English Prose Style, Wilson's The Fairy's Funeral.
America has contributed greatly to the development of prose poetry. Hawthorne, Poe and Emerson were the first great masters in prose poetry we have had, and I
doubt if as poets they have been surpassed by any of our metrical verse writers. One of the finest poems in American literature is undoubtedly Hawthorne's reflections of his lonely life in the Ivory Tower, when he revisited his old chamber in Salem where he spent so many years. The famous passage from his diary, quoted in all big biographies, is as great a poem, though in prose.
Emerson's essays are studied with prose poems. I shall mention only one, the address to the poet, at the conclusion of the essay on "The Poet."
The Hawthorne passage is as follows:
Salem, Oct. 4th. Union Street (Family Mansion).—. . . . Here I sit in my old accustomed chamber, where I used to sit in days gone by. . . . Here I have written many tales,—many that have been burned to ashes, many that doubtless deserved the same fate. This claims to be called a haunted chamber, for thousands upon thousands of visions have appeared to me in it; and some few of them have become visible to the world. If ever I should have a biographer, he ought to make great mention of this chamber in my memoirs, because so much of my lonely youth was wasted here, and here my mind and character were formed; and here I have been glad and hopeful, and here I have been despondent. And here I sat a long, long time, waiting patiently for the world to know me, and sometimes wondering why it did not know me sooner, or whether it would ever know me at all,—at least, till I were in my grave. And sometimes it seemed as if I were already in the grave, with only life enough to be chilled and benumbed. But oftener I was happy,—at least, as happy as I then knew how to be, or was aware of the possibility of being. By and by, the world found me out in my lonely chamber, and called me forth,—not, indeed, with a loud roar of acclamation, but rather with a still, small voice,—and forth I went, but found nothing in the world that I thought preferable to my old solitude till now. . . . And now I begin to understand why I was imprisoned so many years in this lonely chamber, and why I could never break