We are, let it be said again, in the grasp of realism, and realism but imperfectly understood. Just as our drama aims to reproduce exactly a 'solid' room upon the stage, and to set actors to talking therein the exact speech of every day, so our oratory, so-called, is the reproduction of a one-sided conversation, and our novels (when they are worthy of consideration) are reproductions of patiently accumulated details, set forth in impatiently assembled sentences. But all this does not of necessity constitute realism, because its effect is not of necessity the creation of illusion, however truthful the artist's purpose. Of what avail, in the drama, for example, are solid rooms and conversational vernacular if the characters do not come to life in our imaginations, so that we share their joys and sorrows? Of what effect are the realistic details of a novel, whether of incident or language, if we do not re-live its story as we read? Surely, the answer is plain, and therefore any literary devices which heighten the mood for us are perfectly justifiable weapons of the realist, even as they are of the romanticist. One of these devices is consciously wrought prose. For the present we plead for its employment on no higher ground than this of practical expediency.
But how, you may ask,—no, not you, dear reader, who understand, but some other chap, a poor dog of an author, perhaps,—can consciously wrought prose aid in the creation of illusion? How can it be more than pretty?
Let us turn for answer to Sir Thomas Browne, to 'The Garden of Cyrus,' to the closing numbers:—
'Besides, Hippocrates hath spoke so little, and the oneirocritical masters have left such frigid interpretations from plants, that there is little encouragement to dream of paradise itself. Nor will the sweetest delight of gardens afford much comfort in sleep, wherein the dulness of that sense shakes hands with delectable odours; and though in the bed of Cleopatra, can hardly with any delight raise up the ghost of a rose.'
That is archaic, perhaps, and not without a certain taint of quaintness to modern ears. But how drowsy it is, how minor its harmonies, how subtly soothing its languid melody! It tells, surely, in what manner consciously wrought prose may aid in the creation of illusion. The mood of sleep was here to be evoked, and lo! it comes from the very music of the sentences, from the drowsy lullaby of selected syllables.
We might choose a quite different example, from a seemingly most unlikely source, from the plays of George Bernard Shaw. One hardly thinks of Mr. Shaw with a style, but rather with a stiletto. His prefaces have been too disputative, his plays too epigrammatic, for the cultivation of prose rhythms. Yet his prose is almost never without a certain crisp accuracy of conversational cadence; his ear almost never betrays him into sloppiness; and when the occasion demands, his style can rise to meet it. The truth is, Mr. Shaw is seldom emotional, so that his crisp accuracy of speech is most often the fitting garment for his thought. But in John Bull's Other Island his emotions are stirred, and when Larry Doyle breaks out into an impassioned description of Ireland the effect on the imagination of the heightened prose, when a good actor speaks it, is almost startling.
'No, no; the climate is different. Here, if the life is dull, you can be dull too, and no great harm done. (Going off into a passionate dream.) But your wits can't thicken in that soft moist air, on those white springy roads, in those misty rushes and brown bogs, on those hillsides of granite rocks and magenta heather. You've no such colors in the sky, no such lure in the distances, no such sadness in the evenings. Oh, the dreaming! the dreaming! the torturing, heart-scalding, never-satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming! (Savagely.) No debauchery that ever coarsened and brutalized an Englishman can take the worth and usefulness out of him like that dreaming. An Irishman's imagination never lets him alone, never convinces him, never satisfies him; but it makes him so that he can't face reality nor deal with it nor handle it nor conquer it: he can only sneer at them that do, and (bitterly, at Broadbent) be "agreeable to strangers," like a good-for-nothing woman on the streets.'
This, to be sure, is prose to be spoken, not prose to be read. Different laws prevail, for different effects are sought. But the principle of cadence calculated to fit the mood, and by its melodic, or, as here, its percussive character to heighten the emotional appeal, remains the same.
But beyond the argument for cadenced prose as an aid to illusion, employed in the proper places,—that is, where intensity of imagery or feeling can benefit by it,—is the higher plea for sheer lingual beauty for its own sake. Shall realism preclude all other effects of artistic creation? Because the men on our streets, the women in our homes, talk sloppily, shall all our books be written in their idiom, all our stage characters reproduce their commonplaceness, nearly all our magazines and newspapers give no attention to the graces of style? I am pleading for no Newman of the news story, nor am I seeking to arm our muck-rakers with the pen of Sir Thomas Browne. I would not send Walter Pater to report a football game (though Stevenson could doubtless improve on most of the 'sporting editors'), nor ask that Emerson write our editorials. But there is a poor way, and there is a fine way, to write everything, and inevitably the man who has an ear for the rhythms of prose, who has been trained and encouraged to write his very best, will fit his style appropriately to his subject. He will not seek to cadence his sentences in bald narration or in exposition, but he will, nevertheless, keep them capable of natural and pleasant phrasing, he will avoid monotony, jarring syllables, false stress, and ugly or tripping terminations which throw the voice as one's feet are thrown by an unseen obstacle in the path. His paragraphs, too, will group naturally, as falls his thought. But when the subject he has in hand rises to invective, to exhortation, to the dignity of any passion or the sweep of any vision, then if his ear be tuned and his courage does not fail him he must inevitably write in cadenced periods, the effectiveness of his work depending on the adjustment of these cadences to the mood of the moment, on his skill as an artist in prose.
And just now the courage of our young men fails. The unrestrained abandonment of all art to realism, of every sort of printed page to bald colloquialism, has dulled the natural ear in all of us for comely prose, and made us deaf to more stately measures. The complete democratizing of literature has put the fear of plebeian ridicule in our hearts, and the wider a magazine's circulation, it would seem, the more harm it does to English prose, because in direct ratio to its sale are its pages given over to the Philistines, and the dignity and refinement of thought which could stimulate dignity and refinement of expression are unknown to its contributors, or kept carefully undisclosed.