"Distilled Prose," "grand and spiritual passage": the editor gives no other explanation than this second-hand one, but that is enough.
We must grant Mr. Pearsall Smith his ground, but on that ground every reader is sure—as an anthologist's readers always will be—occasionally to quarrel with him. His earlier selections, from the Bible, Donne, and Jeremy Taylor, could not, I think, have been better. He was bound to fill a good deal of his space with the seventeenth-century religious writers. He does not overlook South; and he gives a numerous and glittering selection from Milton, one of the few English writers who have contrived to keep their singing-robes about them, with whatever effort, when writing about every sort of mundane subject. He has found almost everything that he could have wanted in the writers of the eighteenth century, and he gives many perfect passages from Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Landor. But to some of the Victorian writers, and to some of our contemporaries (though he has quarried some exquisite things from unlikely places) he does, if he will allow me to say so, less than justice. We could have spared some of the eleven pages of Emerson for the sake of some of the best paragraphs of Ruskin, who is given only two pages. The single extract from Cardinal Newman (whose Idea of a University should have been searched) does not represent him, and no single extract could. There are two—there might well have been more—extracts from Mr. Doughty's Wanderings in Arabia. The passage from Samuel Butler is more sustained than Butler's wont, but scarcely worthy of inclusion, though the reader would appreciate in any surroundings his last sentence, "I am not very fond of Milton, but I admit that he does at times put me in mind of Fleet Street." Mr. Shaw appears and Henry James; there are good extracts from Mr. Santayana and Mr. Lowes Dickinson. But Mr. Conrad's works—both his Reminiscences and his novels—should have yielded many more than two pieces, and some admirable modern writers of coloured, musical, and affecting prose are omitted altogether. Mr. Hardy is a curious omission. Mr. Chesterton, as a rule, troubles too little to be a good subject for this anthologist; the journalist and the tumbler are always breaking in; the poet appears arm-in-arm with the politician, an exasperating contiguity. But I think that exploration would have been rewarded even had our collector gone no farther than the splendid last pages of The Short History of England. From Mr. Hudson's books, especially from A Crystal Age and Far Away and Long Ago, passages, I think, could have been taken which would have competed respectably with many that are here; Mrs. Meynell's essays and Mr. Bertrand Russell's last book should be drawn on; and where is Mr. Belloc? Rupert Brooke said that Mr. Belloc had a better prose style than any man alive. I should not dispute that: it is a clear, a precise, an economical style that serves admirably all the diverse uses to which its owner puts it. And it often rises, always quietly, where some poignant thing is clearly seen, into sentences of noble beauty. These are liable to occur almost anywhere; for instance, in a digression during an article on strategy. Possibly because he began his career with public facetiousness about "purple patches" he often seems to allow a promising passage to break its back because he will not seem artificial or affected. He fetters his consciously-exercised powers and he can seldom let himself go, as it were, unconsciously. In his books it would therefore be far more easy to find short passages than long ones of the kind included in this anthology; for any other sort of prose anthology his work should be thoroughly ransacked. Nevertheless there are long ones. My memory is that there are certainly several in The Four Men and in the books of essays. To hunt for examples which one will have no room to quote would be tiresome; there is a long passage in The Absence of the Past which begins:
There was a woman of charming vivacity, whose eyes were ever ready for laughter, and whose tone of address of itself provoked the noblest of replies. Many loved her; all admired. She passed (I will suppose) by this street or by that; she sat at table in such and such a house; Gainsborough painted her; and all that time ago there were men who had the luck to meet her and to answer her laughter with their own. And the house where she moved is there, and the street in which she walked, and the very furniture she used and touched with her hands you may touch with your hands. You shall come into the rooms she inhabited, and there you shall see her portrait, all light and movement and grace and beatitude.
But it is a stupid thing to spend much time talking about the omissions from a good book; only less so than it would be to complain that it is one sort of book and not another sort. Mr. Pearsall Smith set out to collect prose passages of a certain, the most poetical and resounding, kind; and he has made an admirable and a learned choice. A perusal of his specimens confirms in me an opinion previously formed as to the nature of this kind of prose in English. It is that we have a canonical style for such prose, and that such prose most frequently arises from meditation on a definable kind of subject.
In great writers and small, in those whose prose marches always with majesty and in those with whom eloquence is infrequent, in the graceful and the ungainly, in the magisterial and the familiar, this thing is to be discerned: that their prose is least personal when at its highest flights. The observation is common that we have in England no standard and accepted prose style, but a medley of manners which are continually increasing in number. This is true. But it has not been generally noticed that amongst those passages of English prose, drawn from authors of all our literary ages, which are received as being the most sublime and the most musical—passages which have been, and must be, the first resort of all anthologists of our prose who are in search of those attributes of power and beauty—there is a strong likeness of form and feature. There is more: the resemblance is often so close that the differences, normally marked, between the styles of writers divided by a great gulf of time are in such sentences not to be distinguished. Styles so various on the lower plane meet, as it were, on the higher: there is an established, an inevitable, manner into which an Englishman will rise when his ideas and images lift into grandeur. It is the style of the Authorised Version, a style in process of formation long before the date of that Parthenon of our prose, but reaching in that its perfection, and by means of that made an element of the air we breathe, and many generations before us have breathed, in childhood. Even in writers who never entirely lose the marks of their eccentricity the most eloquent "purple patches" are always reminiscent. Emotion deepens suddenly, or reaches an expected climax; the results of reflection are summarised; by whatever route, the author comes to a place at which his expression assumes a sublimity of imagery and a perfection of rhythm; and with the emotion he communicates is always mingled the throe of recognition. The note has been struck and a hundred neighbouring strings respond. The writer has stepped off the common road and into that chapel where there is one ritual and one mode of incantation. "Man that is born of a woman, hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay." It is the Prayer-Book of 1549. "Thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, Hic jacit." It is Sir Walter Raleigh. "These wait upon the shore of death, and waft unto him to draw near, wishing above all others to see his star that they might be led to his place; wooing the remorseless Sisters to wind down the watch of their life, and to break them off before the hour." It is Bacon. "A memory of yesterday's pleasures, a fear of to-morrow's dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in mine ear, a light in mine eye, an anything, a nothing, a fancy, a chimera in my brain, troubles me in my prayer." It is John Donne. "Methusalem, with all his hundreds of years, was but a mushroom of a night's growth to this day; and all the four Monarchies, with all their thousands of years, and all the powerful Kings, and all the beautiful Queens of this world, were but as a bed of flowers, some gathered at six, some at seven, some at eight—all in one morning in respect of this day." That too is Donne, and his subject Eternity. "Since the brother of Death daily haunts us with dying Mementoes, and Time that grows old itself bids us hope no long duration, diuturnity is a dream and folly of expectation." That is Sir Thomas Browne. "They that three thousand years agone died unwillingly, and stopped death two days, or stayed it a week, what is their gain? Where is that week?" That is Jeremy Taylor. "When all is done, human life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a froward child, that must be played with and humoured a little to keep it quiet, till it falls asleep, and then the care is over." That is Sir William Temple. "The present is a fleeting moment, the past is no more; and our prospect of futurity is dark and doubtful." That is Gibbon. "The stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and everywhere the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest and their native country and their natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected, and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival." The argument to the Ancient Mariner needs no specification. "Laodameia died; Helen died; Leda, the beloved of Jupiter, went before. It is better to repose in the earth betimes than to sit up late; better, than to cling pertinaciously to what we feel crumbling under us, and to protract an inevitable fall." That is from a dialogue of Landor's. "And it would not taste of death, by reason of its adoption into immortal palaces; but it was to know weakness, and reliance, and the shadow of human imbecility; and it went with a lame gait; but in its goings it exceeded all mortal children in grace and swiftness." That is Charles Lamb. "In her sight there was Elysium; her smile was heaven; her voice was enchantment; the air of love waved round her, breathing balm into my heart: for a little while I had sat with the gods at their golden tables, I had tasted of all earth's bliss." They have quoted that passage from Hazlitt's Liber Amoris a thousand times. "Like God, whose servants they are, they utter their pleasure not by sounds that perish, or by words that go astray, but by signs in heaven, by changes on earth, by pulses in secret rivers, heraldries painted on darkness, and hieroglyphics written on the tablets of the brain." That is de Quincey. "And again the sun blinks out, and the poor sower is casting his grain into the furrow, hopeful he that the Zodiacs and far Heavenly Horologes have not faltered; that there will be yet another summer added for us and another harvest." That is Carlyle. "To what port are we bound? Who knows? There is no one to tell us but such poor weather tossed mariners as ourselves, whom we speak as we pass, or who have hoisted some signal, or floated to us some letter in a bottle from far." It is from Emerson. "Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening." That, if modern in conception, altogether traditional in cadence and in the phrasing of its close, is from Pater's Renaissance. "We can therefore be happy in our sorrows, happy even in the death of our beloved who fall in the fight; for they die nobly, as heroes and saints die, with hearts and hands unstained by hatred and wrong." A peroration: the peroration from the Poet Laureate's Spirit of Man. "And in the autumn before the snows come they have all gone—of all that incalculable abundance of life, of all that hope and adventure, excitement and deliciousness there is scarcely more to be found than a soiled twig, a dirty seed, a dead leaf, black mould or a rotting feather." Mr. H. G. Wells, never a careful artist or fully aware of what language can be, permits himself some looseness in the phraseology of the passage from which that sentence comes, but he too falls, as it were unwittingly, into the old music. And here, from another living author is a piece of declamation which contains, indeed, sentiments and words which would have been foreign to the seventeenth century, but is a true child of its loins:
We survey the past, and see that its history is of blood and tears, of helpless blundering, of wild revolt, of stupid acquiescence, of empty aspirations. We sound the future, and learn that after a period, long compared with the individual life, but short indeed compared with the divisions of time open to our investigation, the energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness, which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. "Imperishable monuments" and "immortal deeds," death itself, and love stronger than death, will be as though they had never been. Nor will anything that is be better or be worse for all that the labour, genius, devotion, and suffering of man have striven through countless generations to effect.
This passage, summarising the conclusions that natural science unaided has been able to reach, is detached from a longer one: it occurs in Mr. Balfour's The Foundations of Belief.
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There is one music and one speech in all these extracts. It is not the result of deliberation, but it is not an accident, that they have so much else in common, that their very subjects are analogous. Chosen, however genuinely, at random and without afterthought, if they are chosen from the best, they will be variations on but a few related themes and half of them will be inspired by the direct contemplation of death. There are innumerable subjects which engage the attention, and they may be seen in countless aspects; but that large utterance comes chiefly to English lips when things, of whatever nature they may be, are regarded sub specie æternitatis. Whatever a man's philosophy and whatever his mood, when he speaks with this music, he speaks with the voice of mankind, awed and saddened by its inscrutable destiny. Time, Death, Eternity, Mutability: those words, the most awful that we know, insistently recur. It is they, unuttered yet present, which give their grandeur to pronouncements of many kinds which do not relate directly to the general operations of Time or of Death: to Burke's passage on Marie Antoinette, to Johnson's Preface to his Dictionary, to Gibbon's moonlight reverie on the conclusion of his History. Those names, those figures with their skirts of thunder and doom, trail through all our literature with a majesty that no others possess. Apostrophising those our shadowy tyrants, celebrating them, rebelling against them, we may clothe our conceptions in many images, though even here, for the most part, we must observe a tendency, natural and spontaneous, to choose as tokens and ornaments a few, in the earthly sense, universal and perennial things. But those shapes tower over our whole world. Anything we look at in the sunlight, a wave, a weed, a travelling insect, may be like a window opening out to them; and at night, under the dark sky, so actual and so symbolical, the reflective man is always aware of them. We have our activities and our distractions. We must satisfy our carnal cravings, eat, drink, and sleep; between birth and death, under that immense and unresponsive heaven, we build and dig, hunt and dance, carve and paint, intrigue, copulate and kill. But whenever the moment comes that we turn round from our toys it is one spectacle that we see: life proceeding from darkness to darkness, change, dissolution, and death. And the greatest utterance of our tongue is a chronicle, again and again resumed and repeated, of the wonder and dread, the certain regret and the wavering hope which that spectacle arouses in hearts which have immortal longings but have loved transient things: a chronicle of grass that withers, leaves that fall, of girls like flowers who fade like flowers, of conquerors who are dust, blown about, of tough oaks that decay, of stone temples and pyramids that as surely, after a few more years, fall into dust, of the world's past, and the past of the individual which cannot be recovered, the innocence and the illusions of childhood, the loss of which typifies all loss and their beauty that Eden to which, with the shadow approaching, we pitifully aspire: all framed by the most abiding things that our senses know, the sea and the wind and the hills, the seasons which come for all generations in their order, the stars, constant, silent, vigilant over all: those also transitory after their own kind, arching to their fall in epochs beyond our computation or guessing, but in relation to us steadfast and immutable.