APPRECIATIONS


STYLE

[5] SINCE all progress of mind consists for the most part in
differentiation, in the resolution of an obscure and complex object
into its component aspects, it is surely the stupidest of losses to
confuse things which right reason has put asunder, to lose the sense
of achieved distinctions, the distinction between poetry and prose,
for instance, or, to speak more exactly, between the laws and
characteristic excellences of verse and prose composition. On the
other hand, those who have dwelt most emphatically on the distinction
between prose and verse, prose and poetry, may sometimes have been
tempted to limit the proper functions of prose too narrowly; and this
again is at least false economy, as being, in effect, the
renunciation of a certain means or faculty, in a world where after
all we must needs make the most of things. Critical efforts to limit
art a priori, by anticipations regarding the natural incapacity of
the material with which this or that artist works, as the sculptor
with solid form, or the prose-writer with the ordinary [6] language
of men, are always liable to be discredited by the facts of artistic
production; and while prose is actually found to be a coloured thing
with Bacon, picturesque with Livy and Carlyle, musical with Cicero
and Newman, mystical and intimate with Plato and Michelet and Sir
Thomas Browne, exalted or florid, it may be, with Milton and Taylor,
it will be useless to protest that it can be nothing at all, except
something very tamely and narrowly confined to mainly practical ends-
-a kind of "good round-hand;" as useless as the protest that poetry
might not touch prosaic subjects as with Wordsworth, or an abstruse