NATIONAL STYLE 213 



In our English literature, the language of poetry has never 

 differed essentially from the language of prose. Think of 

 Jonson's, Milton's, Dryden's use of both. Think of the 

 simultaneous revival of Elizabethan wealth and colour in 

 the diction of both poetry and prose during the nineteenth 

 century. Yet English has been, upon the whole, most success- 

 fully handled for the purposes of verse. That is due, I think, 

 partly to the genius of the idiom and its literary history, 

 partly to the attitude of writers. The simplicity of our 

 grammar, combined with the richness and variety of our 

 vocabulary, renders the language specially fit for poetic utter- 

 ance, where the phrase is always brief and vibrating ; less fit 

 for organised and periodic eloquence, to which it was so ruth- 

 lessly adapted by the humanistic stylists. The humanists 

 improved versification by their sympathy with classic metre. 

 They went near to ruining prose by their imitation of Latin 

 syntactical forms, and checked the natural evolution of our 

 oratio soluta on the lines of early French. Something has 

 always remained of lumbering and slipshod in the structure 

 of long English sentences. Authors, who had no skill in 

 building up periods like Taylor's or Browne's, thought them- 

 selves justified by those eminent examples in floundering 

 through jungles of plethoric phrases loosely tacked together 

 by conjunctions. 



The incoherence of bad English prose is only less desolating 

 than that of common German prose. I will illustrate my 

 meaning by examples of slipshod, clumsy, or obscure sentences 

 extracted from the published essays of the late Mark Pattison. 

 I choose him because he is upon the whole a vigorous writer, 

 and because he was invariably a severe critic merciless to 

 those who fell short of an ideal of scholarship which he had 

 formed. It is difficult to believe, however, that the man 

 who wrote as follows, can have thought with the exactitude 

 pertaining to true scholarship. 



In England it was known from Poggio's report in 1418 that no 

 inedited new classics were to be hoped for. 1 



1 Pattison's Essays, vol. i. p. 91. 



