Essays on Life 



tone of a vanished society, he must move in a 

 circle of alien associations, he must think in a 

 language not his own." 1 



This is crying for the moon, or rather pre- 

 tending to cry for it, for the writer is obviously 

 insincere. I see the Saturday Review says the 

 passage I have just quoted " reaches almost to 

 poetry," and indeed I find many blank verses 

 in it, some of them very aggressive. No prose 

 is free from an occasional blank verse, and a 

 good writer will not go hunting over his work 

 to rout them out, but nine or ten in little 

 more than as many lines is indeed reaching 

 too near to poetry for good prose. This, how- 

 ever, is a trifle, and might pass if the tone of 

 the writer was not so obviously that of cheap 

 pessimism. I know not which is cheapest, 

 pessimism or optimism. One forces lights, the 

 other darks ; both are equally untrue to good 

 art, and equally sure of their effect with the 

 groundlings. The one extenuates, the other 

 sets down in malice. The first is the more 



i < ' The Foundations of Belief/' by the Right Hon. A. J. 

 Balfour. Longmans, 1895, p. 48. 



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