Or, take this from Samuel Johnson:—
The fountain of contentment must spring up in the mind; and he who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the griefs which he purposes to remove.
Now, to be frank, I do not call that first passage very good prose. Like much of Jeremy Taylor’s writing it is prose tricked out with the trappings and odds-and-ends of verse. It starts off, for example, with a brace of heroics—“Since all the evil in the world consists” … “between the object and the appetite.” You may say, further, that the simile of the wheel, though proper enough to prose, is poetical too: that Homer might have used it (“As in a wheel the rim turns violently, while the nave, though it turns also, yet seems to be at rest”—something of that sort). Nevertheless you will agree with me that, in exchanging Wordsworth for Taylor and Johnson, we have relaxed something with the metre, something that the metre kept taut; and this something we discover to be the emotional pitch.
But let me give you another illustration, supplied (I dare say quite unconsciously) by one who combined a genuine love of verse—in which, however, he was no adept—with a sure instinct for beautiful prose. Contentment was a favourite theme with Isaak Walton: The Complete Angler is packed with praise of it; and in The Complete Angler occurs this well-known passage:—
But, master, first let me tell you, that very hour which you were absent from me, I sat down under a willow tree by the waterside, and considered what you had told me of the owner of that pleasant meadow in which you then had left me; that he had a plentiful estate, and not a heart to think so; that he had at this time many lawsuits depending, and that they both damped his mirth and took up so much of his time and thoughts that he had no leisure to take the sweet content that I, who pretended no title to them, took in his fields: for I could there sit quietly; and looking on the water, see some fishes sport themselves in the silver streams, others leaping at flies of several shapes and colours; looking on the hills, I could behold them spotted with woods and groves; looking down the meadows, could see, here a boy gathering lilies and lady-smocks, and there a girl cropping culverlocks and cowslips, all to make garlands suitable to this present month of May. These and many other field-flowers so perfumed the air that I thought that very meadow like that field in Sicily of which Diodorus speaks, where the perfumes arising from the place make all dogs that hunt in it to fall off and lose their hottest scent. I say, as I thus sat, joying in my own happy condition, and pitying this poor rich man that owned this and many other pleasant groves and meadows about me, I did thankfully remember what my Saviour said, that the meek possess the earth; or rather they enjoy what the others possess and enjoy not; for Anglers and meek quiet-spirited men are free from those high, those restless thoughts which corrode the sweets of life; and they, and they only can say as the poet has happily exprest it:
“Hail, blest estate of lowliness!
Happy enjoyments of such minds
As, rich in self-contentedness,
Can, like the reeds in roughest winds,
By yielding make that blow but small
At which proud oaks and cedars fall.”
There you have a passage of felicitous prose culminating in a stanza of trite and fifth-rate verse. Yes, Walton’s instinct is sound; for he is keying up the pitch; and verse, even when mediocre in quality, has its pitch naturally set above that of prose. So, if you will turn to your Walton and read the page following this passage, you will see that, still by a sure instinct, he proceeds from this scrap of reflective verse to a mere rollicking “catch”:
Man’s life is but vain, for ’tis subject to pain
And sorrow, and short as a bubble;
’Tis a hodgepodge of business and money and care,
And care, and money and trouble …
—which is even worse rubbish, and yet a step upwards in emotion because Venator actually sings it to music. “Ay marry, sir, this is music indeed,” approves Brother Peter; “this cheers the heart.”
In this and the preceding lecture, Gentlemen, I have enforced at some length the opinion that to understand the many essential differences between verse and prose we must constantly bear in mind that verse, being metrical, keeps the character originally imposed on it by musical accompaniment and must always, however far the remove, be referred back to its origin and to the emotion which music excites.
Mr. George Bernard Shaw having to commit his novel Cashel Byron’s Profession to paper in a hurry, chose to cast it in blank verse as being more easily and readily written so: a performance which brilliantly illuminates a half-truth. Verse—or at any rate, unrhymed iambic verse—is easier to write than prose, if you
