Let me take an example from a work with which you are all familiar—The Student’s Handbook to the University and Colleges of Cambridge. On p. 405 we read:—
The Medieval and Modern Languages Tripos is divided into ten sections, A, A2, B, C, D, E, F, G, H and I. A student may take either one or two sections at the end of his second year of residence, and either one or two more sections at the end of his third or fourth year of residence; or he may take two sections at the end of his third year only. Thus this Tripos can be treated either as a divided or as an undivided Tripos at the option of the candidate.
Now I do not hold that up to you for a model of prose. Still, lucidity rather than emotion being its aim, I doubt not that the composer spent pains on it; more pains than it would have cost him to convey his information metrically, thus:—
There is a Tripos that aspires to blend
The Medieval and the Modern tongues
In one red burial (Sing Heavenly Muse!)
Divided into sections A, A2,
B, C, D, E, F, G and H and I.
A student may take either one or two
(With some restrictions mention’d in a footnote)
At th’ expiration of his second year:
Or of his third, or of his fourth again
Take one or two; or of his third alone
Take two together. Thus this tripos is
(Like nothing in the Athanasian Creed)
Divisible or indivisible
At the option of the candidate—Gadzooks!
This method has even some advantage over the method of prose in that it is more easily memorised; but it has, as you will admit, the one fatal flaw that it imports emotion into a theme which does not properly admit of emotion, and that so it offends against our first rule of writing—that it should be appropriate.
Now if you accept the argument so far as we have led it—that verse is by nature more emotional than prose—certain consequences would seem to follow: of which the first is that while the capital difficulty of verse consists in saying ordinary things the capital difficulty of prose consists in saying extraordinary things; that while with verse, keyed for high moments, the trouble is to manage the intervals, with prose the trouble is to manage the high moments.
Let us dwell awhile on this difference, for it is important. You remember my quoting to you in my last lecture these lines of Milton’s:—
Up to a hill anon his steps he reared
From whose high top to ken the prospect round,
If cottage were in view, sheepcote or herd;
But cottage, herd, or sheepcote, none he saw.
We agreed that these were good lines, with the accent of poetry: but we allowed it to be a highly exalted way of telling how So-and-so climbed a hill for a better view but found none. Now obviously this exaltation does not arise immediately out of the action described (which is as ordinary as it well could be), but is derivative. It borrows its wings, its impetus, from a previous high moment, from the emotion proper to that moment, from the speech proper to that emotion: and these sustain us across to the next height as with the glide of an aeroplane. Your own sense will tell you at once that the passage would be merely bombastic if the poet were starting to set forth how So-and-so climbed a hill for the view—just that, and nothing else: as your own sense tells you that the swoop is from one height to another. For if bathos lay ahead, if Milton had but to relate how the Duke of York, with twenty thousand men, “marched up a hill and then marched down again,” he certainly would not use diction such as:—
Up to a hill anon his steps he reared.
Even as it is, I think we must all detect a certain artificiality in the passage, and confess to some relief when Satan is introduced to us, ten lines lower down, to revivify the story. For let us note that, in the nature of things, the more adorned and involved our style (and Milton’s is both ornate and involved) the more difficulty we must find with these flat pedestrian intervals. Milton may “bring it off,” largely through knowing how to dodge the interval and contrive that it shall at any rate be brief: but, as Bagehot noted, when we come to Tennyson and find Tennyson in “Enoch Arden” informing us of a fish-jowter, that:—
Enoch’s white horse, and Enoch’s ocean-spoil
In ocean-smelling osier—
(i.e. in a fish-basket)
—and his face
Rough-reddened with a thousand winter gales,
Not only to the market town were known,
But in the leafy lanes beyond the down
Far as the portal-warding lion-whelp
And peacock yewtree of the lonely Hall
Whose Friday fare was Enoch’s ministering,
why, then we feel that the vehicle is altogether too pompous for its load, and those who make speech too pompous for its content commit, albeit in varying degrees, the error of Defoe’s religious lady who, seeing a bottle of overripe beer explode and cork and froth fly up to the ceiling, cried out, “O, the wonders of Omnipotent Power!” The poet who commends fresh fish to us as “ocean-spoil” can cast no stone at his brother who writes of them as “the finny denizens of the deep,” or even at his cousin the journalist, who exalts the oyster into a “succulent bivalve”—
The feathered tribes on pinions cleave the air;
Not so the mackerel, and, still less, the bear!
I believe this difficulty, which verse, by nature and origin emotional, encounters
