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It is a poor diet for the mind, a very colourless and toothless
criticism of life'; but we enjoy the pleasure of a most intricate
'
and dexterous pattern, every stitch a model at once of elegance and
of good sense; and the two oranges, even if one of them be rotten,
kept dancing with inimitable grace.
Up to this moment I have had my eye mainly upon prose; for though
in verse also the implication of the logical texture is a crowning
beauty, yet in verse it may be dispensed with. You would think
that here was a death-blow to all I have been saying; and far from
that, it is but a new illustration of the principle involved. For
if the versifier is not bound to weave a pattern of his own, it is
because another pattern has been formally imposed upon him by the
laws of verse. For that is the essence of a prosody. Verse may be
rhythmical; it may be merely alliterative; it may, like the French,
depend wholly on the (quasi) regular recurrence of the rhyme; or,
like the Hebrew, it may consist in the strangely fanciful device of
repeating the same idea. It does not matter on what principle the
law is based, so it be a law. It may be pure convention; it may
have no inherent beauty; all that we have a right to ask of any
prosody is, that it shall lay down a pattern for the writer, and
that what it lays down shall be neither too easy nor too hard.
Hence it comes that it is much easier for men of equal facility to
write fairly pleasing verse than reasonably interesting prose; for
in prose the pattern itself has to be invented, and the
difficulties first created before they can be solved. Hence,
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