Appreciations, With An Essay on Style | Page 4

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APPRECIATIONS, WITH AN ESSAY ON STYLE
NOTES BY THE E-TEXT EDITOR:
Reliability: Although I have done my best to ensure that the text you
read is error-free in comparison with an exact reprint of the standard
edition--Macmillan's 1910 Library Edition--please exercise scholarly
caution in using it. It is not intended as a substitute for the printed
original but rather as a searchable supplement. My e-texts may prove
convenient substitutes for hard-to-get works in a course where both
instructor and students accept the possibility of some imperfections in

the text, but if you are writing a scholarly article, dissertation, or book,
you should use the standard hard- copy editions of any works you cite.
Pagination and Paragraphing: To avoid an unwieldy electronic copy, I
have transferred original pagination to brackets. A bracketed numeral
such as [22] indicates that the material immediately following the
number marks the beginning of the relevant page. I have preserved
paragraph structure except for first-line indentation.
Hyphenation: I have not preserved original hyphenation since an e-text
does not require line-end or page-end hyphenation.
Greek typeface: For this full-text edition, I have transliterated Pater's
Greek quotations. If there is a need for the original Greek, it can be
viewed at my site, http://www.ajdrake.com/etexts, a Victorianist
archive that contains the complete works of Walter Pater and many
other nineteenth-century texts, mostly in first editions.
CONTENTS
Style: 5-38
Wordsworth: 39-64
Coleridge: 65-104
Charles Lamb: 105-123
Sir Thomas Browne: 124-160
"Love's Labours Lost": 161-169
"Measure for Measure": 170-184
Shakespeare's English Kings: 185-204
Dante Gabriel Rossetti: 205-218
Feuillet's "La Morte": 219-240
Postscript: 241-261

APPRECIATIONS
STYLE
[5] SINCE all progress of mind consists for the most part in
differentiation, in the resolution of an obscure and complex object into
its component aspects, it is surely the stupidest of losses to confuse
things which right reason has put asunder, to lose the sense of achieved
distinctions, the distinction between poetry and prose, for instance, or,
to speak more exactly, between the laws and characteristic excellences
of verse and prose composition. On the other hand, those who have
dwelt most emphatically on the distinction between prose and verse,

prose and poetry, may sometimes have been tempted to limit the proper
functions of prose too narrowly; and this again is at least false economy,
as being, in effect, the renunciation of a certain means or faculty, in a
world where after all we must needs make the most of things. Critical
efforts to limit art a priori, by anticipations regarding the natural
incapacity of the material with which this or that artist works, as the
sculptor with solid form, or the prose-writer with the ordinary [6]
language of men, are always liable to be discredited by the facts of
artistic production; and while prose is actually found to be a coloured
thing with Bacon, picturesque with Livy and Carlyle, musical with
Cicero and Newman, mystical and intimate with Plato and Michelet
and Sir Thomas Browne, exalted or florid, it may be, with Milton and
Taylor, it will be useless to protest that it can be nothing at all, except
something very tamely and narrowly confined to mainly practical ends-
-a kind of "good round-hand;" as useless as the protest that poetry
might not touch prosaic subjects as with Wordsworth, or an abstruse
matter as with Browning, or treat contemporary life nobly as with
Tennyson. In subordination to one essential beauty in all good literary
style, in all literature as a fine art, as there are many beauties of poetry
so the beauties of prose are many, and it is the business of criticism to
estimate them as such; as it is good in the criticism of verse to look for
those hard, logical, and quasi-prosaic excellences which that too has, or
needs. To find in the poem, amid the flowers, the allusions, the mixed
perspectives, of Lycidas for instance, the thought, the logical
structure:--how wholesome! how delightful! as to identify in prose
what we call the poetry, the imaginative power, not