Appreciations, With An Essay on Style | Page 5

treating it as out of
place and a kind of vagrant intruder, but by way of an estimate of its
rights, that is, of its achieved powers, there.
[7] Dryden, with the characteristic instinct of his age, loved to
emphasise the distinction between poetry and prose, the protest against
their confusion with each other, coming with somewhat diminished
effect from one whose poetry was so prosaic. In truth, his sense of
prosaic excellence affected his verse rather than his prose, which is not
only fervid, richly figured, poetic, as we say, but vitiated, all
unconsciously, by many a scanning line. Setting up correctness, that
humble merit of prose, as the central literary excellence, he is really a
less correct writer than he may seem, still with an imperfect mastery of

the relative pronoun. It might have been foreseen that, in the rotations
of mind, the province of poetry in prose would find its assertor; and, a
century after Dryden, amid very different intellectual needs, and with
the need therefore of great modifications in literary form, the range of
the poetic force in literature was effectively enlarged by Wordsworth.
The true distinction between prose and poetry he regarded as the almost
technical or accidental one of the absence or presence of metrical
beauty, or, say! metrical restraint; and for him the opposition came to
be between verse and prose of course; but, as the essential dichotomy in
this matter, between imaginative and unimaginative writing, parallel to
De Quincey's distinction between "the literature of power and the
literature of knowledge," in the former of which the composer gives us
[8] not fact, but his peculiar sense of fact, whether past or present.
Dismissing then, under sanction of Wordsworth, that harsher
opposition of poetry to prose, as savouring in fact of the arbitrary
psychology of the last century, and with it the prejudice that there can
be but one only beauty of prose style, I propose here to point out
certain qualities of all literature as a fine art, which, if they apply to the
literature of fact, apply still more to the literature of the imaginative
sense of fact, while they apply indifferently to verse and prose, so far as
either is really imaginative--certain conditions of true art in both alike,
which conditions may also contain in them the secret of the proper
discrimination and guardianship of the peculiar excellences of either.
The line between fact and something quite different from external fact
is, indeed, hard to draw. In Pascal, for instance, in the persuasive
writers generally, how difficult to define the point where, from time to
time, argument which, if it is to be worth anything at all, must consist
of facts or groups of facts, becomes a pleading--a theorem no longer,
but essentially an appeal to the reader to catch the writer's spirit, to
think with him, if one can or will--an expression no longer of fact but
of his sense of it, his peculiar intuition of a world, prospective, or
discerned below the faulty conditions of the present, in either case
changed somewhat from the actual [9] world. In science, on the other
hand, in history so far as it conforms to scientific rule, we have a
literary domain where the imagination may be thought to be always an
intruder. And as, in all science, the functions of literature reduce
themselves eventually to the transcribing of fact, so all the excellences

of literary form in regard to science are reducible to various kinds of
pains-taking; this good quality being involved in all "skilled work"
whatever, in the drafting of an act of parliament, as in sewing. Yet here
again, the writer's sense of fact, in history especially, and in all those
complex subjects which do but lie on the borders of science, will still
take the place of fact, in various degrees. Your historian, for instance,
with absolutely truthful intention, amid the multitude of facts presented
to him must needs select, and in selecting assert something of his own
humour, something that comes not of the world without but of a vision
within. So Gibbon moulds his unwieldy material to a preconceived
view. Livy, Tacitus, Michelet, moving full of poignant sensibility amid
the records of the past, each, after his own sense, modifies--who can
tell where and to what degree?--and becomes something else than a
transcriber; each, as he thus modifies, passing into the domain of art
proper. For just in proportion as the writer's aim, consciously or
unconsciously, comes to be the transcribing, not of the world, not of
mere fact, but of his sense [10] of it, he becomes an artist, his work fine
art; and good art (as I hope ultimately to show) in proportion to the
truth of his presentment of that sense; as in those humbler