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So much for the literary art. But even in painting, where the self-sufficiency of style is proclaimed somewhat more speciously, the purveyor of Chelsea ware will find scant countenance in the adored Master. Nowhere can I find him preaching “Art for Art’s sake,” in the jejune sense of the empty-headed acolytes of the aesthetic. With him the formula was for the spectator of art; it has been misapplied to the maker of art. Pater’s studies of the great pictures of the Renaissance are, if anything, rather too much taken up with their intellectual content, and their latent revelation of the temper of the time and the artist. No, these young men are no disciples of Pater. In their resoluteness to live in the Beautiful (which is not always distinguishable from the Bestial), they have forgotten the other items of the trinity of Goethe, they have lost sight of the True and the Whole. It is Whistler who is the prophet of the divorce of Art from Life, of the antithesis of Art and Nature. When Whistler said, “Another foolish sunset,” he spake the word that called into being all these “degenerate” paradoxes, though I am not sure but what Mr. Sydney Grundy was before him in creating a stage-manager who thinks meanly of the moons and the scenic backgrounds of real life. It is a good joke, this of Nature paling before Art, or reduced to plagiarising Art,–“Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows?”–but as the basis of a philosophy of Art it palls. The germ of truth in it is that metaphysically these effects may be said not to have existed till artists taught us to see and to look for them. But, after all, wise old Shakespeare has the last word:

Nature is made better by no mean
But Nature makes that mean: so o’er that Art,
Which you say adds to Nature, is an Art
That Nature makes.

But these things are not for the British jury. Pater, the literary artist, however, one is more driven to praise than to appraise. This exquisite care for words has something of moral purity–as well as physical daintiness in it. There is indeed something priestly in this consecration of language, in this reverent ablution of the counters of thought, those poor counters so overcrusted with the dirt of travel, so loosely interchangeable among the vulgar; the figure of the stooping devotee shows sublime in a garrulous world. What a heap of mischief M. Jourdain has done by his discovery that he was talking prose all his life! Prose, indeed! Moliere has much to answer for. The rough, shuffling, slipshod, down-at-heel, clipped, frayed talk of every-day life bears as much relation to prose as a music-hall ditty to poetry. The name “prose” must be reserved for the fine art of language–that fine art whose other branch is poetry. It is a grammarians’ term, “prose,” and belongs not to the herd. They do not need it, and it would never have come into M. Jourdain’s head or out of his mouth, had he not taken a tutor. And yet the delusion is common enough–even with those to whom Moliere is Greek–that prose is anything which is not poetry. As well say that poetry is anything which is not prose. Of the two branches of the art of language, prose is the more difficult. This is not the opinion of those who know nothing about it. They fancy a difficulty about rhymes and metres. ‘T is all the other way. Rhymes are the rudders of thought; they steer the poet’s bark. He cannot get to Heaven itself without striking “seven,” or mixing up his meaning with foreign “leaven.” His shifts to avoid these shifts are pathetic to a degree. He flounders about twixt “given” and “levin,” and has been known to snatch desperately at “reaven.” Of all fraudulent crafts commend me to the poet’s. He is a paragon of deceit and quackery, a jingling knave. ‘T is a game of bouts rimes, and he calls it “inspiration.” No wonder Plato would have none of him in his Republic, even though Plato’s poets were guiltless of rhyme and slaves only to metre. But the metre of verse, too, is a friend to thought, and its enemy. It is like wheels to a cart; not unsagaciously is Pegasus figured with wings. He flies away with you, and you are lulled by the regular flap, flap of his pinions, and his goal concerns you little. The swing and the rush of the verse compensate for reason, and it is wonderful how far a little sense will fly when tricked out with fine feathers. Even in stately, rhymeless decasyllabics the march and music of the verse help a limping thought along like a sore-footed soldier striding to the band. But the prose-writer has none of these advantages. He is like an actor without properties. His thoughts do not go along with a flutter of flags and a blare of trombones. Nor do they glide upon castors. They must needs lumber on after a fashion of their own, and if there is a music to their ambulation it must be individual, neither in common nor in three-eight time, but winding and quickening at will, with no strait symmetry of antiphonal bars. There is nothing to tell you the writer has made “prose”–as the spacing and the capital letters invite you to look for poetry. He has to depend only upon himself. This is why blank verse–which approaches prose most nearly–is so much more difficult to write than rhymed verse, though it looks so much easier and more tempting to the amateur. Are we not justified, then, in taking the logical step further, and saying that prose, which strips itself of the last rags of adventitious ornament, and which tempts the amateur most of all, is the highest of all literary forms, the most difficult of all to handle triumphantly? May we not compare the music of it–that music which we get in Ruskin and in Pater–to the larger rhythms to which the savage drum-beat has developed? Rhythm is undoubtedly an instinct, but civilisation brings complexity. From the tom-tom to the tune, from the tune to the symphony. In the vaster reaches and sweeps of the rhythm of prose there is a massive music as of Wagnerian orchestras. Anybody can enjoy the castanet-play of rhymes; half your popular proverbs clash at the ends; “the jigging of our rhyming mother-wits” is on everybody’s lips. But for the blank verse of “Paradise Lost” there is only “audience fit, though few”; and as for the music of prose, so little is it understood that critics vaguely aware of it had to invent the term “prose poet” when they found the stress of passion and imagination effervescing into resonant utterance. On the other hand, there are those who do not acknowledge Pope as a poet. The essence of the long-standing quarrel is a confusion. From the point of view of form there is only one kind of writer to be recognised–the artist in words. Of him there are two varieties: the artist who uses rhyme and metre, and the artist who–wilfully or through impotence–dispenses with them. From the point of view of matter there is the artist with “soul” and the artist without “soul.” “Soul” is shorthand for that mysterious something the absence of which urges people to deny Pope the title of poet. They feel the intangible something is not there, “the consecration and the poet’s dream.” But with the conventional distinctions, there is no name left for Pope, if he is not a poet. The truth is that he was an artist in words–as masterly as the Mantuan himself, though without that golden cadence and charm which keep Virgil a poet by any classification. On the other hand, Carlyle, who had such scorn of the rhyming crew, was himself a poet to the popular imagination, though to us he will be an artist in prose plus soul. There are, thus, really two classes of writers: