making in the Iliad itself, for example, is not poetry at all but rhetoric strung into hexameters; a metre which the tragedians discarded for iambics, the most conversational form of verse'. Aristotle himself never troubled to define prose, the medium in which he wrote as it happened to him. In the Poetics he just indicates that there is such a thing; that hitherto it has lacked a name; and so (without supplying it) he passes on. He nowhere separates prose from poetry, though we may infer a separation. But in the Rhetoric (Book iii) the philosopher, while (man of science as he was) suggesting that bald words, such as he habitually used, are the medium for some definite and ascertained knowledge, does admit the existence of a medium persuading men's opinion; and, while belittling it somewhat, allows its right to cultivate oeuvóτns or—shall we call it?-the grand style. The man, after all, could not escape thewitchery, the noble charm of Plato, his beloved master. Now we may reasonably argue, I think, that men's opinions about things their speculations, memories, aspirations, glimpses of the unseen and infinite-are actually of more importance, of more meaning to mankind than any amount of ascertained fact, that all ascertained fact exit in mysterium; that when one generation of it has been swallowed, or more frequently ejected, by the next, still man's eternal speculation abides and must abide; and that this is why, while books of exact science may be antiquated by new ones, we can never spare from our shelves a Shakespeare or a Dryden or even a Gibbon. But my immediate point is that even the most austerely practical of philosophers, with his eye intent on prose, admits the value of emotion and the purple patch. For a last difficulty of the Prose anthologist (or the last to be mentioned here): he can by no contrivance make his book attract the eye as a Verse anthology-with its glancing differences of metre, its stanzas, its long and short lines of type-so easily and naturally does. His type must sit blockishly on the page, broken only by paragraphs or by quotations. There is no help for him here. In face of all this, on what can he rely even for hope? Simply, I believe, on the courage of a conviction that of his acquaintance with English prose and by driving at practice in the English way, he (or somebody on the strength of an idea) can make a serviceable and portable volume which shall remind not only many stay-at-home quiet-living folk but many an Englishman on his travels and (still better) many a one in exile on far and solitary outposts of duty, of the nobility of this Island, its lineage and its language. I claim here, and with all emphasis, that my book is not one of Specimens that a critic will mistake its purpose who starts judging it by the amount of space, the number of extracts, assigned to so-and-so; as that he may likely be mistaken in deeming me ignorant. of an author not included or, in his opinion, insufficiently represented as against one of acknowledged importance. Mine is not an effort at 'class-listing-a method always repulsive to me in dealing with literature. The anthologist, as I understand his trade, must have a notion' of his own, a ' pattern in the carpet', though he cannot easily define his pattern. If pressed, I should confess to one or two things. To begin with, I have tried to make this book as representatively English as I might; with less thought of robust and resounding 'patriotism' than of that subdued and hallowed emotion which, for example, should possess any man's thoughts standing before the tomb of the Black Prince in Canterbury Cathedral: a sense of wonderful history written silently, in books and buildings, all persuading that we heirs of more spiritual wealth than, may be, we have surmised or hitherto begun to divine. With this in my mind-keeping English prose as a grand succession while yet trying to release it from any order of ' specimens ', I have (and the critics are welcome to the admission) not cared a whit for the number of extracts by which this or that author is over or under 'represented'. All comment directed upon this will simply ignore the book's purpose. There is a great deal of Berners' Froissart. Why? For two reasons: the first that it holds the core of true English gentility: the second that, in the matter of technique, our prose learnt its grace of our dear enemy, France. For a like reason I have been bold to include an amount of 'out-of-door' matter that may here and there be considered to fall beneath the dignity of high prose and would anyhow overweight a book of specimens. For it is curious to observe, in contrast with our poets who sing of green country all the time, what a disproportionate mass of our prose is urban, and how rarely it contrives, at its best, to get off the pavement. As a countryman I may easily be blamed for a stubborn zeal in redressing this balance. Yet, this opportunity given, I do not repent of my attempt to redress it. Let me illustrate. When Wolfe crossed the St. Lawrence at night to scale the heights of Abraham, it is recorded that he murmured a stanza or two from Gray's Elegy that his vision on that dark passage went back to a green and English country churchyard; so if the reader will turn to an extract I have taken from Charles Reade (No. 429) he will feel this imperishable land of ours revived, and with tears, in the hearts of its roughest outcasts. Those men had no 'patriotism', no sense of any duty to England: a fair sprinkling of them, perhaps, had been convicts and 'left their country for their country's good'. But what they felt is just what I could wish this book to recall to the breast of any gallant Englishman on outpost duty in fort or tent. Nescio qua natale solum dulcedine cunctos I propose that, with the aid of the Clarendon Press, this book shall be put upon sale on November 25, 1925, twenty-five years to a day since The Oxford Book of English Verse saw the light and started to creep into public recognition, at first (as I remember) very slowly. While no more superstitious than ordinary men, I take a pleasure in observing birthdays and other private anniversaries as well as those of the Church: and it is my fancy to choose this as an omen of continuance in some public favour. A quarter of a century is a large slice in the life |