"The rudiments of Paradise"

More stuff from Saintsbury's History of English Prose Rhythm. (Prev. remarks here.)

Robert South on Paradise (proto-Augustan style, re "sin and time" cf. Auden's "time and fevers"):

All those arts, rarities, and inventions, which vulgar minds gaze at, the ingenious pursue, and all admire, are but the relics of an intellect defaced with sin and time. We admire it now, only as antiquaries do a piece of old coin, for the stamp it once bore, and not for those vanishing lineaments and disappearing draughts that remain upon it at present. And certainly, that must needs have been very glorious, the decays of which are so admirable. He that is comely, when old and decrepit, surely was very beautiful when he was young. An ARISTOTLE was but the rubbish of an ADAM, and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise.

Abraham Cowley on solitude ("plain style" approaching chattiness):

The First Minister of State has not so much business in public as a wise man has in private; if the one have little leisure to be alone, the other has less leisure to be in company; the one has but part of the affairs of one nation, the other all the works of God and nature under his consideration. There is no saying shocks me so much as that which I hear very often, "That a man does not know how to pass his time."

Coleridge, in Anima Poetae, trying to get past the antitheses of Augustan prose (the "return of rhythm" in Saintsbury's rather questionable typology):

The thin scattered rain-clouds were scudding along the sky; above them, with a visible interspace, the crescent moon hung, and partook not of the motion; her own hazy light filled up the concave, as if it had been painted and the colors had run. 

(Everything that is good and worthwhile in Coleridge or Wordsworth is bleak; pace Larkin, deprivation was for Wordsworth what daffodils are sometimes supposed to have been.)

More from Anima Poetae. Saintsbury is overly indulgent to this entry:

Leaves of trees upturned by the stirring wind in twilight, -- an image of paleness, wan affright.

Structurally it is not entirely unrelated to Pound's metro poem. I think it is rather bad, on the whole, because I find "leaves of trees" cheap and redundant, and the rhyme annoying, but Saintsbury's real point -- that omitting the conjunction gives the passage a distinctly and pleasantly un-Augustan feel, of a kind the Romantics would continue to exploit -- is valid.

Coleridge's throwaway lines and diary entries are sometimes extraordinarily tantalizing, consider this one (not quoted in Saintsbury):

Analyze the causes that the ludicrous weakens memory, and laughter, mechanically, makes it difficult to remember a good story.

(?!)

In general, as I remarked earlier, Saintsbury seems to me far too cavalier about the constraints imposed by meaning; for instance he quotes the Coleridge passages above after a string of excerpts from Gibbon and Johnson -- he anticipates the objection that most of his so-called "rhythmical revival" is simply a revival of descriptive prose, and of the diffuse at the expense of the crisp, but doesn't really answer it except to say that it's ipso facto good for prose to have complex harmonies.

(Topic for another post: scattered protestations aside this book does very little, directly, to counter one's naive belief that stylistic elaboration is possible and non-distracting only to the extent that the subject matter is already familiar to readers. Jeremy Taylor is explicitly an example of this. If granted, this has the corollary that useful prose is never particularly good. The main counterexamples appear to be Hobbes (clever arrangement of clauses) and Gibbon (musical use of foreign names) -- one could do both, I think, in scientific discourse. Ancient prose could be expository and beautiful because the ancients had so little to expound. (But what about Tacitus?))

"To fill all penuries"

img from Wikipedia


George Saintsbury, in his History of English Prose Rhythm, cites this sentence from one of Donne's sermons -- the ending of which is very famous -- as one of the greatest examples of English rhythmical prose:

If some King of the earth have so large an extent of Dominion, in North, and South, as that he hath Winter and Summer together in his Dominions, so large an extent East and West, as that he hath day and night together in his Dominions, much more hath God mercy and judgement together: He brought light out of darknesse, not out of a lesser light; he can bring thy Summer out of Winter, though thou have no Spring; though in the wayes of fortune, or understanding, or conscience, thou have been benighted till now, wintred and frozen, clouded and eclypsed, damped and benummed, smothered and stupefied till now, now God comes to thee, not as in the dawning of the day, not as in the bud of the spring, but as the Sun at noon to illustrate all shadowes, as the sheaves in harvest, to fill all penuries, all occasions invite his mercies, and all times are his seasons.

It is a magnificent bit of writing, I think, but shows how hard it is to assess prose primarily for its rhythm; if it weren't for the opulence of the language, this would not be an especially notable passage; and yet the opulence is in fact part of the rhythm -- the quantity of a word is not separable from the degree of its unexpectedness; "illustrate," for instance, is dwelt on here as it would not be in other uses.

As usual Saintsbury has a lot of good observations to make -- on Milton's tendency to spoil his sentences by tacking on afterthoughts, on the effects one can get out of alternating short and long sentences (the "undulating" quality of good 16th century prose), on the value of slightly avoided isocolon (see Donne above), on the absolute necessity of avoiding strings of anapests and the relative permissibility of strings of choriambs -- and one enjoys his occasional sarcasms, but the book comes off, on the whole, as the work of a crank. His principles for foot-division are entirely unsystematic as far as I can make out; the quoted passages are usually foot-divided, even when he has nothing to say about the foot-divisions; so you have to read through "to fill | all penuries; | all occasions | invite | his mercies" etc., which is painful and distracting. (It must be admitted, however, that Saintsbury's book has enormous historical value as a guide to stress patterns in RP circa 1900.) The quoted passages are often a little mystifying, being drawn from longer works, like Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, that are about something and that one is unlikely to have read. And the decision to annotate the entire last chapter of Urn-Burial with foot-divisions and (in many places) accent markers was evidently not that of a sane person.