MIDDLE AGE AND PROSE.

Dominion, Volume 3, Issue 888, 6 August 1910, Page 9

MIDDLE AGE AND PROSE.

Professor Jtalcigli, who lias the rare ■ : faculty of handling literature , withoutdestroying it (says the London ; "News"), has been laying down the doctrine that first-rate prose cannot he : written earlier than middle age. Ho ■; was talking about Johnson, and so was , more or less driven into the theory, for if many have made Johnson a hero,' /■ •nobody has ever thought of him as young. Yet whatever the road that led ; Professor .Raleigh to his generalisation, there is much mora than enough truth in it to lift it above the level of an epigram. lYc can all name oif-lmml a : score of. masterpieces iii verse done in " the blush of youth,- quite a number of great poets who never even lived to 1 middle age, and more than one who sur.yived by many years tbe genius'of their j; south. * But how many great prose inters can be''named who entered the . field complete? Perhaps Macaulay, and fss&a. thon one has - to .fight /i num.

guard action with those who deny Macaulay's place' among the groat prose writers.' The statistics would suggest that it is easier to write great poetry than to write great prose—easier, that is, for those who have the stuff in them, for in these mutters we have to start with geiiiiis as a necessary preliminary. .Professor Halcigh suggested that youth is too. full of ideas, and that the best prose requires not so hutch luxuriance air. the ordered cultivation which ripe years give. One might put tho same idea rather irioro generally by noting that verso has the cliormous advantage over prose of strangeness and unfamiliaritv. We all talk prose hut wo do not all lisp in numbers, so that on tho one hand verse fits itself more readily to the revolutionary quality in youth, and 011 the other finds a readier entry into the admiration of the moss. The technique of poetry is much simpler than that of prose. The rules of verso are few and tho craft is restricted, but just because proso is apparently so formless and so irregular, and so familiar to get compelling music out of it is so much the more difficult, so much more a matter of art and discipline. To bowitch us with dancing is difficult, but much less difficult than to bewitch ; us' ~with walking.