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Owing to the refining and fruitless nature of their education, they are quite devoid of the essential traits of the national character, and he who would appeal to them must speak in a way which is not of the people that is to say, after the manner of our best prose-writers and Wagner himself; though that he did violence to himself in writing thus is evident.
"Don't you think it is worth being paid for, if it is worth printing?" he persisted. "Upon that principle, we should feel obliged to pay for poetry," said the editor. "Oh," said Oscar, "poets don't need money. They live on flowers and dew-drops." The editor smiled. "You think prose-writers require something more substantial?" "Yes, sir." "I will tell you how the matter stands," said the editor.
For obvious reasons, the question is one that must be settled by reference to prose-writers, and not poets; and it is, we think, pretty well settled that more words of Latin original were brought into the language in the century between 1550 and 1650 than in the whole period before or since, and for the simple reason, that they were absolutely needful to express new modes and combinations of thought.
Mankind are slow to credit the same person with eminence in various fields. When they read the prose of a great poet, they try it by severer tests than would be applied to other prose-writers. When a painter wins fame by his portraits or his landscapes, they are apt to discourage any other kind of painting he may attempt. So Mr.
It is possible to tell upon the fingers of one hand, or at all events on the fingers of two hands, the names of all the nineteenth-century writers who have handled prose with any marked delicacy. There are several effective prose-writers, but very few artists.
She recites, with no new power, historical facts that are already familiar; and gives many pages to extracts from very well known poets and very ill known prose-writers, to the exclusion of her own terse and vigorous thought. All this is without a trace of book-making, but is done in single-hearted zeal for views which are only damaged by the process. These are merely literary defects; but Mrs.
And in reality those already given, except in the instance of Tullus Hostilius, do not entirely fall within the scope of the present volume. The Roman poets, Virgil, Horace, Ovid and Lucan, give a fuller insight than the Latin prose-writers, into the conceptions of their countrymen upon the subject of incantations and magic.
To begin with, the Carolingian stories had been saturated with Arthurian colour: they had been furnished with all the knight-rrantry, all the gallantry, all the enchantments, the fairies, giants, and necromancers of the Keltic legends; and, moreover, they had lost, by infinite repetition, all the political realism and meaning so striking in "The Chanson de Roland" and "The Quatre Fils Aymon;" a confusion and unreality further increased by the fact that the Italians had no original connection with those tales, that to them real men and plans were no better than imaginary ones, and that the minstrels who sang in the market-place, and the laborious prose-writers who compiled such collections as that called of the "Reali di Francia," were equally free in their alterations and adaptations, creating unknown relationships, inventing new adventures, suppressing essential historical points, with no object save amusing their audience or readers with new stories about familiar heroes.
If he fall short of the highest reaches of imagination, he is none the less a master within his own sphere all the more so, indeed, that he is conscious of his own limitations, and wastes no strength in striving to be other than himself. Genial, natural, and original, as much as in these latter days it is given to be, he holds a place among our poets like that of Irving among our prose-writers.
The greatest of English prose-writers before the Conquest was Ælfric, who was educated at the school at Winchester which Æthelwold, a pupil of St Dunstan, had founded. His works are very numerous. He wrote Homilies, or Sermons, on Scriptural subjects, and Lives of the Saints.
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