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444 THEORIES OF STYLE IN LITERATURE
Prose, as you all know, is always and everywhere a plant
of much later growth than poetry. 9
Plato came four or five
centuries after Homer; Tacitus came two centuries later than
Lucretius; Machiavelli came two centuries after Dante;
Voltaire a century after Corneille; Addison a century after
Shakespeare. And while the prose of Boccaccio, with all its
native charm, can hardly be called an organic, mature, and
mellow style, in poetry, for nearly a century before Boccaccio,
Dante and the minor lyrists of Italy had reached absolute
perfection of rhythmical form.
Although fairly good prose
is much more common than
fairly good verse, yet I hold that truly fine prose
is more rare
than truly fine poetry. I trust that it will be counted neither
a whim nor a paradox if I give it as a reason that mastery in
prose is an art more difficult than mastery in verse. The
very freedom of prose, its want of conventions,
of settled
prosody, of musical inspiration, give wider scope for failure
and afford no beaten paths. Poetry glides swiftly down the
stream of a flowing and familiar river, where the banks are
always the helmsman's guide. Prose puts forth its lonely
skiff
upon a boundless sea, where a multitude of strange and
different crafts are cutting about in contrary directions.
At any rate, the higher triumphs of prose come later and come
to fewer than do the great triumphs of verse.
When I lately had to study a body of despatches and State
papers of the latter half of the sixteenth century,
written in
six modern languages of Europe, I observed that the Italian
alone in that age was a formed and literary language, at the
command of all educated men and women, possessed of organic
canons and a perfectly mature type. The French,
German, Dutch, English, and Spanish of that age, as used for
practical ends, were still in the state of a language held in solution
before it assumes a crystallized form.
Even the men who