COLERIDGE defined prose as 'words in good order,' poetry as 'the best words in the best order.' But there is no reason why prose should not be the best words in the best order. Rhythm alone, and rhythm of a regular and recurrent kind only, distinguishes poetry from prose. It was contended by an Oxford professor of poetry, Mr. W. J. Courthope, that the lines of Marlowe, 'Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, are of a different substance from the substance of prose, and that it is certain that Marlowe 'could only have ventured on the sublime audacity that a face launched ships and burned towers by escaping from the limits of ordinary language, and conveying his metaphor through the harmonious and ecstatic movement of rhythm and metre.' To this it may be answered that any writer of elevated prose, Milton or Ruskin, could have said in prose precisely what Marlowe said in verse, and could have made fine prose of it: the imagination, the idea, a fine kind of form, would have been there; only one thing would have been lacking, the very finest kind of form, the form of verse. It would have been poetical substance, not poetry; the rhythm transforms it into poetry, and nothing but the rhythm. When Wordsworth declares, in the Preface to the 'Lyrical Ballads,' that 'there neither is nor can be any essential differ ence between the language of prose and metrical composition,' he is perfectly right, and Coleridge is certainly wrong in saying, 'I write in metre because I am about to use a language different from that of prose.' Both forget that what must be assumed is poetical substance, and that, given poetical substance, the actual language of the prose and of the verse may very well be identical. When Coleridge says that he would have preferred 'Alice Fell? in prose, he is, very justly, criticising the substance of that 'metrical composition,' which is wholly unpoetical: there, and not in the language, is the distinction between its essential prose and poetry. There is in prose, whenever it is good prose, but not necessarily inherent in it, a certain rhythm, much laxer than that of verse, not, indeed, bound by formal laws at all; but, in its essence, like the intonation which distinguishes one voice from another in the repetition of a single phrase. Prose, in its rudimentary stage, is merely recorded speech; but, as one may talk in prose all one's life without knowing it, so it may be that the conscious form of verse (speech, that is, reduced to rules, and regarded as partly of the nature of music) was of earlier origin. A certain stage of civilisation must have been reached before it could have occurred to any one that ordinary speech was worth being preserved. Verse is more easily remembered than prose, because of its recurrent beat, and whatever men thought worth remembering, either for its beauty (as a song or hymn) or for its utility (as a law), would naturally be put into verse. Verse may well have anticipated the existence of writing, but hardly prose. The writing-down of verse, to this day, is almost a materialization of it; but prose exists only as a written document. The rhythm of verse, that rhythm which distinguishes it from prose, has never been traced with any certainty to its origin. It is not even certain whether its origin is consequent upon the origin of music, or whether the two are independent in their similar but by no means identical capacity. That a sense of regular cadence, though no sense of rhyme, is inherent in our nature, such as it now is, may be seen by the invariably regular rhythm of children's songs and of the half-inarticulate verse arrangements by which they accompany their games, and by the almost invariable inaccuracy of their rhymes. It is equally evident that the pleasure which we derive from the regular beat of verse is inherent in use, from the susceptibility of children to every form of regular rhythm, from the rocking of the cradle to the sound of a lullaby. Prose cuts itself sharply off from this great inheritance of susceptibility to regular rhythm, and thus, by what is looked upon as natural or instinctive in it, begins its existence a lawless and accidental thing. In its origin, prose is in no sense an art, and it never has and never will become an art, strictly speaking, as verse is, or painting, or music. Gradually it has found out its capacities; it has discovered how what is useful in it can be trained to beauty; it has learned to set limits to what is unbounded in it, and to follow, at a distance, some of the laws of verse. Gradually it has developed laws of its own, which, however, by the nature of its existence, are less definite, less peculiar to it as a form, than those of verse. Everything that touches literature as literature affects prose, which has come to be the larger half of what we call literature. It is the danger and privilege of prose that it has no limits. The very form of verse is a concentration; you can load every rift with more ore. Prose, with its careless lineage direct from speech, has a certain impromptu and casualness about it; it has allowed itself so much licence among trivialities that a too serious demeanour surprises; we are apt to be repelled by a too strait observance of law on the part of one not really a citizen. And there is one thing that prose cannot do; it cannot sing. A distinction there is between prose and lyrical verse, even in actual language, because here words are used by rhythm as notes in music, and at times with hardly more than that musi |