Chapter VII

It is usual to class among the first of these faults a defective sense of English prose: and the commonest arraignment lies against his use of blank verse in moments of pathos or of deep emotion. Well, but let us clear our minds of cant about English prose, and abstain from talking about it as if the Almighty had invented its final pattern somewhere in the eighteenth century. Prose--and Poetry too, for that matter--is a way of putting things worth record into memorable speech. English writers of the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century found, with some measure of consent, an admirable fashion of doing this, and have left a tradition: and it is a tradition to which I, personally, would cling if I could, admiring it as I do, and admiring so much less many pages of Dickens and a thousand of pages of Carlyle. After all, so long as the thing gets itself said, and effectively, and memorably, who are we to prescribe rules or parse sentences? What, for example, could that mysterious body, the College of Preceptors, do to improve the grammar of _Antony and Cleopatra_, even if they persuaded one another “Well, apparently they have come to stay, and perhaps we had better call upon them, my dear”?

VIII

Having, then, no preconceived notions about prose, and few prejudices save against certain locutions of which I confess I dislike them mainly because I dislike the sort of person who employs them--I assert that Dickens, aiming straight at his purpose, wrote countless pages of quite splendid prose. I defy you, for example, to suggest how a sense of the eeriness of the Woolwich marshes with an apprehension of horror behind the fog could be better conveyed in words than Dickens conveys them in the opening chapters of _Great Expectations_; as I ask you how the earliest impressions of a sensitive child can be better conveyed in language than they are in the early chapters of _David Copperfield_.