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I have to admit, you do need a little stamina for this tome, but it does contain some interesting chapters, especially if you are interested in music, literature and/or art. There are good reasons for including it, as you can see from the contents page. Mr Huneker does have a commendable vocabulary. Read the last three sentences of the extract at least....
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020
Unicorns
by James Huneker (1917)
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But artistic prose, chiselled prose, is a negligible quantity nowadays. It was all very well in the more spacious times of linkboys, sedan-chairs, and bag-wigs, but with the typist cutting one's phrases into angular fragments, with the soil at our heels saturated in slang, what hope is there for assonance, variety in rhythm, and the sonorous cadences of prose? Write "naturally," we are told. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as a "natural style." Even Newman, master of the pellucid, effortless phrase, confesses to laborious days of correction, and he wrote with the idea uppermost and with no thought of style, so-called. Abraham Lincoln nourished his lonely soul on the Bible and Bunyan. He is a writer of simple yet elevated prose, without parallel in our native literature other than Emerson. Hawthorne and Poe wrote in the key of classic prose; while Walt Whitman's jigsaw jingle is the ultimate deliquescence of prose form. For practical every-day needs the eighteenth-century prose men are the best to follow. But the Bible is the Golden Book of English prose.
Quintilian wrote: "We cannot even speak except in longs and shorts, and longs and shorts are the material of feet." All personal prose should go to a tune of its own. The curious are recommended to the monumental work of George Saintsbury, A History of English Prose Rhythm. Prose may be anything else, but it must not be bad blank verse. "Numerous" as to rhythms, but with no hint of balance, in the metrical sense; without rhythm it is not prose at all. Professor Oliver Elton has set this forth with admirable lucidity in his English Prose Numbers. He also analyses a page from The Golden Bowl of Henry James, discovering new beauties of phrasing and subtle cadences in the prose of this writer. Professor Saintsbury's study is the authoritative one among its fellows. Walter Pater's essay on Style is honeycombed with involutions and preciosity. When On the Art of Writing, by Arthur Quiller-Couch, appeared we followed Hazlitt's advice and reread an old book, English Composition, by Professor Barrett Wendell, and with more pleasure and profit than followed the later perusal of the Cornish novelist's lectures. He warns against jargon. But the seven arts, science, society, medicine, politics, religion, have each their jargon. Not music-criticism, not baseball, are so painfully "jargonised" as metaphysics. Jargon is the fly in the ointment of every critic. Even the worthy fellow of Jesus College, Sir Arthur himself, does not altogether escape it. On page 23 of his Inaugural Address he speaks of "loose, discinct talk." "Discinct" is good, but "ungirded" is better because it is not obsolete, and it is more sonorous and Saxon. On page 42 we stumble against "suppeditate" and gnash our teeth. After finishing the book the timid neophyte will be apt to lay the flattering unction to his soul that he is a born stylist, like the surprised Mr. Jourdain, who spoke prose so many years without knowing it.
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