As in poetry, so in prose. We find in our best prose of to-day an
extraordinary mastery over pure, nervous, imaginative language; and all
this, alongside here of a riotous extravagance, and there, of a crude
and garrulous commonplace. Thackeray's best chapters, say in _Vanity
Fair_, _Esmond_, the _Humourists_, contain an almost perfect prose
style--a style as nervous as that of Swift, as easy as that of
Goldsmith, as graceful as that of Addison, as rich as that of Gibbon or
Burke. No English romances have been clothed in a language so chaste
and scholarly--not even Fielding's. Certainly not the Waverley series;
for Scott, as we know, rehearsed his glowing chronicles of the past
with the somewhat conventional verbosity of the _improvisatore_ who
recites but will not pause to write. George Eliot relates her story
with an art even more cultivated than that of Thackeray--though,
doubtless, with an over-elaborated self-consciousness, and perceptible
suggestions of the laboratory of the student. Trollope tells his
artless tales in perfectly pure, natural, and most articulate prose,
the language of a man of the world telling a good story well. And a
dozen living novelists are masters of a style of extreme ease and grace.
Side by side with this chastened English prose, we have men of genius
who have fallen into evil habits. Bulwer, who knew better, would quite
revel in a stagey bombast; Dickens, with his pathos and his humour, was
capable of sinking into a theatrical mannerism and cockney vulgarities
of wretched taste; Disraeli, with all his wit and _savoir faire_, has
printed some rank fustian, and much slip-slop gossip; and George
Meredith at times can be as jerky and mysterious as a prose Browning.
Charlotte Bronte and Kingsley could both descend to blue fire and
demoniac incoherences. Macaulay is brilliant and emphatic, but we
weary at last of his everlasting _staccato_ on the trumpet; and even
the magnificent symphonies of Ruskin at his best will end sometimes in
a sort of _coda_ of fantasias which suggest limelights and coloured
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