`Prose Is the Language of the Intellect'

Chapter 18 of Gilbert Highet’s The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature, “Baroque Prose,” opens audaciously. Highet christens the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries “the age of prose” (he’s not the first to do so), and says the era’s prose is “superior in quality” to the poetry produced in the same period. Limiting our sample exclusively to poets writing in English, this is the era that gave us Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Herbert, Milton, Marvell, Dryden, Swift, Pope and Johnson, and that represents a mere skimming of genius. But Highet makes a compelling case:

“The reason for the superiority of baroque prose is plain, and may sound like an over-simplification; but no better has been suggested. It is that intellect predominated over emotion and imagination in the life of the time, and controlled them: prose is the language of the intellect.”

Highet identifies two general schools of prose. One he traces to the influence of Cicero; the other, to Seneca and Tacitus. The Ciceronian strain he describes as a “full, ornate, magnificent utterance in which emotion constantly swells up and is constantly ordered and disciplined by superb intellectual control.” Its critics felt that “the `big bow-wow’ style of speaking and writing was bogus.” They argued for a plainer, more “natural” handling of language. Of this second style, Highet lists seven masters in English and French: Bacon, Browne, Burton, La Bruyère, Milton, Montaigne and Pascal. Representing the first, neo-Ciceronian style he gives Addison, Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac, Bossuet, Louis Bourdaloue, Burke, François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, Gibbon, Swift and Johnson. It’s pleasing to know such lists are not mutually exclusive. Readers and writers need not be partisans of either. Johnson, in fact, wrote a largely admiring life of Browne, and told Boswell that The Anatomy of Melancholy was “the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise.” The names of at least half of my favorite writers, the ones whose books I return to most frequently, can be found on the two lists. Here’s Highet on Browne:

“Yet prose is not only a tool. It can also be an instrument of music. The most skillful, least monotonous, and subtlest of the baroque musicians in words was Browne, who produced his finest effects by blending simple Anglo-Saxonisms with organ-toned words from Rome.”

And here is Highet on Gibbon, whose great history he criticizes harshly, especially for its well-known antagonism to Christianity and its sometimes “monotonous” prose, but deeply admires as literature:

“Gibbon’s great range would be useless without his analytical power. He had a highly developed sense of intellectual and aesthetic structure. Through this he controlled the enormous and shapeless mass, a thousand processes and a million facts, so that they arranged themselves in large but manageable groups, seventy-one of which made up the entire work, and, uncluttered by appendixes and excursuses and annexes, formed an architectural whole of truly baroque grandeur.”

One of the signal events of my life was reading The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire some fifteen years ago. Finishing it left me elated and mildly depressed, the way we feel after leaving a household where one has been generously welcomed as a member of the family. Even non-readers of his history know that Gibbon said “history is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind,” but the Decline and Fall at the same time documents a noble achievement in human history, despite all the political savagery (which has remained steadily present in subsequent centuries). I have never found Gibbon’s sonorities “monotonous.”

As readers born into English, we have reason to be proud. Our inheritance is enormous and we come by it naturally, without effort. Is it possible to be a patriot for one’s language? Patriots secure in their gratitude don’t feel the need to loudly demean citizens of other countries or speakers of other languages. They merely celebrate (and defend) their gifts. Highet, for instance, is respectful of Dr. Johnson but not an enthusiast. He praises the non-Ciceronian stylists for the “great deal of quiet solitary thinking and reading [they did] in large libraries,” adding parenthetically, (”poor Johnson in his father’s bookshop).” Consider this from The Rambler #38, published on this date, July 28, in 1750:

“There is one reason, seldom remarked, which makes riches less desirable. Too much wealth is very frequently the occasion of poverty. He whom the wantonness of abundance has once softened, easily sinks into neglect of his affairs; and he that thinks he can afford to be negligent, is not far from being poor. He will soon be involved in perplexities, which his inexperience will render unsurmountable; he will fly for help to those whose interest it is that he should be more distressed, and will be at last torn to pieces by the vultures that always hover over fortunes in decay.”