'Fantastically Good Prose Can Be Launching'

In the middle of “The First Line” (Whatever Is Moving, 1981), an essay devoted to the opening lines of poems, Howard Moss digresses briefly into the virtues of excellent prose. “Fantastically good prose can be launching,” he writes, and cites William Cobbett’s Rural Rides (1830) and Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphiaor Urne Buriall (1658). I take “launching” to mean heaving, hurling or shoving off, as with a ship or aircraft – the first step of any journey. I think Moss may also have propulsion in mind, prose with sufficient energy to move the reader. In the case of Cobbett, here are his opening words, dated Oct. 30, 1821:

“Fog that you might cut with a knife all the way from London to Newbury. This fog does not wet things. It is rather a smoke than a fog. There are no two things in this world; and, were it not for fear of Six-Acts (the ‘wholesome restraint’ of which I continually feel) I might be tempted to carry my comparison further; but, certainly, there are no two things in this world so dissimilar as an English and a Long Island autumn.—These fogs are certainly the white clouds that we sometimes see aloft.”

Inevitably we think of the second paragraph of the first chapter of Bleak House (1853), the one beginning “Fog everywhere.” Cobbett is a political, non-ideological writer who doesn’t clutter his sentences with politics. He hints without hammering. His prose is composed in the plain style. His forbears among writers are Swift, Defoe and Bunyan. In the first sentence, thirteen of its fifteen words are monosyllables, and both exceptions are place names. In contrast, Browne’s prose is often rococo in its extravagance. Here are the opening sentences of Urn Burial, to use its customary modern title:

“When the Funerall pyre was out, and the last valediction was over, men took a lasting adieu of their interred Friends, little expecting the curiosity of future ages should comment upon their ashes, and having no old experience of the duration of their Reliques, held no opinion of such after-considerations.”

In a sense, Browne has no forbears, except perhaps the King James Bible. English is clay in his hands, and he shapes it confidently and with delight. He was the most prolific neologist in the history of the language. In the OED he is cited 788 times for the first appearance of words in English. Among writers most often cited by the Dictionary, Browne ranks seventieth. By his customary standards, the sentence quoted is plain-spoken and contains no rare or exotic words.

Moss doesn’t limit his samples of good prose to a hidebound understanding of “literature.” He quotes a passage from Anthony Collett’s The Changing Face of England (1926) that Auden included in A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970), and another from The Ocean (1955) by F.D. Ommanney. Both are wonderful to read. To his credit, Moss also cites the essays of V.S. Pritchett, the greatest book critic of the twentieth century. Moss concludes his digression on prose with a brief, suggestive observation:

“The half-seen, the barely glimpsed, if they make an impression, are more usable, usually, than the familiar. Though sometimes if the right connection is made, a place one has been steeped in comes alive.”