'Unhandled Stuff and Untrodden Ground'

“[Sir Thomas] Browne requires slightly different treatment from most if not from all other figures in this book. The world-famous passage in Urn Burial, ‘Now since these dead bones,’ is known in its first half-dozen lines probably to thousands who do not know the context at all; and the paragraph of which it forms part, perhaps to hundreds who do not know much or anything more of Browne.”

 

George Saintsbury’s casual understanding floors me. When he published A History of English Prose Rhythm in 1912, he could safely assume that readers would recognize the opening lines of Chap. V in Browne’s  Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial (1658). I’ve read the book and return to it often but didn’t immediately recognize the passage:

 

“Now since these dead bones have already out-lasted the living ones of Methuselah, and in a yard under ground, and thin walls of clay, out-worn all the strong and specious buildings above it; and quietly rested under the drums and tramplings of three conquests; What Prince can promise such diuturnity unto his Reliques, or might not gladly say, Sic ego componi versus in ossa velim.”

 

In the book’s introduction, Saintsbury says his subject -- the rhythmic quality of English prose – remains “unhandled stuff and untrodden ground.” Throughout the book, he scans prose the way we scan verse. “[A]t the risk of disgusting the  reader,” he writes, “I shall attempt the feat (some may say the outrage) of scanning the entire rhapsody [that is, the passage quoted above and more] by division, and in some parts by actual quantification.” In our time, when most poets don’t write metrical verse and most, presumably, don’t know how, Saintsbury’s effort will strike some as eccentric or worse.

 

But for anyone who wishes to write well, it’s a fascinating exercise. I should say I pay unconscious, intuitive attention to the rhythm of my sentences. I’ve never scanned them in a formal sense. I listen to them with my inner ear, hearing the beat. I know when I hear a clam, as musicians say – a wrong note – though I probably couldn’t tell you why it sounds sharp or flat or just plain clunky. In other words, I admire Saintsbury taking prose seriously enough to scan it, but I don’t intend to rigorously apply his method. The second-nature quality of rhythm seems to serve me pretty well. Saintsbury affirms the musical analogy when he refers to Browne’s fifth chapter as “an unbroken and, at most, spaced and rested symphony.” Referring to a subsequent passage in Urn Burial, Saintsbury writes:

 

“This, on the whole, is in a minor key, and uses more muffled instruments. The quaintness of the master has a little (only a little) got the better of his magnificence. But the extraordinary subtlety and variety of it, and the unerring adjustment of the different rhythms to the different senses, are almost equally apparent.”

 

It’s good to be reminded that prose can serve purposes other than the strictly utilitarian.