“It is to be remembered,” Ford Madox Ford writes in The March of Literature (1939), “that a passage of good prose is a work of art absolute in itself and with no more dependence on its contents than is a fugue of Bach, a minuet of Mozart, or the writing for piano of Debussy.”
I’ve often
pondered Ford’s remark and tried to accept it matter-of-factly as Gospel but I can’t.
I love the great prose stylists in various schools. Badly written prose gives
me a headache and makes reading virtually impossible. But prose must have a scaffolding
of meaning. Prose is not music, as Ford suggests, but it ought to be musical.
Words without content are nonsense. I do acknowledge that good prose can make palatable
a subject that doesn’t otherwise interest me. Take A.J. Liebling on boxing or
Michael Oakeshott on politics. To them add Izaak Walton on fishing. I haven’t
fished since I was a boy but I’ve often reread The Compleat Angler (1653), a book that can be legitimately
described as charming: “Rivers and the inhabitants of the watery elements are
made for wise men to contemplate and for fools to pass by without
consideration.” I enjoy the thought and its witty expression while denying its truth.
Ford writes later in The March of Literature, “[J]ust to sweeten the cup, let us take leave of our Jacobean writers with a passage from Walton . . .” and quotes a paragraph drawn from Chapter 4 of The Compleat Angler:
“Look; under
that broad Beech-tree, I sate down, when I was last this way a fishing, and the
birds in the adjoyning Grove seemed to have a friendly contention with an
Eccho, whose dead voice seemed to live in a hallow tree, near to the brow of
that Primrose-hil, there I sate viewing the silver-streams glide silently
towards their center, the tempestuous Sea . . ."
Walton died
on this date, December 15, in 1683 at age ninety.
2 comments:
For me, the test of the value of good prose "on its own" is Mencken; he often seems to me to be completely wrongheaded, but I find his style so delightful that I can read with pleasure almost anything he wrote, even when I think he's spouting nonsense.
The prose of several writers stubbornly beguiles me despite my objection to their world-views, the holes in their arguments, and/or their politics. Examples: G.K. Chesterton, Fredrick Buechner, C.S. Lewis, Oscar Wilde. What masters of language, these guys!
Post a Comment