'Just to Sweeten the Cup'

“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.