'A Natural and Grave Distinction of Air'

In the Imaginary Conversation he stages between John Milton and Andrew Marvell, Walter Savage Landor has the latter say:

“Good prose, to say nothing of the original thoughts it conveys, may be infinitely varied in modulation. It is only an extension of metres, an amplification of harmonies, of which even the best and most varied poetry admits but few. Comprehending at once the prose and poetry of Milton, we could prove, before ‘fit audience,’ that he is incomparably the greatest master of harmony that ever lived.”

Ours is an age when tin-eared poets, not to mention prose writers, know little or nothing of “an extension of metres,” One is reminded of Oscar Wilde’s wisecrack: “George Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning.” The best prose is harmonically and rhythmically arranged like a musical score, but without drawing attention to itself. It’s subtle and seductive. A heavy, self-conscious string of iambs or a virus-like proliferation of alliteration (a practice often judged “poetic”) ought to provoke laughter.

Sidney Colvin (1845-1927) is best remembered for his friendship with Robert Louis Stevenson, but he also contributed two volumes to the English Men of Letters series – one devoted to Keats (1887), the other to Landor (1881). Landor’s epigrams are the best written in English between Ben Jonson and J.V. Cunningham, but Colvin, unlike many readers, favors Landor’s prose style:

“There was not the simplest thing but received in his manner of saying it a charm of sound as well as a natural and grave distinction of air; there was not the most stupendous in the saying of which he ever allowed himself to lose moderation or control. His passion never hurries him, in prose, into the regular beats or equidistant accents of verse; he accumulates clause upon clause of towering eloquence, but in the last clause never fails to plant his period composedly and gracefully on its feet. His perfect instinct for the rhythms and harmonies of prose reveals itself as fully in three lines as in a hundred.”

The comparison with music is inevitable, In prose, Landor almost never fails to resolve a passage and harmonize at least two themes simultaneously. As an example, Colvin offers this passage:

“A bell warbles the more mellifluously in the air when the sound of the stroke is over, and when another swims out from underneath it, and pants upon the element that gave it birth.”

According to my ears, that passage comes off as a little overripe. I prefer this sample made by Colvin, with Landor’s second-nature use of classical references:

“There are no fields of amaranth on this side of the grave: there are no voices, Rhodope, that are not soon mute, however tuneful: there is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last.”

Let’s give Colvin the last word on Landor:

“[H]armony and rhythm are only the superficial beauties of a prose style. Style itself, in the full meaning of the word, depends upon Style means the instinctive rule, the innate principle of selection and control, by which an artist shapes and regulates every expression of his mind. Landor was in English psomething deeper and more inward. rose an artist comparable with the highest in their respective spheres; with Milton in English verse, or with Handel in music.”