This is crying for the moon, or rather pretending to cry for it, for
the writer is obviously insincere. I see the Saturday Review says
the passage I have just quoted "reaches almost to poetry," and
indeed I find many blank verses in it, some of them very aggressive.
No prose is free from an occasional blank verse, and a good writer
will not go hunting over his work to rout them out, but nine or ten
in little more than as many lines is indeed reaching too near to
poetry for good prose. This, however, is a trifle, and might pass
if the tone of the writer was not so obviously that of cheap
pessimism. I know not which is cheapest, pessimism or optimism.
One forces lights, the other darks; both are equally untrue to good
art, and equally sure of their effect with the groundlings. The one
extenuates, the other sets down in malice. The first is the more
amiable lie, but both are lies, and are known to be so by those who
utter them. Talk about catching the tone of a vanished society to
understand Rembrandt or Giovanni Bellini! It's nonsense--the folds
do not thicken in front of these men; we understand them as well as
those among whom they went about in the flesh, and perhaps better.
Homer and Shakespeare speak to us probably far more effectually than
they did to the men of their own time, and most likely we have them
at their best. I cannot think that Shakespeare talked better than
we hear him now in "Hamlet" or "Henry the Fourth"; like enough he
would have been found a very disappointing person in a drawing-room.
People stamp themselves on their work; if they have not done so they
are naught; if they have we have them; and for the most part they
stamp themselves deeper in their work than on their talk. No doubt
Shakespeare and Handel will be one day clean forgotten, as though
they had never been born. The world will in the end die; mortality