Nelson Evening Mail SATURDAY, JUNE 19. 1926 ENGLISH PROSE

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXI, 19 June 1926, Page 6

Nelson Evening Mail SATURDAY, JUNE 19. 1926 ENGLISH PROSE

I,AST yem was issued "The Oxford Hook nl' English I’lwc." the compiler being Sir Arthur Qnillcr-Courh. Anthologie.s are never entirely satisfactory, lively reader finds something left out which he thinks should certainly have gone in and he wonders why this and that finds a place to the exclusion of Tetter things. It is a difficulty which, lying in that basic and impalpable abstraction. personality, can never he smoothed away: not even by Sir Arthur. Still, as anthologies go it would be hard to find a better than this "Oxford Hook." Yet. that being said, one improvement immediately .suggests itsr)t and that is that the volume might, well have included some examples of :1s editor's own graceful prose. It was no light task to undertake the preparation of an anthology of Eng-

lish prose. During five years Sir Arthur read for this especial purpose. ‘Tim result,” lm says, “leaves rne convinced that no honest scholar can pretend an acquaintance with the whole of English prose, or even with the whole that may yield good selections. All one can do is to spread a wide and patient net and report that lie brings the best of Ins haul.” That is fairly spoken and there is little nee-.! to cavil at the quality of the haul in the present instance. Back to the beginning of the fourteenth. century our laborious compiler casts his net, back to John of Trevisa, the Cornishman who became an Oxford scholar and spent his long life in Englishing Latin works, among others the great General History, or Polychronicon, of lligden. A good "booster” of the m aim of England was the man from Tre\isa. It is a land, lie says, “noble copious, and riche of nobil welles and of nobil ryveros with plente of fische; thero is gretc plente of small fische, of samon, and of olvs. So that cherlcs in som place feditli sowes with fische.” Also thre are “seliepe that heretli good wolle.” There also “beeth many cities and townes, fa ire and noble and riche.” .\nd the mi n of “Engelond” always “have the victorie and innistrec in cverich tight wlier no treson is walkinge.” Trevisa’s spelling may differ a Jit lie from that of to r dny but some of his sentiments seem not unmodern.

Passing hv Mnndevilie, or the unknown writer who took that knight’s name in vain, and Malory who wrote the immortal Mort D’Artliur, though it is hut- ‘honey stolen from trance,” and Chaucer and Wycliffc and others of the 14th Century the tale of English prose flows on to Caxton the first English printer, to Lord Berners and Sir Thomas More, to Cranrner and Latimer and Tyridale. And so on into the 16th, to John Knox with his “First Blast of the Trumpet” against women rulers, a blast which must have expended all his breath for it was never followed by a second. Thus writes the enemy of queens, in prose too good for the subject, “To promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire above any realm, nation, or city, is reputrriant to nature, contumely to God, a thing most contrnrious to his revealed will and approved ordinance; and finally, it is the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice.” And before that century was out conies Philip Sydney, perfect knight and equally at home in prose or poetry, to whose work hijpown words might fitly be applied, that it "held children from play, and old men from the chimncv corner.”

Willi tlio 17th century comes the men who made the Authorised Version, they who added the inspired word to the Inspired Word, who set the lyric seal on the Song of Songs, and gave to Job and Isaiah a renewed immortality. So far we have travelled about a tenth of the way through Sir Arthur’s hook, touching not a tithe of that tenth; to do more is not possible. But to merely glance at the pages of such a hook is to ho impressed with the noble heritage of English prose. A heritage which continually ■ increases. There is much, now as there has always been, that is quiet, descriptive, pedestrian, hut every here and there comes the memorable passage, the purple patch. Nor is there any caste of those who produce great prose; the brotherhood is strangely diverse. Raleigh, knight and soldier; Milton, scholar and student; Runyan, tinker of Bedford; Thackeray, of the writing trade; Huxley, scientist; Lon rad, man ot the sea; for such as these, to lie greatly moved is to write greatly. Let us sample a passage, from the Inst of these. It is of the. burning of the old ‘ Judea” in the Indian Ocean. Between the darkness of earth and heaven she was burning fiercely upon a disc ot sea shot by the blood-red play cl gleams; upon a disc of water, glittering and sinister. A high, clear flame, «in immense and lovely flame, ascended 1 1 oin the ocean, and from its summit the black smoke poured continuously at the sky. She burned furiously; mournful arid imposing like a funeral pile kindled in the night, surrounded by the sea, watched over by the stars.” That is Conrad on the death of a ship; and kero is Raleigh on death itself. “0 eloquent, just, and mighty Death! whom none could advise thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared thou hast done; and whom all the world, hast flattered thou only hast cast out of the world and despised ; thou hast drawn together all the far-siretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over jvilh these two narrow words, ‘Hie jncet’.”