and abbreviated forms of poetry; if in any prose they are found, it is such prose as seeks confessedly to produce poetic effects. This exception aside, in-as-muchas the pedestrian movement of prose has no occasion for quaintness, and the rhythm of prose does not require abbreviation, when such terms are employed they have merely the effect of affectation and finery.’8
THE NUCLEUS OF LITERARY PROSE
“The standard with which all prose writing begins is naturally and properly conversation, the spoken word... Whatever refinement literature reaches, therefore, there still inheres in it as it were the vibration of a voice, dictating, as a sound universal rule, to write as if speaking. That is, aim at the directness, the simplicity of structure, the buoyant life that belong ideally to conversation ...“
MANUFACTURED DICTION
“The antique comes from the study of some past usage or period of literary expression, like that of Malory’s Morte Darthur, for instance, or the Bible. To be kept free from lapses of consistency requires not only the literary spirit which can move at home in past habits of thought and phrase but the sound philological knowledge which can separate the strata of usage peculiar to the different ages and follow the analogies of form, derivation, and the like, characteristic of each period. Working in the antique is cheapened and vulgarised by the throwing about of catch words like whilom, quoth, in sooth, yclept such relics of the ‘by my halidome’ — period of writing are now a days beneath the dignity even of humor; and this because the real proficiency is felt to be more a matter of flavour and texture than of single hard used words. Imitation of biblical diction, in-as-muchas the Bible is always with us a sacred possession, is hazardous, not to say a foregone failure because if applied to thought less serious than that of scripture, it
1363 Minute of Dissent
