05-118

8. Ferdinand Fabre: 119-134

9. The "Contes" of M. Augustin Filon: 135-149

ESSAYS FROM 'THE GUARDIAN'

WALTER HORATIO PATER

E-text Editor: Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D. Electronic Version 1.0 / Date
10-12-01

PATER'S NOTE: The nine papers contained in the following volume
originally appeared anonymously in The Guardian newspaper.

E-TEXT EDITOR'S NOTE: I have not preserved the title pages of this
volume, but have instead moved dates to each essay's end and included
any necessary title-page material in the heading area of the first
substantive page.

I. ENGLISH LITERATURE

FOUR BOOKS FOR STUDENTS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

[3] THE making of an anthology of English prose is what must have
occurred to many of its students, by way of pleasure to themselves, or
of profit to other persons. Such an anthology, the compass and variety
of our prose literature being considered, might well follow exclusively
some special line of interest in it; exhibiting, for instance, what is
so obviously striking, its imaginative power, or its (legitimately)
poetic beauty, or again, its philosophical capacity. Mr. Saintsbury's
well-considered Specimens of English Prose Style, from Malory to
Macaulay (Kegan Paul), a volume, as we think, which bears fresh witness
to the truth of the old remark that it takes a scholar indeed to make a
[4] good literary selection, has its motive sufficiently indicated in
the very original "introductory essay," which might well stand, along
with the best of these extracts from a hundred or more deceased masters
of English, as itself a document or standard, in the matter of prose
style. The essential difference between poetry and prose--"that other
beauty of prose"--in the words of the motto he has chosen from Dryden,
the first master of the sort of prose he prefers:--that is Mr.
Saintsbury's burden. It is a consideration, undoubtedly, of great
importance both for the writer and the critic; in England especially,
where, although (as Mr. Saintsbury rightly points out, in correction of
an imperfectly informed French critic of our literature) the radical
distinction between poetry and prose has ever been recognized by its
students, yet the imaginative impulse, which is perhaps the richest of
our purely intellectual gifts, has been apt to invade the province of
that tact and good judgment, alike as to matter and manner, in which we
are not richer than other people. G