eck of this figure was tinctured with many
summers, and cross-hatched by the weather and mature maleness. I caught a
smell of newly-turned earth. The figure moved as though time were
nothing. It turned its face as I drew level, and said it was a good
morning. The morning was better than good; and somehow this object in an
old hat and clothes as rough as bark, with a face which probably had the
same expression when William was momentous at Hastings, and when Pitt
solemnly ordered the map of Europe to be rolled up, was in accord with
the light in the elm, and the superior and convincing insolence of the
blackbirds. They all suggested the tantalizing idea that solid ground is
near us, in this unreasonable world of anxious change, if only we had
intelligence enough to know where to look for it.

VI. Prose Writing

MARCH 16, 1918. A critic has been mourning because good prose is not
being written to-day. This surprised him, and he asked why it was that
when poetry, which he pictured as "primroses and violets," found
abundance of nourishment even in the unlikely compost these latter days
provide, yet prose, which he saw as "cabbages and potatoes," made but
miserable growth.

It is hard to explain it, for I must own that the image of the potato
confuses me. One has seen modern verse which was, florally, very
spud-like. If those potatoes were meant for violets then they suggest
more than anything else a simple penny guide-book for their gardeners.
Here we see at least the danger of using flowers of speech, when violets
and onions get muddled in the same posy, and how ill botany is likely to
serve the writer who flies heedlessly to it for literary symbols. Figures
of speech are pregnant with possibilities (I myself had better be very
careful here), and those likely to show most distress over their progeny
are the unlucky fathers. For the first thing expected of any literary
expression is that it should be faithful to what is in the mind, and if
for the idea of good prose writing the image of a potato is given, then
it can but represent the features of the earthy lumps which are common to
the stalls of the market-place. What is prose? Sodden and lumbering
stuff, I suppose. And what is poetry? That fortunate lighting of an idea
which delights us with the belief that we have surprised truth, and have
seen that it is beautiful.

The difficulty with what the textbooks tell us is prose is that many of
us make it, not natur