THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT IN ENGLISH POETRY INTRODUCTION I COLERIDGE defined prose as 'words in good order,' poetry as the best words in the best order.' But there is no reason why prose should not be the best words in the best order. Rhythm alone, and rhythm of a regular and recurrent kind only, distinguishes poetry from prose. It was contended by an Oxford professor of poetry, Mr. W. J. Courthope, that the lines of Marlowe, 'Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, are of a different substance from the substance of prose, and that it is certain that Marlowe 'could only have ventured on the sublime audacity that a face launched ships and burned towers by escaping from the limits of ordinary language, and conveying his metaphor through the harmonious and ecstatic movement of rhythm and metre.' To this it may be answered that any writer of elevated prose, Milton or Ruskin, could have said in prose precisely what Marlowe said in verse, and could have made fine prose of it: the imagination, the idea, a fine kind of form, would have been there; only one thing would have been lacking, the very finest kind of form, the form of verse. It would have been poetical substance, not poetry; the rhythm transforms it into poetry, and nothing but the rhythm. When Wordsworth declares, in the Preface to the 'Lyrical Ballads,' that 'there neither is nor can be any essential differ ence between the language of prose and metrical composition," he is perfectly right, and Coleridge is certainly wrong in saying, 'I write in metre because I am about to use a language different from that of prose.' Both forget that what must be assumed is poetical substance, and that, given poetical substance, the actual language of the prose and of the verse may very well be identical. When Coleridge says that he would have preferred 'Alice Fell? in prose, he is, very justly, criticising the substance of that 'metrical composition,' which is wholly unpoetical: there, and not in the language, is the distinction between its essential prose and poetry. There is in prose, whenever it is good prose, but not necessarily inherent in it, a certain rhythm, much laxer than that of verse, not, indeed, bound by formal laws at all; but, in its essence, like the intonation which distinguishes one voice from another in the repetition of a single phrase. Prose, in its rudimentary stage, is merely recorded speech; but, as one may talk in prose all one's life without knowing it, so it may be that the conscious form of verse (speech, that is, reduced to rules, and regarded as partly of the nature of music) was of earlier origin. A certain stage of civilisation must have been reached before it could have occurred to any one that ordinary speech was worth being preserved. Verse is more easily remembered than prose, because of recurrent beat, and whatever men thought worth remembering, either for its beauty (as a song or hymn) or for its utility (as a law), would naturally be put into verse. Verse may well have anticipated the existence of writing, but hardly prose. The writing-down of verse, to this day, is almost a materialization of it; but prose exists only as a written document. The rhythm of verse, that rhythm which distinguishes it from prose, has never been traced with any certainty to its origin. It is not even certain whether its origin is consequent upon the origin of music, or whether the two are independent in their similar but by no means identical capacity. That a |