The germ of truth in it is that metaphysically these effects may be said
not to have existed till artists taught us to see and to look for them.
But, after all, wise old Shakespeare has the last word:
Nature is made better by no mean
But Nature makes that mean: so o'er that Art,
Which you say adds to Nature, is an Art
That Nature makes.
But these things are not for the British jury. Pater, the literary
artist, however, one is more driven to praise than to appraise. This
exquisite care for words has something of moral purity--as well as
physical daintiness in it. There is indeed something priestly in this
consecration of language, in this reverent ablution of the counters of
thought, those poor counters so overcrusted with the dirt of travel, so
loosely interchangeable among the vulgar; the figure of the stooping
devotee shows sublime in a garrulous world. What a heap of mischief M.
Jourdain has done by his discovery that he was talking prose all his
life! Prose, indeed! Moliere has much to answer for. The rough,
shuffling, slipshod, down-at-heel, clipped, frayed talk of every-day life
bears as much relation to prose as a music-hall ditty to poetry. The name
"prose" must be reserved for the fine art of language--that fine art
whose other branch is poetry.
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