[86:A] See the selections in _Pastels in Prose_ (1890), and the sympathetic introduction by William Dean Howells.
[88:A] See _The Chapbook_, April, 1921, London. _Poetry in Prose_, Three Essays by T. S. Eliot, Frederic Manning, Richard Aldington.
One of the frequent sayings in the text books of literary history is that the literature of a nation always begins with poetry in verse, and that good prose is a later development. England and Greece are especially cited as examples, since Homer lived before Herodotus and the author of _Beowulf_ before King Alfred.
Scholars follow one another often like sheep. When a man of prominence utters an idea, it is taken up by a disciple and soon becomes a convention. The academic critics and professors usually enshrine the idea and it becomes a heresy to question it. The best illustration of this is the almost universal adherence given to the idea that verse poetry came before prose, a view first set forth by the geographer Strabo in speaking of Homer in the beginning of his _Geography_. His views were not entertained, I believe, by Plato or Aristotle. The passage is worth quoting as I know of no other in literature that has raised so much confusion and misapprehension as to the nature of poetry:
Prose discourse--I mean artistic prose--is, I may say, an imitation of poetic discourse; for poetry as an art first came upon the scene and was first to win approval. Then came Cadmus, Pherecydes, Hecataeus and their followers, with prose writing in which they imitated the poetic art, abandoning the use of metre, but in other respects preserving the qualities of poetry. Then subsequent writers took away, each in his turn, something of these qualities, and brought prose down to its present form, as from a sublime height. In the same way we might say that comedy took its structure from tragedy, but that it also has been degraded from the sublime height of tragedy to its present "prose-like" style, as it is called. _Geography_, 1. 2. 6.
Most critics have accepted this view. Scaliger, however, in the middle of the sixteenth century repudiated it. He asked whether the first so-called poems, the metrical records in temples, antedated everyday speech.