No one with any ear at all would deny Emerson a style, even if his rhythms are often broken into the cross-chop of Carlyle. No one would deny Irving a style, or Poe,--certainly Poe at his best,--or, indeed, to hark far back, Cotton Mather in many passages of the _Magnalia_, where to a quaint iambic simplicity he added a Biblical fervor which redeems and melodizes the monotony. Mather suggests Milton, Irving suggests Addison, Emerson suggests Carlyle, Poe, shall we say, is often the too conscious workman typified by De Quincey. But thereafter, in this country, we descend rapidly into second-hand imitations, into rhythm become, in truth, mere 'fine writing,' until its death within recent memory. Yet we do not find even to-day the true cadenced prose either uninteresting or out of date. Emerson is as modern as the morning paper. Newman's description of the ideal site for a university, in the clear air of Attica beside the blue Ægean, charms us still with its perfect blend of sound and sense, its clear intellectual idea borne on a cadenced undersong, as of distant surf upon the shore; and the exquisite epilogue to the _Apologia_, with its chime of proper names, still brings a moisture to our eyes. The triumphant tramp of Gibbon, the headlong imagery and Biblical fervor of Ruskin, the languid music of Walter Pater, each holds its separate charm, and the charm is not archaic.
Is such prose impossible any more? Certainly it is not. The heritage of the language is still ours, the birthright of our noble English tongue. Simply, we do not dare to let ourselves go. We seem tortured with the modern blight of self-consciousness; and while the cheaper magazines are almost blatant in their unblushing self-puffery, they are none the less cravenly submissive to what they deem popular demand, and turn their backs on literature, on style, as something abhorrent to a race which has been fed on the English Bible for three hundred years. Their ideal of a prose style now seems to consist of a series of staccato yips. It really cannot be described in any other way. The 'triumphantly intricate' sentence celebrated by Walter Pater would give many a modern editor a shiver of terror. He would visualize it as mowing down the circulation of the magazine like a machine gun. Rhythm and beauty of style can hardly be achieved by staccato yips. The modern magazine writer, trying to be rhetorically effective, trying to rise to the demands of heightened thought or emotional appeal, reminds one of that enthusiastic German tympanist who wrote an entire symphonic poem for kettle-drums.