And this obligation is the third
orange with which he has to juggle, the third quality which
the prose writer must work into his pattern of words. It may
be thought perhaps that this is a quality of ease rather than
a fresh difficulty; but such is the inherently rhythmical
strain of the English language, that the bad writer - and
must I take for example that admired friend of my boyhood,
Captain Reid? - the inexperienced writer, as Dickens in his
earlier attempts to be impressive, and the jaded writer, as
any one may see for himself, all tend to fall at once into
the production of bad blank verse. And here it may be
pertinently asked, Why bad? And I suppose it might be enough
to answer that no man ever made good verse by accident, and
that no verse can ever sound otherwise than trivial when
uttered with the delivery of prose. But we can go beyond
such answers. The weak side of verse is the regularity of
the beat, which in itself is decidedly less impressive than
the movement of the nobler prose; and it is just into this
weak side, and this alone, that our careless writer falls. A
peculiar density and mass, consequent on the nearness of the
pauses, is one of the chief good qualities of verse; but this
our accidental versifier, still following after the swift
gait and large gestures of prose, does not so much as aspire
to imitate. Lastly, since he remains unconscious that he is
making verse at all, it can never occur to him to extract
those effects of counterpoint and opposition which I have
referred to as the final grace and justification of verse,
and, I may add, of blank verse in particular.
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