The sacrifice of the musical element in the medium does not
have to be justified on practical grounds as making for efficiency,
or on scientific grounds as favoring analysis, but may be understood
from the artistic standpoint. For it was only through a method and
medium that renounced the musical manner of poetry, with its vaguely
expressive, yet rigid forms, that the fullness and minuteness of life
could be represented.
Even the more fluently musical manner of poetical prose is unsuited
as a medium for the expression of the kind of life which is represented
in normal prose. Poetical prose is appropriate for the expression of
deeds and sentiments of high and mystical import only, but not for the
expression of the more commonplace or definitely and complexly
articulated phases of life. For the latter, the broader and freer and
more literal method of strict prose is the only appropriate medium of
expression. The unmusical character of prose style is not determined
by weakness, but by adaptation to function.
And, although the medium of prose is attenuated almost to the vanishing
point, where it may seem to be lost, it may nevertheless borrow from
its content a beauty of rhythm, imagery, and form that will seem to
be its very own. For in language, as we observed in our discussion of
poetry, the meaning and the symbol are so closely one, that it becomes
impossible, except by analysis, to distinguish them. Prose rhythm is
fundamentally a rhythmical movement of ideas, like poetic rhythm, only
without regularization; yet, since the ideas are carried by the words,
it belongs to them also; images blossom from ideas, yet they too seem
to belong to the words in which they are incarnated; and the harmony
and symmetry which thoughts and images may contain as we compose them
synthetically in the memory, make an architecture of words.
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