The following chapters were originally delivered as public lectures atJohns Hopkins University, in the winter and spring of 1881. Had Mr.Lanier lived to prepare them for the press, he would probably haverecast them to some extent; but the present editor has not felt freeto make any changes from the original manuscript, beyond the omissionof a few local and occasional allusions, and the curtailment ofseveral long extracts from well-known writers.
Although each is complete in itself, this work and its foregoer, TheScience of English Verse, were intended to be parts of acomprehensive philosophy of formal and substantial beauty inliterature, which, unhappily, the author did not live to develop.
W. H. B.
The series of lectures which I last had the pleasure of delivering inthis hall was devoted to the exposition of what is beyond doubt themost remarkable, the most persistent, the most wide-spread, and themost noble of all those methods of arranging words and ideas indefinite relations, which have acquired currency among men—namely,the methods of verse, or Formal Poetry. That exposition began byreducing all possible phenomena of verse to terms of vibration; andhaving thus secured at once a solid physical basis for this science,and a precise nomenclature in which we could talk intelligibly uponthis century-befogged subject, we advanced gradually from the mostminute to the largest possible considerations upon the matter in hand.
Now, wishing that such courses as I might give here should preserve acertain coherence with each other, I have hoped that I could securethat end by successively treating The Great Forms of ModernLiterature; and, wishing further to gain whatever advantage ofentertainment for you may lie in contrast and variety, I have[2] thoughtthat inasmuch as we have already studied the Verse-Form in General, wemight now profitably study some great Prose-Forms in Particular, andin still further contrast; that we might study that form not so muchanalytically—as when we developed the Science of Formal Poetryfrom a single physical principle—but this time synthetically, fromthe point of view of literary art rather than of literary science.
I am further led to this general plan by the consideration that so faras I know—but my reading in this direction is not wide, and I may bein error—there is no book extant in any language which gives aconspectus of all those well-marked and widely-varying literary formswhich have differentiated themselves in the course of time, and of thecurious and subtle needs of the modern civilized man which, under thestress of that imperious demand for expression which all men'semotions make, have respectively determined the modes of suchexpression to be in one case The Novel, in another The Sermon, inanother The Newspaper Leader, in another The Scientific Essay, inanother The Popular Magazine Article, in another TheSemi-Scientific Lecture, and so on: each of these prose-forms, youobserve, having its own limitations and fitnesses quite aswell-defined as the Sonnet-For