Mr George Bernard Shaw having to commit his novel “Cashel Byron’s Profession” to paper in a hurry, chose to cast it in blank verse as being more easily and readily written so:  a performance which brilliantly illuminates a half-truth.  Verse—­or at any rate, unrhymed iambic verse—­is easier to write than prose, if you care to leave out the emotion which makes verse characteristic and worth writing.  I have little doubt that, had he chosen to attempt it, Mr Shaw would have found his story still more ductile in the metre of “Hiawatha.”  But the experiment proves nothing:  or no more than that, all fine art costing labour, it may cost less if burlesqued in a category not its own.

Let me take an example from a work with which you are all familiar—­“The Student’s Handbook to the University and Colleges of Cambridge.”  On p. 405 we read:—­

The Medieval and Modern Languages Tripos is divided into ten sections, A, A2, B, C, D, E, F, G, H and I. A student may take either one or two sections at the end of his second year of residence, and either one or two more sections at the end of his third or fourth year of residence; or he may take two sections at the end of his third year only.  Thus this Tripos can be treated either as a divided or as an undivided Tripos at the option of the candidate.

Now I do not hold that up to you for a model of prose.  Still, lucidity rather than emotion being its aim, I doubt not that the composer spent pains on it; more pains than it would have cost him to convey his information metrically, thus:—­

     There is a Tripos that aspires to blend
     The Medieval and the Modern tongues
     In one red burial (Sing Heavenly Muse!)
     Divided into sections A, A2,
     B, C, D, E, F, G and H and I.
     A student may take either one or two
     (With some restrictions mention’d in a footnote)
     At th’ expiration of his second year: 
     Or of his third, or of his fourth again
     Take one or two; or of his third alone
     Take two together.  Thus this tripos is
     (Like nothing in the Athanasian Creed)
     Divisible or indivisible
     At the option of the candidate—­Gadzooks!

This method has even some advantage over the method of prose in that it is more easily memorised; but it has, as you will admit, the one fatal flaw that it imports emotion into a theme which does not properly admit of emotion, and that so it offends against our first rule of writing—­that it should be appropriate.

Now if you accept the argument so far as we have led it—­that verse is by nature more emotional than prose—­certain consequences would seem to follow:  of which the first is that while the capital difficulty of verse consists in saying ordinary things the capital difficulty of prose consists in saying extraordinary things; that while with verse, keyed for high moments, the trouble is to manage the intervals, with prose the trouble is to manage the high moments.