As in poetry, so in prose.  We find in our best prose of to-day an extraordinary mastery over pure, nervous, imaginative language; and all this, alongside here of a riotous extravagance, and there, of a crude and garrulous commonplace.  Thackeray’s best chapters, say in Vanity Fair, Esmond, the Humourists, contain an almost perfect prose style—­a style as nervous as that of Swift, as easy as that of Goldsmith, as graceful as that of Addison, as rich as that of Gibbon or Burke.  No English romances have been clothed in a language so chaste and scholarly—­not even Fielding’s.  Certainly not the Waverley series; for Scott, as we know, rehearsed his glowing chronicles of the past with the somewhat conventional verbosity of the improvisatore who recites but will not pause to write.  George Eliot relates her story with an art even more cultivated than that of Thackeray—­though, doubtless, with an over-elaborated self-consciousness, and perceptible suggestions of the laboratory of the student.  Trollope tells his artless tales in perfectly pure, natural, and most articulate prose, the language of a man of the world telling a good story well.  And a dozen living novelists are masters of a style of extreme ease and grace.

Side by side with this chastened English prose, we have men of genius who have fallen into evil habits.  Bulwer, who knew better, would quite revel in a stagey bombast; Dickens, with his pathos and his humour, was capable of sinking into a theatrical mannerism and cockney vulgarities of wretched taste; Disraeli, with all his wit and savoir faire, has printed some rank fustian, and much slip-slop gossip; and George Meredith at times can be as jerky and mysterious as a prose Browning.  Charlotte Bronte and Kingsley could both descend to blue fire and demoniac incoherences.  Macaulay is brilliant and emphatic, but we weary at last of his everlasting staccato on the trumpet; and even the magnificent symphonies of Ruskin at his best will end sometimes in a sort of coda of fantasias which suggest limelights and coloured lenses.  Carlyle, if not the greatest prose master of our age, must be held to be, by virtue of his original genius and mass of stroke, the literary dictator of Victorian prose.  And, though we all know how wantonly he often misused his mighty gift, though no one now would venture to imitate him even at a distance, and though Matthew Arnold was ever taking up his parable—­“Flee Carlylese as the very Devil!”—­we are sliding into Carlylese unconsciously from time to time, and even Culture itself fell into the trap in the very act of warning others.