In poetical races and epochs this turn for style is
peculiarly observable; and perhaps it is only on condition of having
this somewhat heightened and difficult manner, so different from the
plain manner of prose, that poetry gets the privilege of being loosed,
at its best moments, into that perfectly simple, limpid style, which is
the supreme style of all, but the simplicity of which is still not the
simplicity of prose. The simplicity of Menander's[255] style is the
simplicity of prose, and is the same kind of simplicity as that which
Goethe's style, in the passage I have quoted, exhibits; but Menander
does not belong to a great poetical moment, he comes too late for it; it
is the simple passages in poets like Pindar or Dante which are perfect,
being masterpieces of _poetical_ simplicity. One may say the same of the
simple passages in Shakespeare; they are perfect, their simplicity being
a _poetical_ simplicity. They are the golden, easeful, crowning moments
of a manner which is always pitched in another key from that of prose, a
manner changed and heightened; the Elizabethan style, regnant in most of
our dramatic poetry to this day, is mainly the continuation of this
manner of Shakespeare's.
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