Development of Prose

Did you ever wonder why poetry developed before prose?

I am reading the most fascinating book: From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present, 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, by Jacques Barzun.

Literally every page is full of interesting information about western culture; I don't recall ever coming across such a collection of well-known stories mixed with history that is seldom told.

Here's today's excerpt, from page 354:

One 17th century creation that was neither Baroque nor a pretended imitation of the ancients was its prose. Monsieur Jourdain in Moliere's Bourgeois Gentilhomme is amazed when he is told that he has been speaking prose all his life. The joke is excellent on th stage, but his surprise is well-founded, he right, as he so often is. What he spoke all his life was not prose but speech. Prose is the written form of deliberate expression, a medium that can become an art. It is as artificial as verse. Whereas speech is halting, comes in fragments, repeats, puts qualifiers after the idea, and often leaves it half expressed, prose aims at organized thought in complete units. The qualifiers of each idea often come before or during its exposition, as required by clarity, the sound of the words, or their rhythm.

The modern languages took a much longer time to develop a prose worthy of the name than to find poetic meters that suited their idioms. True, writers who described action produced readable works fairly early; they were guided by the sequence of what happens in the world. But with rare exceptions they failed when they tried to impart what happens among feelings and ideas. In early modern times they were hampered by their virtually native mastery of Latin: it spoiled the vernacular syntax. Thanks to its case endings, Latin leaves the writer free to throw the makings of his sentence into one spot or another without changing the sense. That cannot be done when meaning depends on the right sequence and right linking of words. As late as Milton in his political pamphlets, English prose makes hard reading; sentences are long and cluttered with clause after clause: the mind has to detach and realign, which slows understanding; the prose does not breathe but chokes.

The same was true in French until the time of Pascal. It is generally agreed that it was his Letters from a Provincial that gave the nation a model of modern prose, rapid and rhythmic. Dryden rendered the same service to English prose a little later. Italian and Spanish started from a simpler syntax and reached the same goal sooner. German was kept from it altogether by its retention of case endings and a glutinous syntax. As the young William James on his travels in the 19th century wrote to his parents, the language "is in fact without any of the modern improvements." In technical terms, German did not become analytic like other modern languages. Few of the great poets and thinkers using German have been masters of both their subject and their prose. [The little book to read is German Style (with annotated examples) by Ludwig Lewisohn.]

And these observations continue page after page. This is truly one of the most interesting books on western culture that I have read in a long time.