The Anatomy of Prose. By Marjorie Boulton. (Routledge & Kegan
Paul. 10s. 6d.) The Anatomy of Prose. By Marjorie Boulton. (Routledge & Kegan Paul. 10s. 6d.)
THE tone of Miss Boulton's book, says the blurb, is tentative and non-dogmatic.' The reader, however, need not fear a milk-and- water diet, especially if he is the intelligent Sixth-former for whom The Anatomy of Prose Is presumably intended. It is pleasant to find Joyce, Lawrence, Hemingway, Elizabeth Bowen, used as examples in a modern text- book : pleasant, because we have grown used M such places to a dreary parading of tlalory, Addison and the Authorised Ver- sion as the only models of what a serviceable English style should be. Miss Boulton herself writes briskly and sometimes tbo hurriedly; she is perhaps a little too much given to
later there are Edmund Burke, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Thomas De Quincey, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt,' followed by four or five other names, is not a ‘'ery helpful appendix to some remarks about the ornate style. And she is strangely Pedantic and unrealistic in the chapter on Prose Rhythm: a detailed comparison, com- plete with anapaests and amphibrachs, between Psalm 90 and a passage from Rase Macaulay may have a crossword Puzzle or anagram interest, but can surely have little relevance to a workmanlike study of the mechanics of prose. These are isolated quibbles, however: the early chapters on prose structure and the later ones on the broader questions of style are lively and cover a wide field of precept and example. The moral issues, for instance, which she raises in Realism, Romance and Unreality' are too seldom noticed in a book like this. That she has found room for them in such a relatively elementary study is a sign of her freshness and independence.
A. S. T.
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