The Establishment of Modern English Prose in the Reformation and the Enlightenment by Ian Robinson (review)

93 text of social, intellectual, and literary history’’ and of the effect of rhetoric as ‘‘a frame for the language consciousness that played . . . a key role in the evolution of English prose.’’ At this point, Mr. McIntosh soars to a yet higher and wider circle, in which he contextualizes his earlier analyses within cultural history and the contemporary terms ‘‘politeness’’ and ‘‘delicacy’’ as well as the current, parallel concept of ‘‘feminization.’’ Here the book’s air thins—not from a lack of interesting insights , but from the sense that the ideas examined in the last chapters probably deserve their own book and that their treatment here is less central to this study’s argument. Regardless, one closes this work grateful for Mr. McIntosh’s fairness, learnedness, clear thinking, and curiosity. Herman Asarnow University of Portland IAN ROBINSON. The Establishment of ModernEnglishProseintheReformation and the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge, 1996. Pp. xvi ⫹ 218. $59.95. What is prose? Easy. Whatever is not poetry. Wrong. Oh, and we speak, and sometimes write, in fragments that may not even be sentences. Because Mr. Robinson has written essentially a history of a surprisingly modern grammatical concept , the sentence, his originality appears to lie in identifying Cranmer asthesource of modernity and Dryden’s literary ancestor . Mr. Robinson is full of surprises. ‘‘Period’’ is ill-defined in our dictionaries . Rhythm is not a regular alternation (‘‘tick-tock’’); ‘‘nor is it as some think a flowing; rhythm is whatever forms a whole out of parts.’’ When oratio meets the well-formed sentence in Cranmer’s prose in the 1552 Prayer Book, ‘‘the coincidence is not for the sake of conveying information or describing the external world.’’ The ‘‘well-formed sentence was developed in English not as a result of the activities of the Royal Society, to purify the language and make it fit for science, but to approach God.’’ By the time he reaches Dryden, the argument is over, and he can demonstrate what a good prose writer Dryden was (‘‘so consistentlycompetentastobewonderful ’’). Dryden’s prose is to Cranmer ‘‘what his heroic or narrative couplets are to Shakespeare’s blank verse.’’ Mr. Robinson likes Dryden for his fluency: ‘‘In Dryden we find, dependably, a union of rhythm and syntax that we may recognize (however we envy Dryden’s fluidity and mastery) as our own. The periodic phrasing , stillimportant,istheobedientservant of syntactic structure.’’ More to the point for most Scriblerian readers, Dryden’s sentences never wander: the shape of his prose corresponds to its sense. The latter parts of the book contain praise for good prose writing—an unexpected element in a critical book in today’s climate that the earlier, rigorous argument has earned. The amazing part is that no linguist has troubled to look at the evolution of prose in this way. Mr. Robinson’s last chapter considers ways of world-making. Ours is made from prose, and Dryden initiated it because , with his union of prose and sense, the remnants of a previous age were excluded from his world. We have, as yet, not destroyed that world in our illiteracy. As is well known, prose comes latetocultures . Once it ‘‘ceases to be precious, prose constitutes a public community,’’ which is true of ‘‘our great prose age, the Augustan.’’ Here, then, is an author unafraid of opinionated assertion:‘‘Thereason thatknowledgeislessinterestingthan 94 discovery is just that we know it already.’’ We can see that going over well in the classroom. He also knows how to use the exclamation mark precisely and properly in scholarly prose. He has a flair for the wittily turned phrase and never hesitates to declare some typical example of longwinded sixteenth-century prose not just turgid but ‘‘unreadable.’’ When Clarendon ‘‘fell in 1667, the year of Sprat’s History of the Royal Society and the year before Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy, his prose and his world fell with him.’’By 1750, Mr. Robinson thinks, ‘‘Clarendon must surely have been one of the great unreadables.’’ No question. Sterne ‘‘the deadly serious joker’’used theem rule‘‘injusttheoldwaytoindicate the succession of phrases that are anything but clauses in a complex sentence.’’ And even if the introduction of Thomas Burnet startles (but it should not, for Mr. Robinson...