We live, Hegel famously declared, in the age of prose. He was speaking in sorrow rather than celebration. This can seem a little harsh, if one happens to be a prose writer - and who is not, even if the only prose you ever write is in the form of e-mails - but one does see what he means. For Hegel, the end of the classical world was the end of art, despite Goethe's Faust and Holderlin's ecstatic hymnals; his age of prose was Hesiod's age of iron, a far fall indeed from the golden world of the gods that we once were. Hesiod, it should be remarked, lived in the 8th century BC, which just shows that whatever time you live in is always the worst there has ever been.
Lucky for Hegel that he is not alive today, to see what has become even of prose. The casting off of the chains of style, grammar, syntax, spelling that has been happening over, say, the past twenty years, can seem like a break for freedom and an access of new energies, but bad writing is bad writing, no matter how red the heart the writer wears on his sleeve. As Claudio Magris points out in his new book, Microcosms, people are always all too ready to march with burning brands behind the latest mountebank of the word. "Correct usage," he writes, "is a premise for moral clarity and honesty," warning that "a single misplaced comma can result in disasters." His warning should be engraved on the walls of every classroom and creative-writing centre in what used to be called the civilised world. So much of prose today is, as Truman Capote said of Kerouac's On the Road, not writing, but typing.
But then, signs have always been taken for wonders. One imagines a couple of literary trend-setters meeting on a street corner in Rome some grey morning in the middle 5th century AD and exclaiming over the work of those new Barbarian writers - "Such energy! Such vitality! Such freedom of expression!" Of course, this raises the question of what is barbarism and what civilisation, and even whether one is preferable to the other. True, the Vandals drank a lot and ate their enemies, but degenerate Rome, as in Cavafy's poem, could not wait for them to come and sack the city and put them all out of their misery. There is always something thrilling in the spectacle of a magnificent tradition having the stuffing pulled out of it and used to make bungs for bottles.
The difference between the best writing and . . . let us say, indifferent writing might be likened to the difference between fishing and skimming stones. In the former, the depths are plumbed; in the latter, only the surface is touched. It is true, sometimes the angler pulls up an old boot, while the stoneskimmer may produce a gesture of grace and lightness no coarse fisherman could ever hope to achieve. T.S. Eliot's Tradition and the Individual Talent, published in 1920, now seems hopelessly crabbed in its purse-mouthed, High Church tones, while Nancy Mitford's notorious reflection on The English Aristocracy, froth though it is, leaves a wonderful feeling of effervescence in its wake.
Every generation has its moans and its moaners. Writing in 1925, Virginia Woolf, in her marvellous - but clumsily titled - essay How It Strikes a Contemporary, bewails the paucity of work of real literary merit in the first quarter of the century - "Ulysses was a memorable catastrophe: immense in daring, terrific in disaster" - seeming, or choosing, to forget that those years produced not only the disdained Ulysses, but also Heart of Darkness, The Waste Land, and the last, great novels of Henry James. One wonders what she would make of today's bestseller lists.
Ian Hamilton has his own grouses. As is to be expected of the editor of what was probably the last of the great "little" magazines, The New Review, which died in 1979, he complains of the dearth of outlets for the five- or ten-thousand word essay. "Today the column rules, and brevity is all." On the other hand, he regrets not having been able to come up with "a lively and literate champion of the actively philistine position," which seems odd, considering that his very first inclusion, G.K. Chesterton, takes an unrestrained flying kick at the "higher culture," which, among other lamentable effects, "means taking literature seriously, a very amateurish thing to do."
In this craftily assembled collection, Hamilton has "tried to organize the essays . . . so that, decade by decade, a portrayal of the century shows through: a portrayal with gaps, and of course a portrayal done from an Anglo-American perspective, but a passably compelling likeness, nonetheless."
HE has been careful to avoid including too many "lit-crit" pieces, but those that he does are superb; there are the "important" ones, such as the Eliot, and Leavis on Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture - a typically feisty performance, and a real tonic against today's demands for "relevance" in the arts - and Edmund Wilson on The Wound and the Bow, but just as effective is The Obscurity of the Poet by Randall Jarrell, one of the finest and most underestimated critics of the century. In this essay he restates Eliot's argument that great art must inevitably be, at least on its initial appearance in the world, difficult, but does so with a lightness and wit that Old Possum could never have managed. "Is Clarity the hand-maiden of Popularity," he asks, "as everybody automatically assumes?" The poetry of the past is always taken to be clear and easy and direct, a notion that a glance at a Shakespeare sonnet or the Symbolic Books of William Blake will immediately dispel: "how difficult and dull the inexperienced reader would find most of the great poetry of the past, if he could ever be induced to read it! Yet it is always in the name of the easy past that he condemns the difficult present."
For this essay alone, Hamilton's collection is worth its price. There are other jewels. Paul Fussell on My War, an account of his bout of hapless soldiering in the second World War, is a chilling testament, for all the ease and stylishness of the writing. Tom Woolf's skewering of the well-heeled left in These Radical Chic Evenings is as fresh - yes, and as "relevant" - as it was in 1970; the thuds of collapsing stout parties still reverberate through its pages. In The Holy Family (1967), Gore Vidal was wise far before his time in his insouciant debunking of the Kennedy myth. Joan Didion's Goodbye to All That, her evocation of the New York of the 1950s and early '60s, is as moving as one of Miles Davis's bitter-sweet blues meditations. The essay by Cyril Connolly, An American in London, is a trivial piece, and unworthy of this consummate stylist. On the other hand, Martin Amis, on the US Republican convention in 1988, is at the peak of his scurrilous powers, while John Carey's Down with Dons is positively sulphuric in its contempt for his own profession. Perhaps it's not so bad, after all, here in the age of prose.
John Banville is a novelist and Chief Literary Critic and Associate Literary Editor of The Irish Times