When we are writing in verse, if we have the line with an iambus (say) then our next words or syllables must make an iambus, and we are confined to that form; but if in prose, our next word need not be an iambus because the first was, but may be any one of several possible rhythmic forms; thus, while in verse we _must_ use _one_ form, in prose we _may_ use _many_ forms; and just to the extent of these possible forms is prose freer than verse. We shall find occasion presently to remember that prose is freer than verse, _not_ because prose is formless while verse is formal, but because any given sequence of prose has _more forms_ in it than a sequence of verse.
Here, reserving to a later place the special application of all this to the novel, I have brought my first general point to a stage where it constitutes the basis of the second one. You have already heard much of "forms"--of the verse-form, the prose-form, of form in art, and the like. Now, in the course of a considerable experience in what Shakspeare sadly calls "public means," I have found no matter upon which wider or more harmful misconceptions exist among people of culture, and particularly among us Americans, than this matter of the true functions of forms in art, of the true relation of science--which we may call the knowledge of forms--to art, and most especially of these functions and relations in literary art. These misconceptions have flowered out into widely different shapes.
In one direction, for example, we find a large number of timorous souls, who believe that science, in explaining everything as they singularly fancy, will destroy the possibility of poetry, of the novel, in short of all works of the imagination; the idea seeming to be that the imagination always requires the hall of life to be darkened before it displays its magic, like the modern spiritualistic séance-givers who can do nothing with the rope-tying and the guitars unless the lights are put out.
Another form of the same misconception goes precisely to the opposite extreme, and declares that the advance of science with its incidents is going to give a great new revolutionized democratic literature, which will wear a slouch hat and have its shirt open at the bosom, and generally riot in a complete independence of form.