Note 53 — INTRODUCTION

The modern custom is to view with some suspicion these inversions when found in prose composition, though in German prose they are common enough. It would be interesting to take two such sentences of the New Testament as μεγάλη ἡ Ἄρτεμις Ἐφεσίων (Acts xix. 28, 34) and ἔπεσεν, ἔπεσεν Βαβυλὼν ἡ μεγάλη (Apoc. xiv. 8), and see how they have been rendered into various modern languages by translators generally (both in authorised and unauthorised versions). It would probably be found that the French language here has been true to what Dionysius would call its λογοείδεια, or essentially prose character. In English the justification of the inversion would be the emotional nature of the original passages, which may be held to raise them to the same plane as poetry. [It would, on the other hand, be not good but bad journalism to write, “Uproarious were the proceedings at yesterday’s meeting of the Grand Committee.”] For the effect of word-order in English verse see an extract from Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria in the notes, p. 79 infra. Coleridge was fond of offering, as a rough definition of poetry, “the best words in the best order.”