Prose Fancies (Second Series) — Inside the Classic

City as Engine and Organism

Le Gallienne renders the city as a living, breathing machine. In the opening essay, he describes 'great steel-limbed monsters' that 'jet up and down' and 'writhe and wrestle,' their movements evoking 'human agony.' The language is visceral: cranes that could 'nip up an elephant,' engines that 'strain and sweat beneath the lash of the compulsive steam.' This personification extends to the human workers, who are reduced to 'pens with ears' or 'helpless pieces of the game.' The narrator's terror is palpable—he cannot 'calmly estimate and prophesy' such forces. Yet the essay pivots when he discovers a bookshop 'blossoming like a rose' amid the wilderness, suggesting that poetry, though fragile, persists.

The Poet's Scroll vs. the Bank

Le Gallienne repeatedly tests the power of literature against commerce. He recalls Keats unearthing 'the buried beauty of Greece' near Finsbury Pavement, and notes that 'great dramatists lie about us' in deserted City churches. The narrator's own purchase—a 'little yellow-leaved garland' from the seventeenth century—becomes a talisman: 'words that would outlast the bank yonder.' This contrast is sharpened by the narrator's confession that he cannot reveal how much of his 'grateful governmental twelve-pound-ten' survived the bookshop visit. The collection thus frames poetry as a 'private interest' that vanishes at a rumour of war, yet remains an enduring counterweight to the 'mighty rushing wind' of commerce.

Shifts in Pace and Perspective

The prose moves between rapid, breathless catalogues of urban detail and slower, reflective passages. Early in 'A Seventh-Story Heaven,' sentences pile up with clauses describing the city's opposite end—'the lordly street of the fine shops,' 'the great exchange which looks like a scene from Romeo and Juliet'—before narrowing to the narrator's solitary garret. The rhythm mimics the narrator's own oscillation between overwhelm and retreat. When he quotes poetry, it 'clears the air,' a deliberate pause in the rush. Later, the discovery of the bookshop triggers a shift from cosmic terror to intimate reassurance, the prose softening as he holds the 'tiny' volume. These changes in pace mirror the collection's central argument: that the poet's scroll, though seemingly powerless, can momentarily still the engines.

Readers will find that Le Gallienne's fancies reward attention to his shifting registers—from the sardonic to the earnest, the panoramic to the personal. The essays are best approached as a sequence of moods rather than arguments, each one testing how far lyricism can hold its own against the clatter of the street. The second series deepens the first's preoccupations, but the excerpts suggest it remains a poet's book, not a philosopher's.

That rainy afternoon, Prose Fancies made me linger over how words outlast the clamor around them—the city’s noise, the machines, all temporary. Later, thumbing through my father’s stack, I stumbled onto another collection of urgent writing, and the same quiet certainty surfaced there, in Roosevelt in the Kansas City Star: War-time Editorials — Key Ideas to Explore. Somehow, both felt like steady lamps in a long dusk.