I really don't know what good prose is. But in English and when I think about finesse, Hazlitt comes to mind among the old-timers. For Hazlitt, it was Burke who showed the way. Here is what Hazlitt says on Burke's prose:
It has always appeared to me that the most perfect prose-style, the most powerful, the most dazzling, the most daring, that which went the nearest to the verge of poetry, and yet never fell over, was Burke's. It has the solidity, and sparkling effect of the diamond: all other fine writing is like French paste or Bristol-stones in the comparison. Burke's style is airy, flighty, adventurous, but it never loses sight of the subject; nay, is always in contact with, and derives its increased or varying impulse from it.
William Hazlitt, On the Prose-Style of Poets (1822)
"Airy, flighty, adventurous",I'd like to say the same for the most perfect prose fiction in American English in the latter half of the twentieth century: Marilynne Robinson's sublime Housekeeping.
