the mind with each other, the exact apprehension of what was needed to carry the meaning." "1 "In lieu of our half-pickled Sundays, or quite fresh boiled beef on Thursdays (strong as caro equina), with detestable marigolds floating in the pail to poison the broth - our scanty mutton scrags on Fridays, and rather more savoury, but grudging, portions of the same flesh, rotten-roasted or rare, on the Tuesdays (the only dish which excited our appetites, and disappointed our stomachs, in almost equal proportion) — he had his hot plate of roast veal, or the more tempting griskin (exotics unknown to our palates), cooked in the paternal kitchen (a great thing), and brought him daily by his maid or aunt!" 2 The imitation of an arrangement natural to Latin, Greek, or German, but foreign to English, is an offence against ease, an offence committed sometimes foreign order. in ignorance, sometimes by design. Imitation of The offence may consist in the adoption of compound expressions unusual in English. For example: "Now you must know, that from the last conversation that passed between my aunt and me, it comes out, that this sudden vehemence on my brother's and sister's parts, was owing to stronger reasons than to the college-begun antipathy on his side, or to slighted love on hers." 8 "the earliest learnt and oftenest used words will, other things equal, call up images with less loss of time and energy than their later learnt synonymes." 4 66 Considering then the writings and fame of Sir W. Hamilton as the great fortress of the intuitional philosophy in this country, a fortress the more formidable from the imposing character, and the in many respects great personal merits and mental endowments, the man.' 1 Pater: Appreciations; Style. of 2 Charles Lamb: Essays of Elia; Christ's Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years Ago. 8 Richardson: Clarissa Harlowe, vol. i. letter xiii. 4 Herbert Spencer: The Philosophy of Style. 5 J. S. Mill: Autobiography, chap. vii. Quoted in John Earle's The offence may consist in the adoption of a form of artificial arrangement which has been called "Johnsonese." "His [Johnson's] letters from the Hebrides to Mrs. Thrale are the original of that work of which the Journey to the Hebrides is the translation; and it is amusing to compare the two versions. 'When we were taken upstairs,' says he in one of his letters, ‘a dirty fellow bounced out of the bed on which one of us was to lie.' This incident is recorded in the Journey as follows: 'Out of one of the beds on which we were to repose started up, at our entrance, a man black as a Cyclops from the forge." "i Macaulay cites these two ways of saying the same thing as illustrative of Dr. Johnson's preference for fine words over the "simple, energetic, and picturesque" ones that were at his command; and certainly the word "bounced" gives to the first version a life which is absent from the second. In the second version, however, "the style is characterized as unidiomatic, quite as much by the suspension of the sense, in consequence of the complicated inversion, 'Out of one of the beds started up, at our entrance, a man,' as by the selection of the words which compose it." "2 The first version follows the order in which one would naturally tell the story; the second is unnatural in prose, and especially so in the account of so simple an incident. Miss Burney in her later novels out-Johnsons Johnson at his worst. "Never was writer," says a recent critic, "so bent on putting words out of their natural order as Miss Burney. The trick becomes unpleasant to the eye; still more so to the ear, if 'Cecilia' be read aloud. Still we fancy that she considered inversion to be ornamental, nay, dignified, and did not consciously affect a French arrangement of words as being French. What she came to in 'Camilla' is so insufferable, that, on finding this simple sentence Thus lived and died another week,' we copied it at once as being the best in the five volumes." 8 1 Macaulay Essays; Boswell's Life of Johnson. 2 Marsh: Lectures on the English Language, lect. vii. An example from Miss Burney shows what this critic means: — "Mr. Morrice, without ceremony, attacked his fair neighbour; he talked of her journey, and the prospects of gaiety which it opened to her view; but by these finding her unmoved, he changed his theme, and expatiated upon the delights of the spot she was quitting." 1 Examples from other authors are:— "As soon as Mrs. Dashwood had recovered herself, to see Marianne was her first desire." 2 "But when ... she heard him declare that of music and dancing he was passionately fond, she gave him such a look of approbation as secured the largest share of his discourse to herself for the rest of his stay." "Of breakfast she had been kept by her fears, and of dinner by their sudden reverse, from eating much." 4 Except in "Sense and Sensibility," such constructions are very rare in Miss Austen. "Mind and matter,' said the lady in the wig, 'glide swift into the vortex of immensity. Howls the sublime, and softly sleeps the calm Ideal, in the whispering chambers of Imagination. To hear it, sweet it is. But then, outlaughs the stern philosopher, and saith to the Grotesque, 'What, ho!'"' ħ Galloped up the winding steep of Canobia the Sheikh Said Djinblat."6 "Came slowly, on steeds dark as night, up the winding steep of Canobia, with a company of twenty men on foot armed with muskets and handjars, the two ferocious brothers Abuneked, Nasif and Hamood. Pale is the cheek of the daughters of Maron at the fell name of Abuneked."6 "Stole over his spirit the countenance august, with the flowing beard and the lordly locks, stole over the spirit of the gazing 1 Miss Burney: Cecilia, vol. i. chap. ii. 2 Miss Austen: Sense and Sensibility, vol. ii. chap. xviii. 8 Ibid., vol. i. chap. x. 4 Ibid., vol. ii. chap. xvi. 5 Dickens: Martin Chuzzlewit, chap. xxxiv. 6 Disraeli: Tancred, book v. chap. ii. pilgrim, each shape of that refined and elegant hierarchy made for the worship of clear skies and sunny lands." 1 Bentham and The foreign structure of sentence was elevated by Bentham into a matter of principle. "He could not bear," says Mill, "for the sake of clearness and the Theories of reader's ease, to say, as ordinary men are con- Spencer. tent to do, a little more than the truth in one sentence, and correct it in the next. The whole of the qualifying remarks which he intended to make he insisted upon imbedding as parentheses in the very middle of the sentence itself. And thus the sense being so long suspended, and attention being required to the accessory ideas before the principal idea had been properly seized, it became difficult, without some practice, to make out the train of thought.' Mr. Herbert Spencer's theory of arrangement is not unlike Bentham's, but his practice does not closely conform to his theory. 3 order the best. Whatever arrangement may, according to Bentham or 2 J. S. Mill: Dissertations and Discussions; Bentham. 4 Macaulay Essays, Boswell's Life of Johnson. distinguished by idiomatic ease vary the order of words in successive sentences so agreeably that attention is not called to the arrangement. SECTION IV. UNITY. In some kinds of writing clearness is of special value, in others force, in others ease; in every kind of writing UNITY is of paramount importance. Every senvalue of unity. tence, whether short or long, simple, compound, or complex, should be a unit. Meaning and That unity does not depend on the length or the complexity of a sentence the following examples will show: “Mr. Drummer spent a week at the World's Fair.” "Mr. Drummer at last went to the World's Fair; but he was able to be there a week only." "Mr. Drummer would have spent more than a week at the World's Fair if he had not been pressed by business engagements." Though Mr. Drummer spent but a week at the World's Fair, he did all that a man of his years and tastes could be expected to do: he saw the buildings by day and by night and from every point of view; he glanced at the pictures and examined the machinery; he took a whirl on the Ferris wheel and a turn in a gondola; he spent two or three evenings in the Midway Plaisance." Each of these sentences expresses one idea; in the first the idea is simple, in the others it is more or less complex. A sentence should be a unit both in substance and in expression. In a sentence which has unity in substance, ideas are Unity homogeneous: they form a whole. The folin substance. lowing sentences lack unity in that they contain heterogeneous ideas: |