and rushing river of blue water sweeping through the heart of it; which, for the dark and solitary rock that bears your castle, has an amphitheatre of cliffs crested with cypresses and olive; which, for the two masses of Arthur's Seat and the ranges of the Pentlands, has a chain of blue mountains higher than the haughtiest peaks of your Highlands; and which, for your far-away Ben Ledi and Ben More, has the great central chain of the St. Gothard Alps: and yet, as you go out of the gates, and walk in the suburban streets of that city — I mean Verona - the eye never seeks to rest on that external scenery, however gorgeous; it does not look for the gaps between the houses, as you do here; it may for a few moments follow the broken line of the great Alpine battlements; but it is only where they form a background for other battlements, built by the hand of man. There is no necessity felt to dwell on the blue river or the burning hills. The heart and eye have enough to do in the streets of the city itself; they are contented there; nay, they sometimes turn from the natural scenery, as if too savage and solitary, to dwell with a deeper interest on the palace walls that cast their shade upon the streets, and the crowd of towers that rise out of that shadow into the depth of the sky." SECTION VI. PARAGRAPHS. The usefulness of division by PARAGRAPHS as a mere mechanical device is apparent to every one who has tried Meaning and to read pages of print or of manuscript that graphs. are unbroken, or that are broken into many small fragments. The unbroken text tires the eye in one way; the text too frequently broken, in another. value of para If the sole use of paragraphs were to rest the eye, as a speaker's changes of tone rest the ear, there would be little difficulty in determining their length or their struct 1 Ruskin: Lectures on Architecture and Painting, delivered at Edin burgh in November, 1853, lecture i. ure; but if their main function is to mark changes in thought, and thus help the reader to follow a writer step by step, puzzling questions as to their length or their structure must sometimes arise. Paragraphs are to sentences what sentences are to words. A paragraph, like a sentence, should be a unit in substance and in expression, and should be developed with clearness, with force, and with ease. To secure clearness in a paragraph, a writer should suggest in the first sentence the main idea of the paragraph and the point of view from which it is Clearness. to be considered, or should at least indicate the direction in which the thought is to move; and he should arrange his sentences in logical order, so that each shall contribute to the development of the idea which is expressed by the paragraph as a whole, and shall occupy the place in which it can be clearly understood both in itself and in its relations to the rest of the paragraph. If a sentence can be put in one place as well as in another, there is a defect somewhere, and usually a defect of such gravity that it cannot be remedied unless the sentence, if not the paragraph, is recast. "We may take the opportunity," writes De Quincey, "of noticing what it is that constitutes the peculiar and characterizing circumstance in Burke's manner of composition. It is this: that under his treatment every truth, be it what it may, every thesis of a sen tence, grows in the very act of unfolding it. . . . whatever may have been the preconception, it receives a new determination or inflexion at every clause of the sentence. Hence, whilst a writer ... of Dr. Johnson's class seems only to look back upon his thoughts, Burke looks forward, and does in fact advance and change his own station concurrently with the advance of the sentences." 1 De Quincey Essay on Rhetoric, note. The following example of clearness in a paragraph comes from Hawthorne: "Half-way down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old Pyncheon House; and an elm-tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon Elm. On my occasional visits to the town aforesaid, I seldom failed to turn down Pyncheon Street, for the sake of passing through the shadow of these two antiquities, — the great elm-tree and the weather-beaten edifice." 1 Another example comes from Macaulay: "The characteristic peculiarity of his [Johnson's] intellect was the union of great powers with low prejudices. If we judged of him by the best parts of his mind, we should place him almost as high as he was placed by the idolatry of Boswell; if by the worst parts of his mind, we should place him even below Boswell himself. Where he was not under the influence of some strange scruple, or some domineering passion, which prevented him from boldly and fairly investigating a subject, he was a wary and acute reasoner, a little too much inclined to scepticism, and a little too fond of paradox. No man was less likely to be imposed upon by fallacies in argument or by exaggerated statements of fact. But if, while he was beating down sophisms and exposing false testimony, some childish prejudices, such as would excite laughter in a well managed nursery, came across him, he was smitten as if by enchantment. His mind dwindled away under the spell from gigantic elevation to dwarfish littleness. Those who had lately been admiring its amplitude and its force were now as much astonished at its strange narrowness and feebleness as the fisherman in the Arabian tale, when he saw the Genie, whose stature had overshadowed the whole seacoast, and whose might seemed equal to a contest with armies, contract himself to the dimensions of his small prison, and lie there the helpless slave of the charm of Solomon." 2 1 Hawthorne: The House of the Seven Gables, chap. i. Force. To secure force in a paragraph, a writer should make the main idea prominent, and should keep subordinate ideas in the background; and he should so arrange his sentences that the paragraph shall move from the less important and less interesting to the more important and more interesting, and thus form a climax. The following example of force in a paragraph comes from Ruskin : So “Having, then, resolved that you will not waste recklessly, but earnestly use, these early days of yours, remember that all the duties of her children to England may be summed in two words -industry, and honour. I say, first, industry, for it is in this that soldier youth are especially tempted to fail. Yet, surely, there is no reason, because your life may possibly or probably be shorter than other men's, that you should therefore waste more recklessly the portion of it that is granted you; neither do the duties of your profession, which require you to keep your bodies strong, in any wise involve the keeping of your minds weak. far from that, the experience, the hardship, and the activity of a soldier's life render his powers of thought more accurate than those of other men; and while, for others, all knowledge is often little more than a means of amusement, there is no form of science which a soldier may not at some time or other find bearing on business of life and death. A young mathematician may be excused for languor in studying curves to be described only with a pencil; but not in tracing those which are to be described with a rocket. Your knowledge of a wholesome herb may involve the feeding of an army; and acquaintance with an obscure point of geography, the success of a campaign. Never waste an instant's time, therefore: the sin of idleness is a thousand-fold greater in you than in other youths; for the fates of those who will one day be under your command hang upon your knowledge; lost moments now will be lost lives then, and every instant which you carelessly take for play, you buy with blood." 1 1 Ruskin: The Crown of Wild Olive; War. The last sentence of a paragraph should bring out the point of the whole effectively, and it may sum up all that has been said in the paragraph which it ends. In the discussion of a difficult problem or the elucidation of a profound thought, or in a persuasive discourse of any kind, such a sentence at the end of a paragraph, particularly if the paragraph be a long one, is of especial value; the reader, having received a full explanation of the writer's meaning, is ready for the thought in a portable form. The value of such a sentence appears in the following paragraph from Carlyle: "Consider his [an editor's] leading articles; what they treat of, how passably they are done. Straw that has been thrashed a hundred times without wheat; ephemeral sound of a sound; such portent of the hour as all men have seen a hundred times turn out inane: how a man, with merely human faculty, buckles himself nightly with new vigour and interest to this thrashed straw, nightly thrashes it anew, nightly gets-up new thunder about it; and so goes on thrashing and thundering for a considerable series of years; this is a fact remaining still to be accounted for, in human physiology. The vitality of man is great.” 1 Ease. To secure ease in a paragraph, a writer should have ease not only in the sentences of which the paragraph is composed, but also in the movement from sentence to sentence. Sometimes he may gain ease in transition by repeating a word, sometimes by using a conjunction or other particle which makes the connection plain. The more he varies his methods, the less likely he is to call attention to them. If he achieves the result without betraying the processes, he is justly said to have "a flowing style." "In Shakspeare one sentence 1 Carlyle: Miscellanies; Sir Walter Scott. For other examples, see pages 150, 151. |