3. For securing differences in distinction and movement, the ordinary marks of punctuation are intensified or attenuated, commas raised to semicolons and vice versa, thus retarding or accelerating the current according to the sense to be conveyed. In a sentence of subordinate or parenthetical significance, punctuation is dispensed with or reduced to its lightest possible, in order that the thought may be rapidly traversed; in a sentence of much importance every phrase may be set off by commas, or what would naturally require a comma may take a semicolon, in order that each detail may secure its due attention. It is thus that a strong individuality may be given to punctuation, so that it ceases to be merely mechanical and becomes an instrument of interpretation and shading.

EXAMPLES.

Compare the following two sentences from Huxley. In the first he wishes to make every detail prominent: "Anything which professes to call itself education must be tried by this standard, and if it fails to stand the test, I will not call it education, whatever may be the force of authority, or of numbers, upon the other side." In the second he attenuates the punctuation of the parenthesis, striking out the comma that would naturally come in the middle: "The object of what we commonly call education - that education in which man intervenes and which I shall distinguish as artificial education-is to make good these defects in Nature's methods; to prepare the child to receive Nature's education, neither incapably nor ignorantly, nor with wilful disobedience; and to understand the preliminary symptoms of her displeasure, without waiting for the box on the ear."1 In the part after the double dash the punctuation is very full : commas supplied at each small pause, and semicolons setting off phrases that some would mark with commas. This intensifying of the comma into the semicolon is very noteworthy in the following: "Some earlier and fainter recollections the child had of a different country; and a town with tall white houses; and a ship." 2 It is evidently the writer's intention to make his reader stop and consider every detail.

1 HUXLEY, Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews, pp. 32, 34.

2 THACKERAY, Henry Esmond, p. 19.

III.

Manufactured Diction. -There remain to be noted some such special types as antique diction, foreigner's English, and dialect. All these are grouped under the head of manufactured diction because the composing of them has necessarily to be a tour de force, a made product, like speaking in a foreign language. The thinking is done in the writer's own tongue, and then translated into a medium more or less alien according to the less or greater thoroughness of his antecedent training.

The Preliminary Discipline. It is important, therefore, to insist at the outset upon thorough preparation for this kind of writing; it must be the work of an expert, eliminating entirely the flavor of the manufactured article, and sounding like the spontaneous utterance of one to the manner born. A foreign language is mastered in its delicacy only in the country where it is native; otherwhere it cannot get beyond the "scole of Stratford-atte-Bowe."1 Just so it is with these

exotic kinds of diction. To an extent their words and turns of expression may be picked up, as it were, from the flotsam lying around loose; but the real flavor comes only from long conversance, until thinking in that medium is the primary process. Used mostly for lighter purposes, for playfulness or humor, such diction exacts a discipline and special scholarship eminently serious and strenuous.

NOTE. One of the most celebrated instances of success in an alien diction is found in Thackeray's Henry Esmond, which not only recounts a story, but reproduces the manner of speech of Queen Anne's time; and the enormous pains taken in preparation for the writing of it, in reading the literature of that period for years, until the writer's mind was saturated with its colorings and ways of thinking, is a matter of record.

The Usage portrayed. What makes all this preliminary training imperative is of course the demand of utter faithfulness 1 Chaucer's expression; see Canterbury Tales, Prologue, 1. 125.

to the usages of the diction adopted. No amount of literary deftness can dispense with this, any more than a story or essay can dispense with correct grammar; it is fundamental.

A word of remark may here be given about each kind of diction named above.

1. The antique comes from the study of some past usage or period of literary expression, like that of Malory's Morte Darthur, for instance, or the Bible. To be kept free from lapses of consistency requires not only the literary spirit which can move at home in past habits of thought and phrase but the sound philological knowledge which can separate the strata of usage peculiar to the different ages and follow the analogies of form, derivation, and the like, characteristic of each period. Working in the antique is cheapened and vulgarized by the throwing about of catchwords like whilom, quoth, in sooth, yclept; such relics of the "by my halidome" period of writing are nowadays beneath the dignity even of humor; and this because the real proficiency is felt to be more a matter of flavor and texture than of single hardused words. Imitation of biblical diction, inasmuch as the Bible is always with us a sacred possession, is hazardous, not to say a foregone failure, because if applied to thought less serious than that of Scripture it is necessarily a parody of what is most venerated, while if applied to solemn thought it runs the risk of being either artificial which defeats its end

-or goody-goody.

NOTE. The peril of an assumed diction of a past period arises from the fact that a very small slip will betray the manufacture and destroy the illusion. It will be remembered how Lowell pointed out to Thackeray the modern provincialism "different to" in Henry Esmond; and how Ignatius Donnelly's Baconian cipher was discredited by the occurrence therein of the modern split infinitive.

2. The composition of foreigner's English — that is, of the lame articulation and uncouth idiom adopted by persons,

especially uneducated persons, to whom a foreign language is native — may, in the language of fire insurance, be marked "extra-hazardous." The conversance required is that of one who is able to think at first hand in the foreign tongue, and who from this ability as a centre can look out through the peculiarities and limitations of articulation, the idioms, the general spirit of the language portrayed. There is not only a changed set of words in question, but a different approach to thought; an American joke translated into German or German English would not be at all like German humor. The hardest yet the most indispensable thing in the representation of foreigner's English is suffusing the whole tissue of the diction with the foreigner's natural mood. If this cannot be done, the foreign English is merely an empty shell of expression.

3. The same remarks apply to the writing of dialect, and a like conversance is required; for this reason it is that novelists laying their scenes in a certain district take the pains of a long sojourn and acquaintance to work up what is called "local color," and still better it is when, as in the case of George W. Cable and Ian Maclaren, a lifetime has been spent in contact with the people and the dialect portrayed. The mastery of a dialect comes from a systematic and sympathetic study of provincialisms, colloquial peculiarities, and traits of articulation; in this way a language is worked up which can be traced in its entirety to no one person, perhaps, but which in general represents the usage of a whole region. The Literary Shaping. To say that the writer, in composing the foregoing kinds of diction, must be faithful to the usage portrayed is to give only half his task. All these have to undergo a process of toning-down and modification; on the crude usage adopted there is superinduced a literary shaping, by which they are freed from what is unintelligible or estranging and adapted to present readers. This in two ways.

In the first place the diction in question is carefully

moulded to self-consistency; it obeys its analogies and congruities, its laws of formation and taste, like a vernacular. Secondly, it is not carried to extreme. If a manufactured usage were absolutely true to the actual, reproducing all the peculiarities accessible, it would be neither pleasing nor artistic nor intelligible: the writer would simply be wallowing in dialect, as if that were his end. The value of these usages is merely as a flavor, a means of coloring thought and giving some characteristic human quality. Accordingly, the literary shaping or workmanship leaves the usage just enough accentuated to suggest the desired flavor, while it leaves the sentiment of the thought unimpeded. There is a delicacy about it, a refinement, which counteracts the native vulgarity or uncouthness: it is like displaying jewels in the rough, or like nature's noblemen expressing the sentiments of the court in the tongue of the multitude. Any such manufactured diction, after all, is merely a means, not an end; the moment it is employed for its own sake, or in greater degree than is necessary for its end, it becomes unreal and tawdry.

III.

MAINTENANCE OF THE TONE OF DISCOURSE.

This is an important matter, a general summing-up of artistic prose diction, which calls for the alert and cultivated literary sense.

1. To merit the name of diction, to presume on the suffrage of a reader, the style must not content itself to be absolutely raw and pedestrian, however correct; it must possess a dignity and distinction which will evince at least the writer's desire to please. The literary endeavor in itself produces a certain elevation of tone, a table-land of expression below which the conscientious writer will be careful not to fall.2

1 See BATES, Talks on Writing English, pp. 245-250.

2" But, whatever becomes of details, the general requisite is that there must be something of elevation. There is a certain distinction of manner which cannot be