natural proportion, it becomes a digression, and distracts from the effect of the main topic. A digression is to a paragraph what a parenthesis is to a sentence, and what an episode, to be mentioned later,' is to a narrative. For all three the justification is only exceptional, and more so, it would seem, as the scale of treatment enlarges. As an occasional means of relieving the tension of strong emotion or severe argumentation, the digression may have its use; it needs, however, the masterful direction of a sound literary And when employed it should be subjected to treatment analogous to that of the parenthesis: softened tone, lightness and rapidity of diction, a subdued scale of stress. Its boundaries, too, should be clearly marked; and especially the return to the main current should be made with particular care to make the words of connection and resumption pointed. sense. NOTE. A very short digression, sufficient, however, to show the skill involved in making a digression well, is shown in the example under the next heading. It is from De Quincey, the most digressive of modern writers, whose tendency to expatiate far from his subject is worth study, because, with his scrupulous care for explicit reference, he always kept his reader aware both of his ramblings and of his return.2 3 Parallel Construction. The repetition of construction, already applied to elements within the sentence, has a somewhat less marked though not less real application to the structure of the paragraph. Its most striking and rhetorical use is where several sentences dealing with the same stage of amplification are made on the same model. This, however, needs constant testing lest it become artificial. A more practical rule it is, when successive sentences deal with the same subject of thought, to keep that subject in the forefront of attention and stress; and 1 See below, p. 537. 2 De Quincey's whimsical defense of his rambling tendency may be found in PAGE, Thomas De Quincey, his Life and Writings, Vol. ii, p. 64. 3 See above, p. 308. conversely, when subordinate or digressive ideas are introduced, to put them in a different distribution of emphasis, that they may not be confounded with main ideas. As a grammatical matter of some importance, it is not well to change the voice of the verb, as from active to passive, unadvisedly; small matter as it seems, it changes the subject of the sentence, and hence the current of the assertion. EXAMPLES. -I. The somewhat rhetorical balancing of sentences, with its artificial tendency, may be seen in the paragraph from Macaulay's Essay on Milton already quoted from on p. 309. Here are some of the beginnings of grouped sentences: "If they were unacquainted. If their names.... If their steps"; "For his sake empires . . . . For his sake the Almighty"; "He had been wrested. . . . He had been ransomed." The whole paragraph is highly rhetorical. .... 2. In the following paragraph the italics show how the principal subject is kept in like prominence throughout, except in the digressive portion, here put in brackets, where the subordinate subject, though represented by the same personal pronoun, is so differently placed that it is never in danger of being mistaken for the main one. "Her eyes are sweet and subtile, wild and sleepy, by turns; oftentimes rising to the clouds, oftentimes challenging the heavens. She wears a diadem round her head. And I knew by childish memories that she could go abroad upon the winds, when she heard that sobbing of litanies, or the thundering of organs, and when she beheld the mustering of summer clouds. This sister, the elder, it is that carries keys more than papal at her girdle, which open every cottage and every palace. She, to my knowledge, sate all last summer by the bedside of the blind beggar, him that so often and so gladly I talked with, whose pious daughter, eight years old, with the sunny countenance, resisted the temptations of play and village mirth to travel all day long on dusty roads with her afflicted father. [For this did God send her a great reward. In the spring-time of the year, and whilst yet her own spring was budding, he recalled her to himself. But her blind father mourns forever over her; still he dreams at midnight that the little guiding hand is locked within his own; and still he wakens to a darkness that is now within a second and a deeper darkness.] This Mater Lachrymarum also has been sitting all this winter of 1844-5 within the bedchamber of the Czar, bringing before his eyes a daughter (not less pious) that vanished to God not less suddenly, and left behind her a darkness not less profound. By the power of her keys it is that Our Lady of Tears glides a ghostly intruder into the cham bers of sleepless men, sleepless women, sleepless children, from Ganges to the Nile, from Nile to Mississippi. . And her, because she is the firstborn of her house, and has the widest empire, let us honor with the title of 'Madonna.' 999 1 Beginnings and Endings. How these are to proportion in the paragraph cannot, of course, be laid down by rule; but some suggestions, founded on their function, may here be given. The opening sentence of a paragraph, being either the topicsentence or a connecting link with the preceding, is ordinarily a rather short and condensed sentence. When the topic is defined by some phase of repetition several short pithy sentences, succeeding each other at the beginning, form a very effective means of getting the paragraph under way. The style of such opening sentences calls more naturally for conciseness and simplicity than for ornament. The closing sentence of the paragraph, following the principle of climax, is quite apt to derive a certain roll and momentum from previous sentences; in which case it is somewhat long, often periodic, and forms, indeed, the cadence of the paragraph. This is especially noticeable in impassioned and oratoric language. An exception to this elaborated structure, sometimes adopted to excellent effect, is the apothegmatic ending: a terse and pithy short sentence gathering into one statement the gist of the idea which has been expanded in the sentences preceding. EXAMPLES.-I. Both the short opening and the longer closing sentence are so common as hardly to need a quotation here; see, for example, the paragraph from Macaulay on p. 359, above. 2. The apothegmatic close may be illustrated from Burke, with whom it was a favorite: "But power, of some kind or other, will survive the shock in which manners and opinions perish; and it will find other and worse means for 1 DE QUINCEY, Levana and our Ladies of Sorrow, Works, Vol. i, p. 241. its support. The usurpation which, in order to subvert ancient institutions, has destroyed ancient principles, will hold power by arts similar to those by which it has acquired it. When the old feudal and chivalrous spirit of Fealty, which, by freeing kings from fear, freed both kings and subjects from the precautions of tyranny, shall be extinct in the minds of men, plots and assassinations will be anticipated by preventive murder and preventive confiscation, and that long roll of grim and bloody maxims, which form the political code of all power, not standing on its own honor, and the honor of those who are to obey it. Kings will be tyrants from policy when subjects are rebels from principle." 1 III. KINDS OF PARAGRAPHS. The different kinds of paragraphs that evolve themselves in the course of a composition may be explained, for the most part, as modifications of the typical scheme already given,2these modifications rising naturally from the claims of brevity, or from the amount of detail to be disposed of. In other words, instead of crowding the whole treatment of a given topic into one paragraph, we may choose to make it more manageable by giving only a section at a time, or by condensing part or all to an outline. This sectional treatment, in the paragraph, is analogous to the punctuation of a composita sentence by periods instead of semicolons, and has the similar justification of lightness and point to commend it. 3 The following kinds of paragraph may here be noted. The Propositional Paragraph. This kind comes nearest to filling out the type, being controlled in all its course by a topic, or quasi proposition, at the beginning, and giving enough of explication to make a fairly rounded sum. Considered as a section of the type, it may be regarded as the topic followed out at least through the first stage, and left ready for further amplification. 1 BURKE, Reflections on the Revolution in France, p. 91. 2 Compare above, pp. 366, 367. 8 Compare preceding chapter, pp. 318 and 326. EXAMPLE. —The following propositional paragraph has the somewhat exceptional interest of propounding its topic in stages, as may be seen by comparing the first and the third sentences. This is not the same as the double topic, defined on p. 363, above. History, at least in its state of ideal perfection, is a compound of poetry and philosophy. It impresses general truths on the mind by a vivid representation of particular characters and incidents. But, in fact, the two hostile elements of which it consists have never been known to form a perfect amalgamation; and at length, in our own time, they have been completely and professedly separated. Good histories, in the proper sense of the word, we have not. But we have good historical romances, and good historical essays. The imagination and the reason, if we may use a legal metaphor, have made partition of a province of literature of which they were formerly seised per my et per tout; and now they hold their respective portions in severalty, instead of holding the whole in common.' "1 It will be noted that all the amplification given here is of the nature of definition, and belongs thus to the first stage of the type. 2 The Amplifying Paragraph. This kind of paragraph represents the middle section of the type, its office being to particularize or amplify some statement made previously, or to enumerate the details of a description or narrative. It is the peculiarity of this kind of paragraph that the subject is not definitely expressed, at least within its limits, but is gathered from the general bearing of the whole; and the structure has merely to devise such plan as will make the most lucid and logical arrangement of coördinate facts. EXAMPLE.- The following paragraph immediately succeeds the one last quoted, and will be recognized as merely an amplification of the same topic. The two antithetic sides of the topic determine its plan: — "To make the past present, to bring the distant near, to place us in the society of a great man, or on the eminence which overlooks the field of a mighty battle, to invest with the reality of human flesh and blood beings whom we are too much inclined to consider as personified qualities in an allegory, to call up our ancestors before us with all their peculiarities of language, manners, and garb, to show us over their houses, to seat us at 1 MACAULAY, Essay on Hallam's Constitutional History, beginning. 2 The word amplificatory, if it were not so unwieldy, would be perhaps the term to use here. |