exclamation, and other means of variety and vividness, instead of belonging to the genius of the style, are reserved for an occasional touch. More complex, because suspensive structure, long sentences and sentence-members, and involved modifications of the thought can be more safely employed, since the written or printed page is there, to be studied at leisure.

NOTE.- The following sentence, in its complex structure and the length between joints, is an extreme of what is admissible in writing, and far beyond what is natural to a spoken utterance : —

“On her first arrival in Leicester, in a milieu, that is to say, where at the time 'Gavroche,' as M. Renan calls him—the street philosopher who is no less certain and no more rational than the street preacher — reigned supreme, where her Secularist father and his associates, hot-headed and early representatives of a phase of thought which has since then found much abler, though hardly less virulent, expression in such a paper, say, as the 'National Reformer,' were for ever rending and trampling on all the current religious images and ideas, Dora shrank into herself more and more." 1

Mechanical Aids to Written Diction. One reason why spoken diction may be left less finished is that the speaker conveys his meaning not only by words but by gesture, expression of countenance, modulation of voice. All these written discourse must forego; but all these, so far as they are necessary to the thought, must be in some way represented. demand gives rise to certain signs and marks of relation which, as they do not affect the articulation of the sentence,2 but merely modify the stress and current of the style, need here to be mentioned.

This

1. For increasing the stress of a word or clause the accepted

1 MRS. WARD, David Grieve, p. 165.

2 Printers' marks are of various orders. Some, as capitals, apostrophe, and elision mark, diæresis, hyphen, and quotation-marks, belong to grammar; they are no more a part of rhetoric than is spelling. Others, used for modifying the stress or coloring of a passage, belong to written diction, and are discussed here. Still others, the distinctive marks of punctuation, belong to the composition or articulation of the sentence, and will be found discussed in the chapter on The Sentence, pp. 325-334, below.

means is the use of italics, represented in manuscript by underlining. The custom of italicizing for emphasis is on the decrease, partly for the same reason that applies to exclamation,1 namely, the prevalent tendency to subdue the signs of emotion, and partly because the skilful placing of words is more relied on to make important elements stress themselves. The effectiveness of an italicized passage depends largely on its infrequency; the device is to be employed only for the exceptional occasions when the utmost advantage of position fails to give the word stress enough. A means of increasing distinction, more used by English writers than by American, is the occasional employment of a capital to begin a word not a proper name nor personified, solely to mark it as a cardinal word in the passage. In this usage personal idiosyncrasy plays some part; Carlyle, for instance, employed this device incessantly.

EXAMPLES. — 1. Of Italic. In the following sentence the first use of italics is for stress, the second to mark non-English words, as noted above, p. 59: "His various and exotic knowledge, complete although unready sympathies, and fine, full, discriminative flow of language, fit him out to be the best of talkers; so perhaps he is with some, not quite with me— proxime accessit, I should say."

2. For diminishing or otherwise shading the stress of a word or clause, several marks are used. - -The marks of parenthesis () are used to inclose a subordinate phrase used for elucidation. This phrase occupies a plane of its own, and

1 See above, pp. 96, 102.

2 It will be recalled how Thackeray uses italicizing as a sign of vulgarity or lack of culture, in the letters that he makes some of his characters write; see, for instance, Henry Esmond, p. 317. Hawthorne, it is said, detested the employment of italics for stress; a feeling that we can well understand from the perfect poise and sanity of his sentences, they do not need it.

3 STEVENSON, Memories and Portraits, p. 277. In this whole volume, though Stevenson employs italics more freely than is usually done for foreign words, titles of books, and quoted conversation, I can find no more than three or four clear cases of italicizing for stress.

is read aloud with an attenuated tone of voice. As parenthesis is an interruption, the rule is to make it as short and light as possible; it is poor form to make a parenthesis outweigh the main assertion, or draw away attention from it. Parenthesis is less used than formerly, its place being largely taken by the double dash, that is, a dash at each end of a clause or phrase, inclosing it much as do marks of parenthesis. The inclosed matter is in fact a minor parenthesis, that is, used for a lighter touch and less of an interruption to the course of the sentence than the old-fashioned pårenthesis, — a sign, perhaps, of the more buoyant and delicately balanced diction that marks present artistry in prose. As the double dash, like the parenthesis, marks the lowering of the plane and then the return to the former level, the single dash marks a similar sinking without return. It is used to set off sometimes a restatement with variation of form, sometimes a sly comment by way of surprise. The use of the dash may easily become a disagreeable mannerism, producing a kind of jaunty, skittish effect.

EXAMPLES. -I. Parenthesis. "It is remarkable that this Evangelist (said to be anti-Jewish) has alone recorded our Lord's attendance at these feasts, and has used them as landmarks to divide the history."

"1

2. Double Dash. "I have seen some Olivias — and those very sensible actresses too who in these interlocutions have seemed to set their wits at the jester, and to vie conceits with him in downright emulation." 2

3. The Single Dash. For varied restatement: "Philosophy may throw doubt upon such yearning, science may call it a dream; but there is in humanity what is above and beyond science the language of the heart, whose voice speaks in tones which echo through eternity." For surprise : "All this is excellent — upon paper. Unfortunately, we have always had a very efficient army upon paper," etc.4

1 SALMON, Introduction, New Testament, p. 318.
2 LAMB, Essays of Elia, On some of the old Actors.

8 DAVIDSON, The Doctrine of Last Things, p. 130.

4 The London Times, March 12, 1889. In writing this paragraph, and in adopting the quotations, use has been made of EARLE, English Prose, pp. 103-109.

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.