The Sentence. Concerning the rhythmical structure of the sentence, which corresponds to the stanza in poetry, little of a practical nature can be said; not because the subject is barren, but because every writer must so truly work out the pattern according to his own artistic insight. In one thing, however, theorists are agreed: that the sentence has three rhythmic divisions or stages, a gradual rise to a pause or culminating point, then a period of reposeful or level progress, then a cadence or graduated solution.' Such graceful management of sentences, in prose of the more pedestrian type, may impart much of the sense of rhythm, even when the balanced rhythm of clause and phrase is less marked.

EXAMPLE. — The following sentence from Sir William Temple, with the comment thereon is quoted from Professor Saintsbury: :

"When all is done, human life is at the greatest and the best but like a froward child, that must be played with and humored a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over.'

"Here the division is that which has been noted as the usual one in eighteenth century prose, an arsis (to alter the use of the word a little) as far as 'child,' a level space of progress till asleep,' and then a thesis, here unusually brief, but quite sufficient for the purpose. But here also the movement is quite different from that of poetry. Part of the centre clause, 'but like a froward child that must be played with,' may indeed be twisted into something like a heroic, but there is nothing corresponding to it earlier or later, and the twisting itself is violent and unnatural." 2

Pause and Hiatus. One of the important principles coming into prosody from the rhythm of music is, that the pause must be reckoned with. It has a distinctive value, expressed in silence; in other words, while the voice is waiting, the music of the movement is going on. This applies equally to

1 In addition to the remark quoted from Professor Saintsbury in the text may be quoted the following from Stevenson's essay (p. 247) already so extensively used: "The true business of the literary artist is to plait or weave his meaning, involving it around itself; so that each sentence, by successive phrases, shall first come into a kind of knot, and then, after a moment of suspended meaning, solve and clear itself." 2 SAINTSBURY, on English Prose Style, Miscellaneous Essays, p. 34.

To

verse and to prose, though in the measured rhythm and musical lilt of the former its period is more calculable. manage it in prose, with its delicacies and compensations, requires that same fineness of ear on which we must depend for all faultless prose rhythm.

When there is no compensation, when the pause is unmotived or inadvertent, it is called hiatus. Of this blemish every ordinary ear is aware, though it may not perceive the cause or even locate the fault; there is a sense of jolting and lack, as if some pin or fastening had fallen out. The ill management of the pause is the secret of much unmusical prose which, tested merely by phrase and clause, seems to satisfy all rhythmical requirements.

EXAMPLES OF PAUSE. In the passage from Revelation treated musically on p. 215, two pauses of different lengths are very naturally measured by the musical rhythm; the pause before neither (marked by an eighth rest), which amounts to the shortening of the succeeding syllable; and the pause after pain, which is a whole beat and an eighth rest

over.

In the example from Stevenson, p. 216, the pause with the word "Soon, soon," gives the word the value of a whole poetic foot.

Cadence. It is at the end of a sentence or paragraph that rhythm, or the lack of it, is especially noticeable. In such places the ear requires that the sense be brought to a gradual fall, not a sudden halt; and the well-trained ear will graduate the length of this fall to the amount of preparation that has been made for it. It acts as a rhythmical unfolding of the movement that the body of the sentence has involved in a more or less complex progression, and thus is not merely an idle embellishment but a means of giving impressiveness to the whole current of the sentence.

EXAMPLES. In the sentence from Sir William Temple, the words "and then the care is over" form a beautiful brief cadence.

1 See this practically shown under Suspension, p. 286 below.

The following sentences illustrate the disagreeable sound of an abrupt ending: "Famine, epidemics, raged"; "The soldier, transfixed by the spear, writhed"; "Achilles, being apprised of the death of his friend, goes to the battle-field without armor, and, standing by the wall, shouts." All these endings are felt to be bad, not because they are inaccurate, but because they are too short; we naturally require more volume, and more graduation of accent and sound, in words that in themselves are so important.

BOOK III. COMPOSITION.

LEAVING now the subject of diction, which, it will be remembered, centres mainly in words — their usages, their shadings and connotations, their euphonic and rhythmic potencies — we enter here upon a study of the processes involved in putting words together, the constructive forms we have in view being phrases, sentences, paragraphs. Our problems now are problems not of material but of combination; and the qualities we seek are, mainly, clearness in its aspect of perspicuity, as promoted by the mutual relations of words, and force in its aspect of emphasis, as promoted by their relative positions.

The word composition, in the coming four chapters, is employed in a somewhat restricted sense, carrying the meaning, that is, only so far as we may regard the subject-matter as already in hand, ready to be moulded into style. Beyond that, in the consideration of theme, plan, and specific literary forms, we are dealing with that larger stage of organism, that work with the discovery and ordering of material, which we call invention.

It is in composition that rhetoric shows its close relationship to grammar, and at the same time its fundamental advance beyond that science. Grammar deals with the laws of correct expression; which laws rhetoric must observe, because correctness lies necessarily at the foundation of all expression, rhetorical or other. But even in employing grammatical processes as working-tools, rhetoric imparts to them

a new quality distinctively rhetorical, the quality by which they become methods in an art, means to an end. They are viewed not for themselves, but for their adaptedness to the requirements and capacities of a reader or hearer, — for their power to act on men. In discussing them, therefore, we are to approach each principle, so to say, on its operative side; to take it up not at all because it is grammar, but because there is discerned in it a touch or strain of rhetoric.