2. Of intervening phrases containing verbs. "Base-ball managers must look at this pleasant weather and think of the opportunity they have let slip to fill their coffers to overflowing with anything but pleasure." Here the attachment of the last phrase is meant for "think," but it seems to belong to "fill," a verb that has slipped into an intervening phrase. The same faults are seen in the following: "Sir Morton Peto spoke of the notion that the national debt might be repudiated with absolute contempt." "People have been crying out that Germany never could be an aggressive power a great deal too soon." "It is curious to see how very little is said on the subject treated in the present essay, by the great writers on jurisprudence."

25. In making up sentences of principal and dependent clauses, the writer should note how far the influence of such particles as if, unless, though, that, while, whereas, and the like extends; they may by the conjunction and have the range of more than one clause, and need to be arrested if such range is not intended. The rule is to keep the principal assertions and the dependent clauses clearly separate from one another.

EXAMPLES. "The lesson intended to be taught by these manœuvres will be lost, if the plan of operations is laid down too definitely beforehand, and the affair degenerates into a mere review." Is the coördinate here "the lesson . . . will be lost. . . and the affair degenerates," that is, two principal assertions paired together, or, "if the plan . . . and [if] the affair," etc.? Put the if-clause first, and one sense of the sentence is made clear, the principal assertions being by themselves; put the word so or thus in place of the bracketed if above, and the influence of the if is arrested. "Our critics appear to be fascinated by the quaintness of our public, as the world is when our beast-garden has a new importation of magnitude, and the creature's appetite is reverently consulted." Here the influence of as is not properly arrested at the beginning of the next clause. -A that-clause within a that-clause is apt to give trouble; e.g. "Some faint elements of reason being discernible in the brute, it is not enough to prove that a process is not a process of reason, that something approaching to it is seen in the brute." Here a recast is needed, beginning, "The fact that something approaching reason is not enough," etc.

To concentrate Stress. For every element in the sentence there is an ordinary or typical position, where it performs its

1 MEREDITH, Essay on Comedy, p. 99.

function principal or subordinate without attracting special attention to itself. The problem how to concentrate stress on any such element is therefore merely some form of the problem how and where to remove it from its regular position; to the solution of which problem it is necessary not only to know what is normal, what unusual in an element's position, but also to have a cultivated sense of the effect of every smallest change in placement. This cannot come by any formal theory; it must be a tact.

26. The natural position of the simple adjective is before its noun. This order of collocation is so well established that "marked divergencies arrest the attention, and have, by reason of their exceptional character, a force that may be converted into a useful rhetorical effect." The occasional putting of the adjective after the noun, "one of the traces which early French culture has left on our literature," is a grace of style in cases where the noun has been sufficiently emphasized and can afford to throw the stress on the modification. When there is a group of adjectives, or when the adjective is modified by a phrase, the place after the noun is quite natural.

EXAMPLES.

- It will be seen in the following examples how the interest centres in the quality rather than in the thing qualified. "But at last, and even here, it seemed as if the years of this loyal and eager poet had felicities too many.” - 66 Having been successively subject to all these influences, our language has become as it were a sort of centre to which beauties the most opposite converge." In this latter example the adjunct of the adjective makes its position after the noun more nearly a matter of course. - In the next example the noun is already so taken for granted that all the interest centres rather in its adjectives, which accordingly take the stress place: "The crowd round a couple of dogs fighting is a crowd masculine mainly, with an occasional active, compassionate woman, fluttering wildly round the outside, and using her tongue and hands freely upon the men, as so many 'brutes'; it is a crowd annular, compact, and mobile; a crowd centripetal, having its eyes and its heads all bent downwards and inwards, to one common focus."1

1 DR. JOHN BROWN, Rab and his Friends.

27. When, besides the adjective, the noun has belonging to it an article, demonstrative, or possessive, the position of this latter is next the adjective, with at most an adverb between. There is a tendency, due to recent German influence, to encumber the adjective with adjuncts of its own, a construction which packs away material into an unobtrusive position, but produces a lumbering effect unfriendly to free movement and ease.

EXAMPLES. "I have now travelled through nearly every Department in France, and I do not remember ever meeting with a dirty bed: this, I fear, cannot be said of our happily in all other respects cleaner island.”. "A young man, with some tints of academical training, and some of the livid lights of a then only incipient Rationalism on his mind." In these sentences the endeavor to introduce qualifying matter in a non-emphatic place is praiseworthy, but the place makes it seem like dead weight.

28. The single-word adverb is unemphatic before its verb and emphatic after it; according to the stress needed, therefore, the adverb can be placed at will. An adverbial phrase, coming as it does naturally after its verb, is stressed by being placed at the beginning of the sentence or clause.

EXAMPLES. 1. In the following sentence the adverb, while important, is not emphatic: "Each man gains a power of realizing and firmly conceiving those things he habitually deals with, and not other things." Here the stress-word is the verb.

2. Compare now the effect of placing the adverb after the verb: "He writes passionately, because he feels keenly; forcibly, because he feels vividly; he sees too clearly to be vague; he is too serious to be otiose," Here the adverb is the strong element; strong enough in one instance ("forcibly ") to stand alone in its clause.

etc.

3. In the following the two positions are taken alternately, with the stress thereby shifted: 'There is a plot to humiliate us in the most abominable way. The whole family have sworn to make us blush publicly. Publicly blush! They have written to Mama to come and speak out. Now will you attend to me, Caroline? You do not credit such atrocity? I know it to be true."

"1

1 MEREDITH, Evan Harrington, Chap. xxx.

Sppl.

4. The adverbial phrase emphasized by being placed at the beginning: "In no modern country has ideality been more retarded than in our own; and I think that certain restrictions have peculiarly limited production in the field of Poetry, - the chief of imaginative arts." Here the inverted sentence-order directs the stress.

29. A genitival or of-phrase, being the adjunct of a noun, naturally craves the place just after its noun, and in a series of phrases takes precedence of phrases adverbial in office. But in the stress-position, at the end, it is more liable than other phrases to seem misplaced, more liable also to incur ambiguity (cf. T 24); it should be tested, therefore, for both of these faults.

men.

EXAMPLES. In the following sentence we can see the justification of delaying the genitival phrase; it is seeking the stress-position: "It is largely the magnificent gift to the present of dead and unremembered ."1 — In the following, though there is the same reason, the position begins to seem awkward and suggestive of ambiguity: "I was frightened not less by the darkness than by the silence - which every now and then was made keener by the hooting in some elm or willow by the roadside of a screech-owl: a dismal bird.” 2 — The following is too awkwardly collocated to justify itself, it needs a recast: Again, the preservation

66

in a race or nation by tradition of historical characters bears the same relation to literary embodiment that folk-lore or folk-ballads bear to literature."

IV. RETROSPECTIVE REFERENCE.

This term is here adopted to designate the office of any word that requires for its interpretation some word or construction preceding. Under the term are included pronouns personal, demonstrative, and relative, adverbs demonstrative and relative, and phrases of reference, in general, whatever for its meaning necessitates thinking back to an earlier word called an antecedent.

1 GORDON, The Christ of To-day, p. 266.

2 GRAS, The Reds of the Midi, p. 66.

In the whole range of composition there is no process oftener mismanaged than this process of retrospective referThe mismanagement results not from ignorance, but from haste and carelessness; the writer, in his ardor to continue his thought, does not stay to look back, but trusts to chance for accuracy, or puts the burden of interpretation on his reader. It is of especial importance in this process to form the habit, in the case of any backward referring word, of looking back at once and making sure of its adjustments before proceeding. Such a grammatical habit once thoroughly established does not check or retard the current of the thinking, and will save much trouble of recasting afterwards.1 Resources at Command. -The range and character of retrospective reference are indicated in the subjoined tabular view.

1 In speaking of "the liability of pronominal words to be the seat of obscurity," Professor Earle says: "The chief security against this danger lies in the cultivation