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descended by the musical interval of a fourth or a minor fourth. Scott's theory is that these inflectional arcs constitute the "feet" of prose rhythm, which are compounded in various ways. He admits that there are other rhythmical elements also, such as stress, alliteration, balance of clause and phrase, etc. Scott's observations, it appears, were made on his own reading; he gives no detailed account of them. Stetson has estimated the falling slide at the close of sentences to be an interval of a third or a fourth.1

Phonographic recitation records enable one easily to observe the rhythm of prose. Cylinder records of Lincoln's "Gettysburg Speech," of Ingersoll on "Napoleon's Tomb" and of McKinley's "Speech at the Pan-American Exposition," are on the market,-spoken, of course, by an elocutionist. The elocutionist's artificiality mars rather than improves these pieces, but their measured character becomes obvious enough. The writer from much listening had them so impressed on his mind, that they ran through his head constantly in the elocutionist's voice, and he read them in the elocutionist's manner when he had the written copies before him. It was not difficult to mark on a copy the syllables accented in the phonograph. The rhythm of the first sentence of the Ingersoll selection, for example, is quite distinct. It is here given as marked, with accents and pauses:

A little while agó | I stood at the tomb of the first Napóleon | a magnificent tómb of gilt and gold where résted at lást the ashes of that réstless mán.||

No measurements or calculations were made on these specimens. The chief result of the study of them was to accustom the ear to detect beats in prose. The fact of the existence of rhythm in prose became clear and certain. It is easy to "beat time" while each of the phrases separated by the vertical lines in the above sentence is spoken.

In listening to public speakers, one is usually so interested in the meaning of the discourse that one does not observe the rhythm of its sound, but if the language is a foreign one and unintelligible there is nothing but the sound to attend to, and its rhythmical character becomes apparent. The writer listened to a sermon of which he did not understand a word, in the Russian church in New York. He was able to beat time for short stretches, though constantly thrown out at pauses, where the movement broke up and varied. But the delivery

1 Harvard Psychl. Studies, 1903.

of some American public speakers is so markedly rhythmical as to become annoying in its unvaried chant. With a little effort, it is possible to abstract the attention from the meaning of what is said and beat time. The writer has done it very often.

That authors of marked individuality of style differ from one another in the quality of rhythm is a commonplace of literary criticism. Every sensitive reader feels the difference between such writers as Scott and Stevenson, Macaulay and Carlyle, De Quincey and Emerson, Dickens and Thackeray, Spencer and Huxley. What is at the bottom of these differences? In poetry different rhythms are produced by various metrical forms that may be schematically exhibited. Can anything like this be done for prose?

The following experiment to test this question was made. A number of mimeograph copies were made of selections from Scott, Stevenson, Thackeray, Carlyle, Ruskin, Hawthorne and Lotze (translation). The selections were arranged as if by one author in consecutive paragraphs, each of about 130 words. One person read aloud while another marked the syllables that to his hearing were accented. Six markings were thus obtained. In going over the copies afterwards, three or more marks on a syllable were considered an accent.

The most surprising result of the experiment was that only one of the persons engaged in it was sure, when asked, that the selections were by different authors. The others had not noticed the fact. One declared they were by the same author. The selections had, of course, purposely been chosen so as to be on congruous topics.

More syllables were marked towards the close than at the beginning, showing that the discriminativeness of the markers increased as they proceeded. There was a high degree of agreement among the markers but the selections differed from one another in the proportion of unaccented to accented syllables.

A couple of sentences with the markings gathered from the several sheets are here given:

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You might sooner get lightning out of incense smoke than true action or passion out af your modern English religion. You had

4

5

6

6

5

5

4

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better get rid of the smoke and the organ pipes both, leave them

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3

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and the Gothic windows and the painted glass to the property man,

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give up your carburetted hydrogen ghost in one healthy expiration

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and look after Lazarus at the door-step.

The agreement is close enough to justify the assumption that the scanning of one individual having "a good ear," would be just as valid for the practical purpose in view as the result obtained by add

ing markings of several persons. There is considerable variation in the scanning of good poetry by scholars. These individual variations, however, are insignificant beside the large differences due to different types of rhythm, like blank verse and hexameter, shown by the scanning of all alike. One person's scanning of a number of poetical specimens would be sure to show these typical differences, however it might vary in detail from the scanning of another. The assumption is that if there are distinct rhythmical types in prose, the same procedure there should give valid results.

The term "scanning" applied to prose obviously does not mean quite the same process as that gone through by the school-boy who scans Virgil. The school-boy is taught that the poetry he is to scan consists of two kinds of syllables arranged according to definite rules and his task is to find how each line conforms to the given pattern. The pattern being flexible within definite limits, the boy's ingenuity is expended in accounting for seeming irregularities in the line before him. But we never are provided with a ready-made pattern for any piece of prose. Scanning prose, then, must mean marking accents wherever we feel them. Here a certain amount of vagueness enters. Not having a pattern to guide us, which accents shall we mark? For there are accents of various degrees of intensity.

A good poem sets the tune in the first line so unmistakably that the succeeding lines, even though they be somewhat uncertain rhythmically, are drawn by the reader into the rhythm suggested at the beginning.1 Prose has no lines like those of poetry, and its rhythmical units certainly do not follow each other with any such regularity as do the lines of poetry. Nevertheless, a phrase in prose frequently suggests a rhythm as distinctly as does a line of poetry, and rhythms are echoed in prose as in verse.

The tendency to accommodate the time of a syllable in prose to fit the movement of the phrase in which it occurs, may be shown by a simple experiment. Give a person the sentence, "You are a wicked man," to read aloud, and then, "You are a bad man." There will be a distinct lingering on the word "bad." So in the second of the sentences, "How do you do this morning?" and, "How do you do this morning?" where the first "do" is emphasized, "you" is prolonged. There may be a shifting of accent from one syllable to another, as may be seen on comparing the two sentences, "That judgment was unjust," and "It was an unjust judgment." In the first, "unjust" is accented on the second syllable; in the second, on the first.2

1 Lanier, Science of Eng. Verse, p. 10, 1880.

2 Lewis, C. M., Principles of Eng. Verse, p. 1, 1906.

In order to determine whether various prose styles differ from one another in accentual rhythm the method of scanning was employed, as follows: A thousand words (or more, if needed to reach a full stop) were counted from the works of different authors, and "scanned" by the writer. The whole number of syllables was counted, also the accented and the unaccented syllables. The average number of unaccented syllables between a pair of accented syllables was calculated. Then the frequency of each type of "foot" was counted;that is, the number of times the combination—

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etc., occurred. Sentence stops were disregarded. The procedure here described, it will be seen, is the same as that employed by Marbe.

To illustrate: The first 1,004 words of Cooper's Red Rover contained 1,593 syllables, 498 were accented in scanning, 1,095 were left unaccented,-average unaccented interval 2.20 syllables, average deviation .99, average word 1.59 syllables. The distribution of groups or "feet" was as follows:

33

120

153

116

57

15

3

Since the number of syllables in the different selections scanned varied, distributions were calculated for a common base of 1,000 syllables. The above accordingly gave:

20.75

75.48

96.23

72.96

35.85

9.43

1.88

Table I gives the frequencies of the various types of "foot" for 35 specimens scanned by the writer. The figures over the columns indicate types of "foot”: 0 =

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In the left-hand column of the Table are

These are in full:

Red Rover

Little Minister

Old Pacific Capital

In the Matter of a Private

Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney

Man Who Was

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