Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 804
Transposed it runs:
Anne Day sat with closed eyes in the corner of her third-class carriage. Her mind was seething with a delicious excitement. No one would have thought thus from Anne Day’s appearance.
Pretty good, but too slow for crime. At that rate Anne Day would never get murdered — perhaps she didn’t anyway. I forget.
But in some cases the attempt to turn things into single sentences would be just about hopeless, if not comic. What are we to say of this, the opening of Boswell’s Life of Johnson:
To write the life of him who excelled all mankind in writing the lives of others and who, whether we consider his extraordinary endowments or his various works, has been equalled by few in any age is an arduous and may be reckoned in me a presumptuous task.
The trouble here is that we don’t know where to get at it. It is like trying to catch a hen. Obviously the main statement is that something is an arduous task, but we have got to go back to find it. It will turn into something like this:
Dr. Johnson excelled all mankind in writing the lives of others. Consider his extraordinary endowments. Now consider his various works. He has been equalled by few in any age. To write his life is an arduous task. It may be reckoned in me a presumptuous task.
This is about as close to Japanese prose, if we put humble worm for me, as one would wish to go. But in English it won’t stand.
In other words we very soon reach the conclusion that sentences which are to correspond to our form of thinking have got to be qualified by the inclusion of subordinate and conditional ideas. Rodin’s ‘Thinker’ might take his thoughts one by one, but we can’t.
In spite of this, however, the principal thing which I would wish to emphasize in this connection, the main precept I wish to inculpate, is a warning against long and complicated and qualified sentences, and a plea for short and direct ones.
Let it be said at once that some sentences are long only in appearance. The connecting words are mere couplings. The sentences stand alone.
Witness this passage that after more than a hundred and sixty years still thrills the American heart:
These are the time’s that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will in this crisis shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now deserves the thanks of men and women. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us that the harder the conflict the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap we esteem too lightly; ’tis dearness alone that gives everything its value.
Or take a characteristic descriptive passage by Charles Dickens, the kind which he loved to use as the opening of a novel. In the mere form of printing the sentences seem endless. But in the sense of their meaning they consist of a series of short statements.
‘London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather.
.. Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits (islets) and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwhales of barges and small boats’... etc.
Legal sentences must of necessity be long. A lawyer dare not stop. If he ever seems to have brought a thing to a complete end then somebody may discover something left unsaid and invalidate everything. The Tenth Commandment is able to say, Thou shalt not steal. A lawyer has to say, Subject always to the provision of clauses 8-20 below thou shalt not steal except as hereinafter provided. Even at that the lawyer would have to take another look at the word steal, and scratch it out in favour of, Thou shalt not steal, pilfer, rob, appropriate, book, swipe, or in any other way obtain unlawful possession of anything. Then the word thing would start him off again to write — thing, object, commodity, chattel, property....
Now this inhibition that prevents the lawyer from stopping at the end of a sentence lies in a certain measure on all who write. In ever so many ordinary cases the qualification of what is said has practically got to be said in the same sentence. Otherwise we seem to have first said something and then unsaid it. We write:
You mustn’t go down to the end of the town unless you go down with me.
That seems without doubt a necessity of thought with us. Oddly enough the Greeks didn’t find it so. A Greek could write, ask Xenophon if he couldn’t:
Now there was no grass in all this desert, if there was any it was very short.
Similarly a Greek could write:
Not a drum was heard not a funeral note. A. few drums were heating up town.
To a certain extent qualifying clauses are perfectly natural and help to show the balance of what is important and what is secondary. Thus Fielding writes in his Tom Jones:
It was Mr. Weston’s custom every afternoon, as soon as he was drunk, to hear his daughter play on the harpsichord.
The emphasis is on the harpsichord; the drunk is neither here nor there, except to indicate the time.
We may grant of course the literary value of long and beautiful sentences written into the prose of narrative, or the long yet balanced sentences of essay and argument. We may grant also the value of long sentences varied and broken with short ones. A specially striking effect is obtained when a short sentence, a sort of announcement, introduces and indicates the matter that follows.
The blow was soon to fall. In the dead of night in the glare and tumult of a summer thunderstorm, two hundred ferocious Iroquois broke over the unhappy village... etc.
If you look into the pages of any author whose style is worth considering you will find such effects used to their full advantage. The sentences, as was said at the outset, fall into a sort of rhythm specially designed to fit the sense.
But all said and done we may still repeat — Beware of the qualifying clause. With many writers the everlasting use of qualifying matter, in things other than fiction, arises largely from a fear of inaccuracy, a dread of contradiction and disproof that makes them afraid to state a plain fact. Nothing, indeed, is absolutely true. The earth is not quite round. The sky is not quite blue. Rain isn’t altogether wet. Hence any statement that you can make has some kind of limitation to it. Writers who are obsessed with limitations, exceptions and approximations become unable to say a thing straight out and let it alone. They never say that a thing is; they say that it may be said to be. They don’t say that a thing never happens; they say that it virtually never happens; they don’t say that Old Grimes is dead; they say that he is as good as dead, or is dead for all practical purposes, in other words may maybe said to be virtually dead. They might go as far as to say that he is as dead as a doornail.
Very many academic writers, and many professors in their classroom lectures, develop this peculiar hesitation. Many of us in our college days listened to such talk as:
.. and now, gentlemen, we come to the so-called French devolution, culminating in the so-called Reign of Terror and occasioning the so-called Great War which spread around the so-called world.
In a somewhat similar way writers, including writers of eminence, are misled into the over-use of subordinate sentences by trying to pack too much into too little. In their overpacked sentences the meaning has not room to turn round. They are packed as a woman packs a valise, a mosaic never to be reset, as compared with the easy, open spaces left by a man.
Most objectionable of all are sentences made with subordinate clauses introduced by relative pronouns and conjunctions that are telescoped in together one after the other, each clause modifying the one in front of it. It is a peculiarity of our English construction that we can actually begin a sentence:
London which, when, what... or:
Edward who, whatever, where... and still manage to get away with it. Thus, to make a full sentence of this type:
George Washington who, when whatever he attempted had failed, never despaired.
It is not often that authors perplex their prose with three of these things. But the use of two is very common and indeed becomes a mannerism. Nor is it only in the negative sense, as avoiding confusion, that short sentences come into their own. There is a great power in them, in their very finality. In good narration, what we call breathless narration, the short sentences, one following the other, are like the stages of the action itself. Even if of necessity a little broken and joined here and there by plain coupling words (and — but — etc etc.) the short sentences, though no longer short in the sense of punctuation, are short in their essential bearing. Here is Huckleberry Finn, making his escape from the cabin beside the river where his ‘pop’ had locked him in:
I took the sack of corn meal and took it to where the canoe was hid and shoved the vines and branches apart and put it in; then I done the same with the side of bacon; then the whiskey-jug; I took all the coffee and sugar there was and all the ammunition; I took the wadding; I took the bucket and gourd; took a tin dipper and a cup, and the skillet and the coffee-pot. I took fish lines and matches and other things. I cleaned out the place.
In the old-fashioned books on rhetoric much was made of the formation of paragraphs. Indeed the Scottish writers, who loved severity, took the paragraph in custody under a set of rules called the laws of the paragraph. But little need be made of this now. In the printer’s sense a paragraph is becoming not a break in the sense, but a break in the type. It is made as a gardener trims a border with a hoe, knocking a little gap wherever it looks pretty. It is part of the new need for make-up that goes with our magazines and newspapers of to-day. Even our books share it. From a printer’s point of view it doesn’t so much matter what is in a book as what is outside of it; what is in a chapter as what is over it; and what is on a page so much as what is round a page. In the brute commercial sense there is a good deal in this. People are attracted to neat pages, artistically broken into trim sections. Set a thing into a solid unending block of type, into pages that never break, and few books could get over. Milton’s Paradise would be lost and Dante’s Inferno would look like hell.
The paragraph, therefore, in the sense of a division of type is vanishing. It remains as a division of the sense, a pause in a story, an opening of an argument. But it is doubtful if we can with any advantage reduce this to law. A paragraph is in reality a consequence not a cause. You don’t make a paragraph; you merely, as it were, run out of breath. Now no one would plan his breathing for his exercise and his breathing must take the consequence.
The older notion was that written language naturally ran, as it were, in successive waves. The form of movement of these could be guided, and their advance indicated. Thus Law No i of the paragraph, as quoted from a bygone manual: The opening sentence of the paragraph, unless obviously introductory, must indicate with clearness the subject of the paragraph.
This is excellent, sometimes, a lot of times. But there is no law about it. Very often the effect was very happy, as carried out by authors of the past generation who aimed deliberately at a formal style. Francis Parkman is a good example. Open his Wolfe and Montcalm and you will find, with no attempt at search, these paragraph openings used with evident effect.
Here are the chief paragraph headings with which Wolfe wins the battle of the Plains of Abraham:
For full two hours the procession of boats, borne on the current, steered silently down the St. Lawrence.
The main body of troops waited in their boats by the edge of the strand.
Before many of them had reached the top, cannons were heard close on the left.
The day broke in clouds and threatening rain.
Montcalm had passed a troubled night.
Montcalm was amazed at what he saw.
Montcalm and his chief officers held a council of war.
The English waited the result with a composure which, if not real, was at least well feigned.
Wolfe was everywhere.
Montcalm, still on horseback, was borne with the tide of fugitives towards the town.
There are other paragraphs as well but with headings less pointed. A Scottish rhetoric expert might have claimed that Wolfe should have had a paragraph all to himself to die in. In place of that, his death comes in the two-page paragraph of the climax of the battle. Apart from this the chapter is a fine example of this style of writing at its best.
But all that can be said for this formal structure of paragraphs is that it is one good way to write. Another good way is to wander, to seem to drift in a kind of discursive style that is willing to make digressions and, if need be, to get nowhere. Under the laws of the paragraph no digression could be made except as a paragraph itself, duly marked with a sign — like the bump sign on a highway.
Indeed all the laws of the paragraph ran to this same artificially and monotonous regularity. Thus the second law concerned the use of the ‘connective’ words that must link the sentences together so that the bearing of each upon what had proceeded must be plain and unmistakable. At least two generations of British and American- writers were badly damaged by this law. I recall an old professor who began every fourth sentence with ‘Hence accordingly.’ That meant, here’s a new start, boys. It was followed in regular order by of course, therefore, however. It sounded like this:
Hence accordingly Julius Caesar invaded Britain. The Britons, of course, determined to oppose him. They, therefore, defended the beaches. The Romans, however, easily overcame their resistance. Hence accordingly, Caesar marched to London, etc.
Take it all in all I do not think that forming paragraphs is part of the art of writing. It is putting the cart before the horse. Good writing, one kind of good writing, results in measured paragraphs just as painting a portrait results in a distribution of paint. Painters, I admit, talk of a ‘composition,’ but I should imagine that the picture comes first and the paint afterwards.
CHAPTER FIVE. THE ART OF NARRATION
NEVER MIND THE plot: there are only three anyway — It’s all in the telling — The use of the right word — Worn-out phrases — Now the boy stood on the burning deck till his whereabouts became a matter of speculation — Metaphors, straight and mixed — Watering a spark to make it a great mustard tree — Who tells the story? Omniscience?
Or do I tell it? — Or, do they tell it in letters? — Romance and Pealism — Fancy or photograph — The art of description — Don’t keep a murder waiting — Prosy prose.
MOST people, especially those who have never thought about it, would be apt to suppose that a story depends chiefly on a plot, and that story telling — the art of narration — consists chiefly on finding or inventing an interesting plot. We speak of stories as having a wonderful plot.’ In a well-developed story the plot is supposed to thicken and to brew till it boils over in a climax. One thinks of the hundred and one stories of that fertile and facile genius the late Edgar Wallace. They seem all plot and nothing else, and they gather movement like a cyclone till they reach a sort of water-spout climax in which criminals and detectives chase one another in circles in aeroplanes, disappear, crawl out of sewers and grapple again.
In other words the plot is supposed to tangle and then slowly untangle, until it turns out in the end that almost everybody is somebody else. In other stories again the plot deepens and darkens and gets so mysterious that the reader loses it altogether. This was especially the case with the books of Charles Dickens. The plot, as in Little Dorrit, got so unfathomable that at last the readers leave it to Dickens himself and are content with just the characters. Many of Dickens’s plots, indeed, are too complicated for comprehension or too preposterous for belief. People crawl round in the disguises for years, acting a part or leading a double life, in order to find out and divulge the fact that somebody was someone else — thirty years ago. But the most celebrated of Dickens’s books, the Pickwick Papers, had no plot, or none at the start, except that Mr. Pickwick and his associates were commissioned by the Pickwick Club to travel as long as they liked and as far as they liked, provided that they did it at their own expense.
Now if Charles Dickens was the greatest writer of fiction who ever lived, as some of us think he was, then this aspect of his work merits attention. It means that, after all; plot can’t be everything, and in fact the more you look into it the less and less important plot will seem as compared with the other elements that enter into story telling. Many people who would like to write get the idea that if they could only ‘think of a good plot,’ the thing would be done. To which the answer is — My dear sir, if you thought of the best plot in the world you wouldn’t be any nearer to it. A plot only means that certain things happen to certain characters in certain places. But unless you can make the characters live and the place rise before the eye and make the incidents really happen — all of which is part of the art of narration — the mere statement that they did happen won’t interest anybody. That is why so many of our current mystery and crime stories fail to raise a shudder or start a thrill. If Mr, X., who is nothing more than just Mr. X., as lifeless as a dead letter, is found dead by Messrs. Y. and Z. in an apartment on Q. street, we are frankly, like Queen Victoria, not amused. The characters are as dead as the corpse and are all one to us.
Not long ago an anonymous writer in Punch beautifully illustrated this idea in a burlesque detective story. He speaks of the finding of the body and of how at the sight of it, Detective Trumper, ‘accustomed as he was to scenes of horror, could scarcely suppress a yawn’ This is beautiful, not only as an exquisite example of the technique of humour, but also in showing the power of humour to reveal a hidden truth. Why did Trumper yawn? Well, don’t you see, why shouldn’t he? The body was of no particular interest. Trumper must have felt with the poet,’Tis but another dead, all you say is said. They’re killing bookfuls every year.
