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Now, use the word in a difjudgment;" the accent has Compare the two sentences,

this end without betraying the strain. Take, for example, the sentence, "That judgment was unjust;" the accent in the word "unjust" falls on the last syllable. ferent setting, "It was an unjust been shifted to the first syllable. "It was a bad excuse" with "He was a bad man," and notice how the word "bad" is lengthened in the second sentence. The purpose of such shifting of accents and lengthening or shortening of syllables is obviously to accommodate the syllable to the movement of the phrase in which it occurs. There are limits, of course, beyond which we may not go with a given material in lengthening or shortening of syllables and shifting of accent, and everyone who has read aloud knows how prose styles vary in tractableness.

Who has not felt such a difference - let us call it a difference of movement — between the prose, for example, of Cooper and Stevenson, Burke and Ingersoll, Johnson and Ruskin, Spencer and Huxley? It will not be possible to resolve these differences into differences of subject matter or of mere vocabulary. Take, for example, such a sentence as this from Stevenson's "Travels With a Donkey:" "From time to time a warm wind rustled down the valley and set all the chestnuts dangling their bundles of foliage and fruit; the ear was filled with whispering music, and the shadows danced in tune." Compare it with this from Scott: "The sun was setting upon one of the rich glassy glades of that forest which we have mentioned in the beginning of the chapter. Hundreds of broad-headed, short-stemmed, widebranched oaks were crowded together; in some places they were intermingled with beeches, hollies and copsewood of various descriptions so closely as totally to intercept the level beams of the sinking sun." The difference between these two passages is one of pace, movement or rhythm - which has been called the "mysterious essence" of style.

The thought that prose styles are distinguishable by characteristic rhythms suggests the question, How may these rhythms be determined and described? Types of verse are characterized by distinct metres discoverable by the simple process of scanning. But we have been told by rhetoricians, as we have seen, from

Aristotle to Stevenson, that good prose, though rhythmical, must not be metrical; and it is quite obvious that no prose worthy of the name can be reduced as a whole to any of the regular schemes underlying poetry. And yet we know perfectly well that the prose of Gibbon is distinct from that of Macaulay, that of Henry James from that of Barrie, by virtue of something which can only be described as rhythm. Can we not be more specific and ask what are the rhythmical elements that differentiate one style from the other? What, more definitely, do we mean by rhythm in language?

There is first that phonetic or syllabic rhythm with which everyone is familiar, the recurrence of accents at regular intervals spaced by unaccented syllables or pauses. This is the rhythm one looks for when scanning poetry. It is the rhythm of which we have above given a few short flights. There is also another, a larger rhythm of which the unit in poetry is the verse or line, in prose, the sentence, clause or phrase. Syllabic rhythm is purely phonetic or mechanical; phrase, clause and sentence rhythm corresponds to the beat of thought itself, for, as a great psychologist says: "Thought is rhythmical even with the simple perception of a number of objects; accentuation and emphasis are present in every perception we have!"

The metrical scheme of a piece of poetry is ordinarily disclosed by the simple process of reading with a little exaggeration of the natural emphases, and counting accented and unaccented syllables in short, by scanning. The same method applied to prose seems to lead to immediate confusion. Not catching the jog-trot of verse at the start, we begin to vacillate as to what is and what is not an accent. No recognizable rhythmical scheme emerges and we abandon the attempt in disgust. And yet, even as we give up the task, if we read on naturally, regardless of scanning, we are impressed by the fact that there nevertheless is a rhythm, despite our inability to describe it.

The problem before us is similar to that which confronts science in many forms. It is the problem of finding the law of a multitude of facts that we suspect to be in some way bound together, and yet superficially appear to obey no law but chance. The problems of life-insurance are of this sort. Human beings

die from a thousand and one accidents, and yet we speak of the death rate of a community and observe how it remains uniform within narrow limits from year to year. Nothing is more capricious than weather, but somehow multitudes of "weathers" get themselves summed up into characteristic and recognizable "climates." Every individual of a plant or animal species differs from every other individual in some respects, human beings differ in innumerable ways, and yet we go on speaking of biological species and of human races. Science has developed a formidable weapon with which to attack problems of this sort problems arising from great multitudes of variations among allied phenomena. This weapon is the method of statistics. Take a large enough number of facts, the larger the better, suspected to be subject to the same influence, and no matter how bewildering the superficial confusion may seem, the underlying uniformity will be revealed, if it is there.

We feel that one piece of prose is not like another rhythmically just as we feel that the climate of one locality is different from that of another. A hot day in town may be matched by a hot one at the sea-shore, and a cold day in the mountains by an equally cold one in town; the climates of town, seashore and mountain are nevertheless different. So, although scanning a few sentences of prose may not reveal a rhythmical pattern that will enable one to distinguish those sentences from an equal number in another piece of style, yet the indescribable difference we feel in reading the two may perhaps be definitely formulated if we apply the statistical method to a sufficiently large

section of each.

Let us take two styles that everybody will without hesitation acknowledge to vary in respect to this something which is called rhythm the styles of Cooper and Stevenson. Let us take for investigation "Red Rover" and a sketch of Stevenson's called "The Old Pacific Capital." We count a thousand words from the beginning of each and as many more as will bring us to the end of a sentence. We then read each selection as naturally as we can, noticing what words and what syllables appear to have stress. We mark these syllables with stress, and after we have done this for the whole thousand and odd words, we count the

number of marked syllables and the number unmarked. From the figures thus obtained we find the average number of unaccented syllables between a pair of accents. The first 1,004 words of Cooper's "Red Rover," for example, contain 1,593 syllables. Of these, the present writer has counted 498 as accented and 1,095 unaccented, which gives an average unaccented interval of 2.20 syllables. The same process applied to Stevenson's sketch gives an average unaccented interval of only 1.76 syllables. Other pairs of contrasted styles similarly display variations in the figures obtained by the same method. Johnson's "Essay on Shakespeare" gives an average interval of 2.3 syllables, Emerson's "Nature" one of 1.95; Burke on "Conciliation" gives an interval of 2.24, while Ingersoll on "Heretics" one of only 1.85; Ruskin's "Modern Painters" gives 1.67, but his "Sesame and Lilies" goes up to 2.01. Huxley's Preface to his little book on Physiography contains an average interval of 2.13 syllables the preface being very learned and addressed to the scientific fraternity; the first chapter of the body of the book, addressed to the general reader, sinks to 1.80. Spencer's "Principles of Psychology" has an interval of 2.56, Darwin's "Expression of the Emotions," one of 1.95. Addison's "Essay on Milton" has 2.17, Sir Thomas Browne's "Urn Burial" 1.89. There seems in general to be a correspondence between the large numbers and the styles usually described as heavy, and between the small ones and the styles felt to be light.

It may be objected to this wholesale manner of scanning prose that either the placing of the accents will be wholly arbitrary, subject to the whim of the scanner, or that an accent will be simply placed somewhere on each and every word, making the result dependent entirely on the lengths of the words. But it should be observed that the more rhythmical a piece of prose is, the less doubt there will be as to the placing of accents. This is in fact one of the reasons that makes rhythmical prose easier and pleasanter to read than relatively unrhythmical prose. As for the second objection, it is true that long and short words play a large part in determining the character of prose, as well as of verse rhythm; but one has only to read a strongly rhythmical passage to see that the outcome is not by any means a mere

summation of word accents. I read a passage from Macaulay's "Essay on Milton," for instance, as follows:

On the ri'ch and the el'oquent, on no'bles and prie'sts, they looked do'wn with conte'mpt; for they este'emed themselves ri'ch in a more pre'cious tre'asure and el'oquent in a more subli'me lan'guage, no'bles by the right of an earlier crea'tion and prie'sts by the imposi'tion of a mi'ghtier ha'nd.

Here not only are such small words as "on," "the," and "and,' passed over, but also "they," "themselves" and "looked."

Styles, then, that feel as distinct rhythmically as Cooper's and Stevenson's, Johnson's and Emerson's, Burke's and Ingersoll's, Addison's and Browne's, and so on, give by the statistical method correspondingly different average unaccented intervals. But we can, if we are willing to take the pains, come to a more exact description of the rhythmical elements composing various styles. It is possible to determine whether in a given. style one or another type of "foot" predominates. The interval between two consecutive accents may be called a "foot," and this may consist of no syllable, as when two accents come together, or of one or more unaccented syllables. It is, of course, only a matter of eye strain and patience to count in each of our thousand-word selections the number of no-syllable, one-syllable, two-syllable, three-syllable, four-syllable groups, and so on. If one style should happen to be throughout iambic and another dactylic to make an extravagant supposition - our count should in the one case yield us a great excess of one-syllable intervals and in the other of two-syllable intervals. But if not wholly iambic or dactylic, a style predominantly one or the other will give characteristic results; and variously proportioned mixtures of one-, two-, three- and more syllabled intervals will be revealed.

An actual census of the selections already mentioned shows. that differences of the sort we have suspected really exist. A thousand words of Cooper contain about 75 one-syllable intervals, 96 two-syllable intervals, 72 three-syllable intervals, 35 foursyllable intervals, with a scattering of others which we will not take the space to mention. Stevenson, on the other hand, has

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