TIME. "Do not tell me of to-morrow; If we throw the hours away!" Some take no thought of the value of money until it is gone, and many do the same with their time. The hours are allowed to pass by unemployed; and then when life is fast waning they bethink themselves of making a wiser use of it. But the habit of listlessness and idleness may already have become confirmed and they are unable to break the bonds with which they have permitted themselves to become bound. Lost wealth may be replaced by industry, lost knowledge by study, lost health by temperance and medicine; but lost time is gone forever. 66 66 This is worse than uninteresting. It is characteristically prefaced by a cheap jingle. Then the writer becomingly shies a little, not introducing the subject suddenly, but leading up to it by a forced and lifeless comparison. There follows a sweeping statement, presumably applicable to each one of the imaginary 'many" to whom we have been introduced. And then-with so little vividness has the picture of life fast waning" been conceived-we are told in weak, uncertain terms that the habit of idleness may already have become confirmed. And the paragraph concludes with a rhetorical climax, artificial to the last word of it. The difficulty lies in the fact that the writer was not conceiving vividly nor feeling deeply when he wrote. He had no purpose beyond that of making a composition. And he conceived of a composition as something very special in its nature, having a subject drawn from a particular field of speculation, following an approved method of development, and consecrated by an appropriate style. Why did he use the words waning, bethink, bonds? Partly because he could say nothing new on his subject, and in saying what had often been said before he naturally used the words that had been used before; partly because the poetic tinge of these words had impressed his imagination; partly because he thought that, unless he used a diction sanctified by generations of composition-writers, his work would not be a composition at all. Let us not be too severe. The writer was indulging his love of the beautiful, and in this all writers may, within reasonable bounds, be encouraged. But we do insist that a writer shall first say something definite, something worth saying, and say it clearly, and only after that turn his attention to style. The writer of the last essay was advised to write upon some subject connected with his school work. His next essay began thus: AIR. Our earth has many robes. First come close-fitting garments of brown soil, gray rock, or green grass, with wide liquid underskirts of deep blue filling up the spaces between their edges. Outside of these are more wonderful coverings, fragile yet strong, transparent, almost invisible, and folded round the earth, layer upon layer; or, as one might say, veil upon veil, each more gossamer-like than the last. The last-mentioned layers or veils form Earth's atmosphere-a substance found everywhere upon it and pervading everything about it. One may travel from the equator to the poles, one may journey by land or by sea, one may soar high in a balloon or descend deep in a mine, but one can never go in this world to a place where atmosphere is not. But his old This time the writer chose a good subject. faults followed him. There is the same shying round the subject instead of coming directly to it. There is the same fondness for figures. There is the same ransacking of earth and heaven for parallels, and the same striving after climax where no climax is called for. Evidently he still felt that the composition-writer's chief duty is to decorate. Now farther along in the essay were to be found such straightforward sentences as these: Air has a faint bluish tint which on a sunshiny day becomes in the sky a very pure and deep blue. This tint is not believed to be the natural color of the atmosphere. Were it such, the air would act the part of a blue pane of glass, rendering the white light of the sun blue as it reached our eyes. The blue of the air is thought to be a reflected blue. If reflected, there must be something in the air to reflect it; and such indeed is the case. Perfectly pure air would doubtless be without color, but perfectly pure air we do not find. Etc. Here at last was stuff of the right sort-good matter and a good manner. What the writer had failed to realize, as his introduction showed, was that such simple statements of fact concerning the atmosphere as would satisfy a teacher of chemistry or of physics would satisfy a teacher of composition-just that and nothing more or less. He had not yet learned that composition must not be detached from the other activities of hand or brain, in school or out. 4. Limitation of the Subject. Another point is suggested by this last subject. The subject is of the right nature, but it is too broad to be treated in an ordinary school essay. Nothing short of a volume would warrant the selection of such an unqualified theme as " Air." The briefer the title the broader the theme, and consequently the fuller the treatment demanded. The theme before us might have been narrowed in many ways. The writer might have confined himself to the chemical composition of air, to its physical properties, or to its relation to organic life. "The Blue Color of the Atmosphere" would constitute a good subject in itself. Narrowing the theme is not only a proper measure to take when the essay is to be brief: it will be found actually helpful. Paradoxical it is, but the average writer will find more to say upon a narrow theme than upon a broad one. So soon as he confines his attention to one phase of a subject details come into view. And writing, as he must, one word at a time, one sentence at a time, he finds it easier to deal with details. The broad theme discourages him by its very breadth, puzzles him with its features that cannot be represented by a single word or a single sentence. And often his knowledge is inadequate and his time is insufficient for obtaining adequate knowledge. Or he may have adequate and minute knowledge and yet lack a well-developed faculty of organization, so that when he sits down to write, his mass of knowledge proves a real hindrance instead of a help. 5 Kinds of Subjects.-A formal classification of subjects may be made. They fall naturally into four kinds: Narrative, Descriptive, Expository, and Argumentative. The kinds necessarily overlap, and they are continually mingled in actual composition, though in any composition that pretends to unity one kind must be dominant. Tales are chiefly narrative, so-called Travels chiefly descriptive. Novels usually mingle these two kinds. What are technically styled Essays, and Treatises of all kinds-scientific, sociological, critical-are expository in their nature. Philosophical, religious, and political writings tend strongly to the argumentative. History includes the first three kinds. of composition, and, if the historian advances personal opinions and attempts to support them, it may include the fourth. These are examples only. Let us define the terms briefly. (1) Narrative composition is that which deals with action. performed or suffered, that is, with deeds or experiences, with events that occupy time. It may deal with a single incident, or it may be carried to great length, as in biography and history. (2) Description is concerned with objects as they exist in space, or with individual qualities and attributes. The word has a broader use than this technical one, as when we speak of describing an occurrence or an experience, but for the purposes of rhetoric it is desirable to limit it to this technical definition. Description, in this meaning, is practically confined to short articles, scientific or literary, or to brief interpolations in longer works where it is merely accessory to narration or exposition. R. L. Stevenson says: "No human being ever spoke of scenery for above two minutes at a time, which makes one suspect we hear too much of it in literature." The caution will hold for other things a picture, a poem, a human being, as well as scenery. (3) Exposition differs from description in that it deals with groups of individuals that are similar in certain respects, or with general qualities or abstract ideas. We describe "A Landscape," for it is particular; it has characteristics peculiar to itself, and these it is the office of description to dwell on. We expound "Landscape in Literature," "Landscape Painting," or possibly even "Landscape Paintings," for here the emphasis is upon the general characteristics that determine a class. If special characteristics are mentioned, it is only incidentally or perhaps for the sake of distinguishing a sub-class. Exposition is never very far from classification, express or implied. Its range is wide, from the single-paragraph editorial on some question of the day to the voluminous scientific treatise. (4) Argumentation strives to establish the truth or falsity of a proposition. Its range is also wide, determined chiefly by the complexity of the proposition. For further definition and explanation, see the author's " tical Course in Composition," pages 29, 31, 47, 119, 137. Prac Of the different kinds of composition narration and description |