III

SENTENCES AND THEIR RELATIONS

20. THERE are a number of ways of perceiving any single group of related facts. You may remember having tried to count the number of persons in a room. If so, you will remember further that you counted them by fours, fives, or sixes, trying by imaginary lines to isolate these smaller groups from the rest not yet counted. Then you went over the counting again, and this time you divided the sixty or seventy persons in the room up into groups as before, but the groups were not the same and the imaginary lines did not mark them off in the same way. Some one else counting the company after you would have a still different arrangement. Some sort of arrangement there must be, because the counting cannot be done comfortably by taking each person singly. They are to be understood as a body, and the process of thinking them from their isolation as individuals into some form of collective unity is a process of simplification. The smaller grouping that permits us to count them is a part of the simplification from variety into oneness.

This illustrates in an elementary way what is a fundamental part of our thinking. Our mental activities are involved largely in the establishment of relationships. Just as in counting we try to find something that will enable us to tie the units together into groups of five or six, perhaps, so, in dealing with facts, we try to find bonds of some kind between the facts by which we hold a number` of them in the mind at once and make them one. No two

persons will find the same bonds in this process. Indeed, as the facts increase in variety and complexity, they will be able to do so correspondingly less than in counting. Individual reactions to the separate facts soon color the sense of relationship, and that must be more and more largely so as those facts become more and more humanly significant, less and less a mere matter of numbers. The groupings of the facts, then, and the threads that hold the groups together must be a new thing in each person who surveys them, puts them together, and tries to see what they mean in the mass.

21. In any piece of writing the writer's feeling for relationships that he discovers between the units of the material in which he works will show itself in the way in which those units are assembled in words. In this sentence or that, perhaps, the thread is very tenuous, and the mark of its insubstantiality is a semicolon. Then it snaps completely, and the break is shown by a period. In the next sentence it sways and falters with commas and dashes, drawing a great many things together until perhaps you are not quite sure why they belong in one group. Nevertheless, the punctuation declares that it was so that the author thought of them, and understanding the author is understanding just that, the way he feels the relationships with which he is dealing. This can best be understood, of course, through examination of some writings in which this tendency to organization by subordinate groupings exhibits a distinctive character.

"But over and above these practical rectitudes, thus determined by natural affection or self-love or fear, he may notice that there is a remnant of right conduct—what he does, still more what he abstains from doing—not so much through his own free election, as from a deference, an 'assent,' entire, habitual, unconscious, to custom-to the

actual habit or fashion of others, from whom he would not endure to break away, any more than he would care to be out of agreement with them in questions of mere manner, or, say, even of dress. Yes! there were the evils, the vices, which he avoided as, essentially, a soil. An assent, such as this, to the preferences of others might seem to be the weakest of motives, and the rectitude it could determine the least considerable element in moral life. Yet here, according to Fronto, was in truth the revealing example, albeit operating upon comparative trifles, of the general principle required. There was one great idea (Fronto proceeded to expound the idea of humanityof a universal commonwealth of minds-which yet somehow becomes conscious, and as if incarnate, in a select body of just men made perfect) in association with which the determination to conform to precedent was elevated into the weightiest, the fullest, the clearest principle under which one might subsume men's most strenuous efforts after righteousness."

In this from Marius the Epicurean, by Walter Pater, we shall perceive at once that the first sentence is both a long sentence and a loose sentence. It is so long and so loose, indeed, that the meaning is a bit elusive. In some writers that would be a fault, because it would be the mark of a failure to make themselves clear. In Pater that effect is the very essence of his thought. The mind that he is putting before us in his fiction is in a condition of uncertainty and struggle, seeing various implications, various relations and associations of ideas, in what he is presenting, trying to simplify them and bring them to order by a kind of eliminating definition. A sentence of this sort is the natural expression of that feeling. The next sentence is short as marking a decision reached, but that decision is not perfectly straightforward and simple. Evils must be interpreted as vices, not left simply as evils, just as in the preceding sentence deference needed interpretation by a

number of terms, and the subordinate declaration in the relative clause must be qualified by a phrase, which has itself an adverbial modification. Sentence three is more direct, although longer than sentence two, taking up an idea just developed, maintaining touch with it as part of what has gone before by the phrase "such as this," and putting forward a kind of objection to the idea, a qualification like those that we have seen in the preceding sentence, except that here it is given the dignity of greater grammatical independence. In the fourth sentence the thought turns back again, a short sentence opening with definite terms of relation with what precedes. With the current of ideas now turned directly forward on its course, the fifth sentence expands the thought and carries it on in a growing volume.

22. Now, counting up the words in the paragraph, we shall find that the sentences have an average length of forty-seven words. That is nearly double the average length of sentences in modern prose. There are two reasons for this complicated ordering of words, this enlargement of the primary grouping in sentences. In the first place, it follows that feeling for the indeterminate,, the unsettled, and the conflicting which is part of Pater's charm, the mood of the aesthetic mystic dwelling forever in the light of distant stars that break dimly through an earth haze. The wandering length of the first sentence maintains this tone. It wavers from phrase to phrase, keeping to the theme, but confusing the eyes with differentcolored lights. The three succeeding sentences become more decisive, but they do not sharply change the tone, and they are phrased to maintain the connection with the first sentence closely. The fifth sentence is peculiar in that the portion of it within the parenthesis is in the vein of qualification seen in the first sentence, while the rest of it is in the way of amplifying intensification of a conclusion

now definitely reached. Leaving the parenthetical portion of the sentence out, we may see that it illustrates the principle of mass, that is, its length serves to force one thing upon the mind more compellingly simply by reason of its having so much weight of words. The two long sentences of the paragraph, then, produce directly opposite effects by their length, the first one piling up the sense of incertitude even by the terms in parallel order, because these terms are employed, not in the way of emphatic reiteration, but in the opposed fashion of a carefully approximating definition in which one word does not so much reaffirm the preceding as take its place. The last sentence, however, comes up to a sort of climax in the employment of the parallel construction in the cumulative way, one term echoing the preceding and giving it weight.

It is to be observed here finally that the long sentence, especially when a loose sentence also, as is the first sentence of this paragraph, may produce the effect of vagueness and indecision, perhaps, at times, of weakness. On the other hand, it may produce the effect of strength by its massing of a body of like details. More particularly will this latter effect result when the sentence is also periodic and is therefore more readily adapted to a climactic arrangement. From this examination, then, we may say that long sentences have two very diverse offices and must, therefore, have some intermediate offices also as they change in general structure from the loose to the periodic, from the diffuse to the cumulative, from the heterogeneous and amorphous to the homogeneous and massive. How, now, do short sentences function? We shall have to look after that.

23. "But what good have the Zeppelin raids done? Thus far their only purpose seems to have been to tease Eng