Terminal and Other Points 245 Of all the passages recorded in the table, the most elaborately pointed happens to be one from Pater's Essay on Style, the one in which students read of the rhythm which gives its musical value to every syllable, of vraie vérité, of self-restraint and the removal of surplusage, of the sentence "so fortunately born, 'entire, smooth, and round,' that it needs no punctuation." Next in elaborateness is Mr. Henry James. In the passage cited, there is free omission of parenthetical points; yet the average number of points per sentence is very high -6.8 plus, as against less than 2.5 for most of the periodicals. The elaborate punctuation may help to explain the indifference in which Mr. James's writings are held by many whose literary interest is far from narrow. The percentage next lowest after that for Mr. James is for a passage from Carlyle: 23.1 per cent of terminal points. Carlyle's omission of points for parenthesis, adjective series, and appositives may seem the height of economy; but in general his pointing is heavy and emphatic. The Carlyle flavor in the mechanics of style is due in considerable measure to the frequency of hyphens and capitals. The following passage (from Heroes, and HeroWorship, Chapman and Hall's London edition, 1885, page 147) is typical of Carlyle's punctuation, though inadequate to illustrate his free use of capitals. One remembers always that story of the shoes at Oxford: the rough, seamy-faced, rawboned College Servitor stalking about, in winter-season, with his shoes worn-out; how the charitable Gentleman Commoner secretly places a new pair at his door; and the rawboned Servitor, lifting them, looking at them near, with his dim eyes, with what thoughts, pitches them out of window! Wet feet, mud, frost, hunger or what you will; but not beggary: we cannot stand beggary! Rude stubborn self-help here; a whole world of squalor, rudeness, confused misery and want, It is a type of the yet of nobleness and manfulness withal. man's life, this pitching-away of the shoes. not a secondhand, borrowing or begging man. Let us stand on our own basis, at any rate! On such shoes as we ourselves can get. On frost and mud, if you will, but honestly on that;on the reality and substance which Nature gives us, not on the semblance, on the thing she has given another than us!— Rude stubborn self-help is a rapid group which a modern purist in punctuation might interrupt with a comma. But for the most part the passage is pointed with a lavishness not often matched in good writing today. The eight sentences carry 38 structural points or combinations: 4 periods, 3 exclamation marks, 1 exclamation mark with dash, 21 commas, 4 semicolons, 2 semicolons with dash, 1 comma with dash, 2 colons. The average number of interior breaks per sentence is 3.75. With the sentence points added, the average number of points or combinations per sentence is 4.75. The Carlyle passage for which figures are given in the table shows a lower average of points per sentence, but is similar in tone and effect. The use of strange hyphened compounds, with marked effects on suggested accent, is a striking characteristic of Carlylese mechanics. With his shoes worn-out, this pitching-away of the shoes, sprawl-out, putting-in the woof, Heroes have gone-out, Quacks have come-in, your Able-man -these are characteristic. The hyphenations and the German style of capitalization have much to do with the peculiarities of Carlyle's manner. Even without the extremes represented by the passages from Pater, Mr. James, and Carlyle, the sentence-point percentages vary sharply. They range from 28.8 for Mr. Paul Elmer More to 63 for Mr. Samuel McChord Crothers. In the passage cited Mr. More uses about 3.47 points per Terminal and Other Points 247 sentence, Mr. G. K. Chesterton about 2.54, the Nation about 2.35, the Saturday Evening Post just under 2.1, the New York Tribune and Mr. Crothers about 1.88 and 1.59. The differences are due partly to material and purpose, partly to differences of temper or varying degrees of literary skill. Mr. More, for example, is less careful of his medium than of his thought. Certainly he is less persuasive than he might be if he were more careful of style—as careful, say, as Miss Agnes Repplier or Mr. Arnold Bennett. Mr. More's elaborate sentence structure requires more than twice as many points per sentence as are used by Mr. Crothers. Just below Mr. More, with an average of about 3.41, are the editorials from the Christian Science Monitor. The large average here is partly explained by the small variety of points-only periods, commas, question marks, and a few semicolons, with dependence in unusual degree upon that greatly overburdened point the comma. Of all the writers and journals listed in this chapter, except Pater, Mr. Henry James comes nearest to the comma percentage of the Monitor. The last fifteen passages in the list-with the highest sentence-point averages and the smallest numbers of points per sentence-represent five newspapers, three weekly periodicals, and seven individual writers: Emerson, and Messrs. H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, Samuel McChord Crothers, Albert Elmer Hancock, and William Allen White. Though varied enough in tone and style, they are alike in keeping the average number of points per sentence well below three. Emerson's style is essentially modern, that of Mr. Crothers almost ultramodern. Obviously no safe deductions can be made from the number of points per sentence except in relation to the other things that contribute to the effect. The passages with the lowest averages of points per sentence are not necessarily better than those with higher averages. The North American Review editorials are not less effective than those of the Saturday Evening Post or the New York Tribune; nor is Miss Repplier's writing inferior in art or persuasiveness to that of the writers who use only three fifths as many points per sentence. In general, an average exceeding three points per sentence is likely to be a sign of heavy structure; but within limits of reasonable economy there is much latitude. In most of the passages listed in Table B the most frequent point is the comma. The exceptions are the passages from Mr. Hancock (periods 45.6, commas 42), Mr. Crothers (periods 60.3, commas 33.7), the Saturday Evening Post editorials (periods 46.9, commas 39.2), and the New York Tribune editorials (periods 49.4, commas 41). In the aggregate of the 20,000 points represented in the table, commas outnumber periods 9801 to 7852. This is partly because the comma is the most versatile of all structural points and usually the lightest. In the passages here represented, periods outnumber question marks 7852 to 312, about 20 times. They outnumber exclamation marks more than 50 times. But in a few of the writings listed, question and exclamation marks make a considerable proportion of the less frequent marks-3 per cent for Mr. Harvey, 3.3 for the New York Times, 3.7 for the New York Tribune, 6.5 for Mr. Galsworthy. Third in frequency is the semicolon. Omitting a few cases of semicolon with dash, the semicolons number 899; the 616 dashes plus 66 cases of comma with dash make 682. In the aggregate of 20,000 points the semicolons make nearly 4.5 per cent; the dashes plus the reinforced dashes |