as the details are more and more individualized, or else, through the introduction of irrelevant matter, concentration upon the central theme is weakened with consequent loss of effect. For example, in the following item, by the introduction of a wholly irrelevant detail the sense of concentrated directness is lost. The full effect of the paragraph becomes more apparent if the detail in question be omitted and the narrative be allowed to proceed without interruption.

The wretched spy, Veslovsky, received annually 100,000 francs ($20,000) from the Russian Government. He was a short, fat man, with long unkempt hair. He associated with us, and we believed in him. From the first day he came among us this wonderful plotter, this genial schemer, sold his brethren, and betrayed women into the hands of jailers and hangmen. He incited us to acts of violence, in the interest of the Government.1

In President Roosevelt's tribute to Lincoln in the speech delivered at Hodgenville, Ky., on the centenary of Lincoln's birth, the unity of the following paragraph - which may be isolated as if in itself a complete item -is apparent throughout. Every detail contributes to the ultimate conception of Lincoln's career as the painful struggle of an earnest personality toward the goal of supreme attainment. The central idea is not interrupted by the interjection of anything that does not bear on the core idea; the unity of the "transaction" is apparent.

This rail-splitter, this boy who passed his ungainly youth in the dire poverty of the poorest of the frontier folk, whose rise was by weary and painful labor, lived to lead his people through the burning flames of a struggle from which the nation

1 Literary Digest: vol. xxxviii, p. 287.

emerged, purified as by fire, born anew to a loftier life. After long years of iron effort, and of failure that came more often than victory, he at last rose to the leadership of the Republic, at the moment when that leadership had become the stupendous world-task of the time. He grew to know greatness, but never ease. Success came to him, but never happiness, save that which springs from doing well a painful and a vital task. Power was his, but not pleasure. The furrows deepened on his brow, but his eyes were undimmed by either hate or fear. His gaunt shoulders were bowed, but his steel thews never faltered as he bore for a burden the destinies of his people. His great and tender heart shrank from giving pain; and the task allotted him was to pour out like water the life-blood of the young men, and to feel in his every fibre the sorrow of the women. Disaster saddened but never dismayed him. As the red years of war went by they found him ever doing his duty in the present, ever facing the future with fearless front, high of heart, and dauntless of soul. Unbroken by hatred, unshaken by scorn, he worked and suffered for the people. Triumph was his at the last; and barely had he tasted it before murder found him, and those kindly, patient, fearless eyes were closed forever.

(2) Emphasis

In the narrative item, as in the ordinary isolated paragraph, emphasis, or effectiveness, is secured by so massing the details as to bring out definitely and vividly the fundamental occurrence. This is often accomplished by the conventional rhetorical device of placing the most significant matter in those parts of the discourse best suited to attract and hold the reader's attention the beginning or the end, preferably the end. A narrative item that closes with unimportant data is weak indeed. In many instances there may be no particular detail of relatively great importance save the climax of

the narrative, which rounds out and completes the account, and the ordering of the details so as to produce this cumulative effect belongs to coherence rather than to emphasis. But often, especially when narration combines with exposition, there is opportunity of observing the principle of effective massing. The narrative form, in such cases, is chosen for the elucidation of some truth, and the effectiveness of the composition depends upon the emphatic presentation of this cardinal idea. For example, in the following paragraph from Green's Short History of the English People-which, for the purposes of the immediate discussion, we may view as a complete unit - the thought of especial value is the resolute character of Henry II. as underlying a policy that prepared England for future unity and freedom. It will be noted that this central theme is brought to the reader's attention at the very outset and is left with him at the close.

Young as he was, Henry mounted the throne with a resolute purpose of government which his reign carried steadily out. His practical, serviceable frame suited the hardest worker of his time. There was something in his build and look, in the square, stout frame, the fiery face, the close-cropped hair, the prominent eyes, the bull neck, the coarse strong hands, the bowed legs, that marked out the keen, stirring, coarse-fibred man of business. "He never sits down," said one who observed him closely; "he is always on his legs from morning to night." Orderly in business, careless in appearance, sparing in diet, never resting or giving his servants rest, chatty, inquisitive, endowed with a singular charm of address and strength of memory, obstinate in love or hatred, a fair scholar, a great hunter, his general air that of a rough, passionate, busy man, Henry's personal character told directly on the character of his reign. His accession marks the period of amalgamation, when neighborhood and traffic and intermarriage drew Englishmen and Normans rapidly into a single people. A national feeling

was thus springing up before which the barriers of the older feudalism were to be swept away. Henry had even less reverence for the feudal past than the men of his day; he was indeed utterly without the imagination and reverence which enable men to sympathize with any past at all. He had a practical man's impatience of the obstacles thrown in the way of his reforms by the older constitution of the realm, nor could he understand other men's reluctance to purchase undoubted improvements by the sacrifice of customs and traditions of bygone days. Without any theoretical hostility to the co-ordinate powers of the state, it seemed to him a perfectly reasonable and natural course to trample either baronage or Church under foot to gain his end of good government. He saw clearly that the remedy for such anarchy as England had endured under Stephen lay in the establishment of a kingly government unembarrassed by any privileges of order or class, administered by royal servants, and in whose public administration the nobles acted simply as delegates of the sovereign. His work was to lie in the organization of judicial and administrative reforms which realized this idea. But of the great currents of thought and feeling which were tending in the same direction he knew nothing. What he did for the moral and social impulses which were telling on men about him was simply to let them alone. Religion grew more and more identified with patriotism under the eyes of a King who whispered, and scribbled, and looked at picture-books during mass, who never confessed, and cursed God in wild frenzies of blasphemy. Great peoples formed themselves on both sides of the sea round a sovereign who bent the whole force of his mind to hold together an Empire which the growth of nationality must inevitably destroy. There is throughout a tragic grandeur in the irony of Henry's position, that of a Sforza of the fifteenth century set in the midst of the twelfth, building up by patience and policy and craft a dominion alien to the deepest sympathies of his age, and fated to be swept away in the end by popular forces to whose existence his very cleverness and activity blinded him. But indirectly and unconsciously, his policy did more

than that of all his predecessors to prepare England for the unity and freedom which the fall of his house was to reveal.1

The passage does not indeed carry out the rather theoretical principle laid down by Professor Barrett Wendell in his English Composition that the effective massing of a paragraph may be tested by our ability to summarize its substance in a simple sentence of which the subject is the opening sentence of the paragraph and the predicate the last; but it approximates even this extreme test. We might perhaps say that the substantial thought of the passage from Green runs somewhat after this order: The resolute purpose displayed by the young king at his accession, and steadily carried out through his reign, was largely instrumental in preparing England for her future unity and freedom. The brief narrative résumé contained in the body of the paragraph is entirely subordinate to this main consideration, which is driven home by its emphatic position at the beginning and at the end of the passage.

Macaulay's famous account of the Black Hole horror, as contained in the Essay on Lord Clive, is an example of the more typical brief narrative. It may be considered as an enlarged narrative item of three paragraphs in length.

Then was committed that great crime, memorable for its singular atrocity, memorable for the tremendous retribution by which it was followed. The English captives were left at the mercy of the guards, and the guards determined to secure them for the night in the prison of the garrison, a chamber known by the fearful name of the Black Hole. Even for a single European malefactor that dungeon would, in such a climate,

1 From Green's Short History of the English People. Published by Harper & Brothers.