VOL. XXI.

FORMS OF THOUGHT. F. A. Myers

ENTERED AT THE BOSTON POST-OFFICE AS SECOND-CLASS MAIL MATTER.

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COMMON ERRORS IN WRITING CORRECTED. - II.

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No. 3.

The following expression would be of special significance coming from a surgeon or anatomist: "Desiring to know your friend better, I took him apart to converse with him." It has been said that two persons who take each other apart, frequently do so for the express purpose of putting their heads together.

"He is seldom or ever out of town"; say, seldom or never, or, seldom if ever.

"It is dangerous to walk of a slippery morning"; say, on a slippery morning. But the expression, "walking on a slippery morning," and all others like it, of which a strictly literal interpretation will not give the designed signification, are to be avoided. They often excite a smile when seriousness is intended.

"His reputation is acknowledged through Europe"; say, throughout Europe.

"I doubt if this will ever reach you"; say, whether this, etc.

"There were not over twenty persons present"; say, more than.

'Bills are requested to be paid quarterly"; the bills are not requested, but the persons who owe them. Say instead, It is requested that bills be paid quarterly.

"There can be no doubt but that he will succeed"; omit but.

"It was no use asking him any more questions"; say, of no use to ask him, or, there was no use in asking, etc.

and devise; ingenious and ingenuous; immerge and emerge.

The number of emigrants arriving in this country is increasing and alarming"; say, immigrants. Emigrants are those going out from a country; immigrants, those coming into it.

'The soil in those islands is so very thin, that little is produced in them beside cocoanut trees"; "beside cocoa-nut trees" means strictly alongside, or by the side, of them. Besides, or except, should be used. Besides also signifies in addition to as, "I sat beside the President, and conversed with him besides.

"As far as I am able to judge, the book is well written"; say, So far as, etc.

'Do you know who this dog-headed cane belongs to?"; say, whom. In expressing in writing the idea conveyed in this question, a better form of sentence would be: "Do you know to whom this belongs?" In familiar dialogue, however, the latter mode might be thought too formal and precise.

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"Who did you wish to see?"; say, whom. "Whom say ye that I am?" This is the English translation, given in Luke ix: 20, of the question of Christ to Peter. The word whom should be who. Other instances of grammatical inaccuracies occur in the Bible; for example, in the Sermon on the Mount, the Saviour says: Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt," etc. "Moth and rust" make a plural nominative to "doth corrupt," a singular verb. The following, however, is correct: "But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt."

"Let each of us mind their own business"; say, his own business.

"Whenever I try to write well, I always find I can do it"; leave out always, which is unnecessary.

"First of all I shall give you a lesson in French, and last of all in music ; omit of all in both instances, as unnecessary.

"They sought him throughout the whole country"; leave out whole, which is implied in throughout.

"I bought a new pair of shoes"; say, a pair of new shoes.

“Do you believe that he will receive my letter?"; observe that in the former word the diphthong is ie, and in the latter ei. A convenient rule for the spelling of such words is the following: c takes ei after it; all other consonants are followed by ie: as, deceive, reprieve.

"St. John's is about two days nearer England than Halifax." Does this mean that St. John's is nearer to England than Halifax is, or nearer to England than to Halifax ?

"He is a distinguished antiquarian”; say, antiquary. Antiquarian is an adjective; antiquary, a noun.

Beware of using Oh! and O indiscriminately; Oh! is used to express the emotion of pain, sorrow, or surprise; as, “Oh ! the exceeding grace of God." O is used to express wishing, exclamation, or a direct address to a person; as :

"O mother, will the God above Forgive my faults like thee?" "I will retain two-thirds, and give you the balance"; say, remainder.

Will you accept of this slight testimonial?" Omit of, which is superfluous, and weakens the sentence.

"The robber entered the dwelling, and secretly carried off the silver"; say, thief; a robber attacks violently, and commits his

"No less than fifty persons were there"; say, fewer, etc. Less refers to quantity; fewer to number. “Such another victory, and we shall be ruined"; say, Another such victory, etc. "Give me both of those books"; leave out of.

who uses secrecy and deception.

the very rats

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Instinctively had quit it."-Tempest, i., 2. "I shall leave my house for a month before next autumn; but I shall not be obliged to quit it until after Christmas."

Strong and robust. These words are frequently misused; a strong man is able to bear a heavy burden, but not necessarily for a long time; a robust man bears continual fatigue with ease; a strong man may be active and nimble; while an excess of muscular development, together with a clumsiness of action, exclude these qualities from the robust man :

"Strong as a tower in hope, I cry Amen ! " SHAKESPEARE, Richard II., i., 3. "For one who, though of drooping mien, had yet From nature's kindliness received a frame Robust as ever rural labor bred."

WORDSWORTH, Excursion, VI. To hear and to listen have each distinct de

grees of meaning. To hear implies no effort or particular attention. To listen implies some eagerness to hear. An old proverb

says: "They that listen seldom hear any good of themselves."

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Isaac Newton invented the law of gravitation"; say, discovered. Galileo discovered the telescope"; say, invented.

Ought and should both express obligation, but the latter is not so binding as the former. "Children ought to love their parents, and should be neat in their appearance."

"That bourne from whence no traveler returns." How often are precisely these words spoken? They are improperly quoted from Shakspere, in "Hamlet," and correctly read as follows:

"That undiscovered country, from whose bourne No traveler returns."

"Whether he will or no; say, not. The reason of this correction is clearly seen by supplying what is needed to complete the sense Whether he will or will not.

"The Danube empties into the Black Sea"; say, flows; to empty means to make vacant; no river can properly be called empty until it is entirely dried up. NEW YORK, N. Y.

Walton Burgess.

The newer dictionaries reveal many new words adopted from the spoken into the written language,-some slang, some localisms, some conversationalisms, some "technicalisms." Slang is commonly esteemed the voice of the masses, and therefore (no better reason for the "therefore") is inelegant. The fact is, however, that slang is a great feeder of the language, which dies at the bottom and lives at the top, like coral; for slang is vivid, terse, living, contagious, pat, full of red blood, and often comes forward from the kitchen into the parlor, and

there acquires polite manners and social recognition. Modern magazine writers use contractions and vulgarisms, even in staid old essays, and no longer think of apologizing in a phrase for such usage. But

It is no doubt a fact clear to every one that commercialism and merchandisable literary stuff are giving direction to thought at this time. That is as much as to say that the business end of literary effort dominates. Conviction, zeal, research, and investigation are secondary. Such things bound up in merchandisable packages do not "take," are

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To be a little more specific as to forms of thought, it may be stated that Schopenhauer laments the style of those who coin new words and write prolix periods, which go round and round the thought and wrap it up in disguise." He likes neither those who "jot down their thoughts bit by bit, in short, ambiguous and paradoxical sentences, which apparently mean much more than they say," nor those who "hold forth with a deluge of words and the most intolerable diffuseness, as if no end of fuss were necessary to make the reader understand the deep meaning of the sentences, whereas it is some quite simple, if not actually trivial, idea." He says that "longest of all lasts the mask of unintelligibility." Vagueness of manner argues vagueness of thought, he thinks. To save time and the wear and tear upon the reader, he advises the writer to give "the quintessence only, mere leading thoughts, nothing that the reader would think for himself." For "many words to communicate few thoughts is everywhere the unmistakable sign of mediocrity." But "a writer should never be brief at the expense of being clear, to say nothing of being grammatical." Careless writing implies want of confidence of the writer in his subject, or a confession that little importance is attached to the question in hand, and is an 'outrageous lack of regard for the reader." A writer should not "break up his principal sentences into little pieces, for the purpose of pushing into the gaps thus made two or three other thoughts by way of parenthesis, thereby unconsciously and wantonly confusing the reader." He decries sentences that are "rich in involved parentheses," and thus "interrupt what was begun to say," "inserting some quite alien matter." This, as Schopenhauer

views it, is a bit of impertinence as great as the interruption of a person speaking. He has no tolerance for a writer who breaks "up one phrase in order to glue in another." This he denominates stupidity. One should write as an architect builds, who "sketches out his plan, and thinks it over down to its smallest details."

There are some mediocre thinkers to-day, who advise the author to sit down and write, and as he proceeds and his studies thereon enlarge they say he will become more enthusiastic, and the fire will burn stronger on the altar of the heart; the subject matter will fuse better, and the light of inspiration will be stronger. These mediocre advisers state, with no want of assumption, that the advised will write better than when he is full of his subject and coolly selects from his abundance what he desires to say.

It is needless here to caution any one against constructing patchwork stuff. And it is equally useless to remind any one against reprinting dead matter and secondhand stuff. Only Christ can resurrect a Lazarus.

And now, the literature of the hour is ephemeral, necessarily so since it but represents the taste and spirit of this age. The next and the next ages, as all well know, judging by the lamp of the past, will have other and different standards of taste and spirit. The age in which we live is provincial, so to say, and hence peculiar to this day, and people, and taste. The next will have its desires and modes of mind, and they will be unlike ours, and these methods of thought in turn will be antiquated to the next approaching age. Much of the socalled literature of the day will not survive. Practically speaking, it is stillborn. The literature that is to be born out of the womb of time may be of giant stature, or it may be of enfeebled birth. The law of the survival of the fittest applied to literature, testing that suited to all men for all time, would bury most of that of the hour.

Following up Schopenhauer's line of criticism, though not as a muckraker with hysteria or a critic who has failed in literature, it may not be amiss to say some

things that signify that all roads do not lead to Rome. Much of the present-day literature is mechanically correct enough, and yet is truly unlettered forms of thought, significant of a clumsy thinker. A word-monger may be classically able to put puny thoughts in gaudy raiment, and present lace-fringed phrases and embroidered remarks, with the pedantic mark upon them, but when summed up they are, after all, but mere frescoed wind. To talk on tiptoe is not evidence in itself of high thinking or enduring sentiment. A literary contortionist can't infuse eternality into his work by gaining the reputation of being able to turn a fine phrase or a diaphanous quirk. Over-ripe culture and full understanding of the best literary standards will not compensate for a painful dallying along with a pet thought that would better be dismissed in a business way in a keen sentence. A measured, mathematical tread of words, like the throbbing feet of a moving division of the army - animating; what of it? A word-mason may lay up his literary structure, perfect as the bricks in a building, and affably and skilfully concede the studied unstudied efforts, as do the best littérateurs of the times, but nevertheless you know the walls look straight, cold, mechanical, uncomfortable, - unnatural. It is not sufficient to pick up a waif of an idea, put trousers on it, coat, collar, tie, cuffs, stick a diamond pin in its dickey, put a rattan in its thin, pale, bloodless hand, and a boutonnière in its lapel, make a dude of it, pronounce it perfect, and turn it loose on an unsuspecting public," thinking it is going to live forever. In the language of the bishop of the street-corner: “Nay, nay, Pauline; not so!"

but

To be free from breaking Priscian's head in the liberating of a swarm of half-born ideas; or be the creator of an orgie of sickly, writhing thoughts; or to put anæmic ideas into plush-lined sentences, is not the way to gain the sphere of the literary immortals crowned with anemones. Such mechanical precision may have in its cell structure, or protoplasm, the dwarfing, dulling, stunting effect of a too-conscious sense of the "carping critic." The charm of cheer

fulness is a very superior one, - a mantle

for a multitude of sins.

Style is both method and thought, both manner of language (or fashion of phraseology) and well-born athletic ideas.

It has been said: One who writes politics is supposed not to know anything, but one who writes an educational or a religious article or book must be a scholar indeed.

The too old-maidish temper of modern literature is not wholly deplorable, but forms of thought constructed behind screens and lace curtains, about plush carpets, Aphrodite, the Queen of Sheba, Scheherezade, and about "what he said" and then "what she said" lack the nerve of outdoor flavor and masculinity, such as is found in "Tom Brown" at Rugby, or at Oxford. And, again, much of it smacks of the amateur in the use of words, of the fling of the pengalloper (reporter). The sense may, too, be crowded and obscure, showing an unskilled, immature pen. Or evidences of the word-mangler may grin through a muddy style and beclouded ideas. An untidy manner of private thinking will naturally dress its progeny slovenly, - perhaps the best it has, resulting in a patchwork effect, a Joseph-coat appearance.

It is well known that some of Scott's critics pointed out, with what they supposed a sort of infallible intuitive sense, the "labored" parts of some of his stories; and that in his Journal he smiled at his allknowing critics for pronouncing "labored" what was in fact written as swiftly as his pen could gallop over the paper.

An old rheumatic pencil has no prescriptive right, by reason of age, to imitate the Sage of Chelsea and belabor the public with aches and groans. Such an ogre pen has no message divine, for the reason that the words quarrel even on the nibs of the pen. Like spirits each crowding forward to be first to gain possession of the "medium," they have no new evangel to give a dying people.

The Spectator and the Rambler are already so far back that they afford little benefit to the stylist nowadays.