Page:The king's English (IA kingsenglish00fowlrich).pdf/198

184 ', as forming the subject-matter of the whole context, does not in the slightest degree affect their relation to the other words in this particular sentence.

It follows from what has been said that true balance inversion is employed not for the sake of impressiveness, but with the purely negative object of avoiding a bad balance. The data required for its justification are (i) An emphatic subject, carrying in itself the point of the sentence. (ii) Unemphatic 'sign-post' words, essential to the connexion, standing originally at the end of the sentence, and there felt to be inadequately placed. The results of the inversion must be (iii) That the sign-post stands at the beginning, (iv) That the subject stands absolutely at the end.

When these four conditions are fulfilled, the inversion, far from being objectionable, may tend greatly to vigour and lucidity. It is liable, of course, to be overdone, but there are several ways of avoiding that: sometimes it is possible to place the sign-post at the beginning without inversion; or the uninverted sentence may be reconstructed, so that the subject no longer carries the emphasis; and, as often as not, a sentence of which the accentuation is theoretically doubtful may in practice be left to the reader's discernment.

One occasional limitation remains to be mentioned, before we proceed to instances. It applies to those sentences only that have a compound verb: if the compound verb cannot be represented simply by its auxiliary component, the inversion may have to be abandoned, on account of the clumsiness of compound verbs in the middle of an inverted sentence; for to carry the other component to the end would be to violate our fourth rule. Take the type sentence 'To these causes may be attributed...', and first let the subject be 'our disasters'. The clumsiness of the verb is then distinctly felt; and 'To these causes may our disasters be attributed' is ugly enough to show the importance of the rule it violates. But next let the subject be 'every one of the disasters that have come upon us'. This time the inversion is satisfactory; whence we