Page:The king's English (IA kingsenglish00fowlrich).pdf/310

296

It is only necessary to read aloud any one of the sentences quoted below, to perceive at once that there is something wrong with its accentuation. To lay down rules on this point would be superfluous, even if it were practicable; for in all doubtful cases the ear can and should decide. A writer who cannot trust himself to balance his sentences properly should read aloud all that he writes. It is useless for him to argue that readers will not read his work aloud, and that therefore the fault of which we are speaking will escape notice. For, although the fault may appear to be exclusively one of sound, it is always in fact a fault of sense: unnatural accentuation is only the outward sign of an unnatural combination of thought. Thus, nine readers out of ten would detect in a moment, without reading aloud, the ill-judged structure in our first example: the writer has tried to do two incompatible things at the same time, to describe in some detail the appearance of his characters, and to begin a conversation; the result is that any one reading the sentence aloud is compelled to maintain, through several lines of new and essential information, the tone that is appropriate only to what is treated as a matter of course. The interrogative tone protests more loudly than any other against this kind of mismanagement; but our examples will show that other tones are liable to the same abuse.

The accentuation of each clause or principal member of a sentence is primarily fixed by its relation to the other members: when the internal claims of its own component parts clash with this fixed accentuation—when, for instance, what should be read with a uniformly declining accentuation requires for its own internal purposes a marked rise and fall of accent—reconstruction is necessary to avoid a badly balanced sentence. The passage from Peacock will illustrate this: after pupils, and still more after counterpoint, the accentuation should steadily decline to the end of the passage; but,