4 R. E. Merits 



certainly is that there is a single set of constants for each author. 

 Professor Sherman speaks of "a rhythmic law from which an 

 author may not escape," and asserts that "the determining factor 

 (of sentence-length) in each case is the relative capacity of the 

 author to respond to what may be called the sentence-sense in 

 his own mind,"^ "which, if it could have its will, would reduce 

 all sentences to procrustean regularity."^ Here we notice the 

 excepting clause "if it could have its own will," indicating that 

 the writer was conscious of some kind of limitation of the prin- 

 ciple in question ; and elsewhere we read, "to avoid complica- 

 tion, no consistent attempt has yet been made to determine the 

 sentence-average in works of fiction. Here of course the matter 

 is mainly narrative or descriptive, thus reaching the imagination 

 of the reader more directly, also much of the language is quota- 

 tion and dialogue."^ Yet dialogue was not ruled out in com- 

 parisons. In the test case of the 40,000 sentences in Macaulay's 

 History of England, it was found that "After the dialogue pas- 

 sages and consequent reduced averages, seemingly by a sort of 

 reaction, full rounded periods and high averages take their 

 place."* Later on, this restriction seems to have been entirely 

 ignored, as, for instance, when Miss C. Whiting,^ in studying 

 the relative sentence-lengths during different periods of English 

 literature, by an examination of 500 sentences from each of 60 

 authors, admits De Foe's Robinson Crusoe, Fielding's Tom Jones, 

 Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield,- Scott's Kenilworth, Eliot's Mid- 

 dlemarch, Howell's Rise of Silas Lapham, etc., alongside of Mil- 

 ton's Areopagitica, Dryden's Discourse on Satire, Gibbon's Rome, 

 Emerson's American Scholar, Channing's Self-Culture, Spencer's 

 Data of Ethics, etc. 



Gerwig remarks that "the question incidentally arose whether 

 a writer had the same sentence-structure in poetry as in prose,"' 



^University Studies, vol. T, no. 2, p. 119. 

 '^Ibid., vol. I, no. 4, p. 353. 

 ^Ibid., vol. I, no. 2, pp. 129, 130. 

 ^Ibid., vol. I, no. 4, p. 352. 



^The Descent of Sentence-Length in English Prose , master's thesis, Univ. 

 of Neb. (unpublished). 



^University Studies, vol. II, no. 1, p. 4. 



232 



