26 L. A. S hen nan, 



Hence the exhibits from Emerson and Bartol indicate rather 

 revolutionary or transitional than final forms. As has been 

 already pointed out, the development is most assuredly not 

 headed towards laconism and sentences averaging each three 

 words or less, but towards the most organic and perfect oral 

 norm. That reached, men will write, — at least in sentence 

 structure, — essentially as they speak, and the gap between 

 written and spoken English, except in vocabulary, will be 

 closed up. The practice of dictating to stenographers and 

 the increasing personal use of type-writers- by professional 

 authors are unmistakably aiding and hastening this consum- 

 mation.^ 



The principal difference between the oral and the literary 

 sentence is the greater heaviness of the latter. Much of the 

 matter in books, which inexpert readers find either unin- 

 telligible or 'dry,' is wholly within the range of their expe- 

 rience or knowledge, and could be made edifying to them 

 if told by word of mouth, or rewritten in oral sentences. We 

 must be careful to distinguish here between heaviness and 

 zveigJit. A man who usually talks in very easy sentences 

 may, in course of a knotty argument, stiffen his periods very 

 appreciably. His sentences for the time being may be 

 weighty, but unless containing more predications than neces- 

 sary will not be heavy. Heaviness can be properly applied 

 only to what is burdensome, and, in styles, only to what 

 requires conscious effort in the reading. Weighty meaning 

 need not therefore be heavy ; and very frequently heavy 

 compositions do not contain meaning of much weight. Pop- 

 ularly speaking, we of course use 'weight' for 'heaviness' 

 without much risk of ambiguity, and in best styles have little 

 occasion to employ it in any other sense. There are fortu- 

 nately in this generation few writers of the first class who 

 do not succeed, like the best French stylists, in so casting 

 strong meaning in light clauses as to keep the reader unaware 



1 A somewhat fuller, though elementary, discussion of the differences between 

 oral and written English, along lines here suggested, has been attempted by the 

 author in Chapter XXI V^. of his Analytics of Literature ; Boston, 1892. 



362 



