Development of Form in Literature. 27 



of their real weight. Also there are unfortunately too many 

 writers of the second or third class who may warrantably 

 remind us of the sixteenth century prosaists. But perhaps 

 the best examples of heavy writing are to be found among 

 the early compositions of high-school and college students. 

 It would be hard to say whence they derive the synthetic 

 sentence sense evinced in first attempts at literary English. 

 What makes short-period styles is the oral sentence-sense 

 given free play as in ordinary informal talk. The prime 

 difficulty encountered by teachers of composition is in making 

 students give up their stiff, elephantine sentences and write 

 simply, in plain mother tongue phrases and terms. The 

 whole of our rhetorical education — after we have learned to 

 speak correctly — is often nothing but the process of taming 

 and subduing our literary sentence-sense to practicable oral 

 standards. 



Heaviness, then, is a relative term. The styles of those 

 who, like Newman, address the educated exclusively, will not 

 be heavy to their proper public, though unintelligible to 

 common readers. Hooker is to-day hard reading for the 

 audience which Newman addresses, but was apparently not 

 heavy to his own narrower circle. The relative heaviness of 

 Hooker and Newman is seen by comparison from the table, 

 p. 21, of their respective per cents of predications and of 

 clauses saved. Hooker has perhaps a slight advantage over 

 Newman in preponderance of oral sentences, as would appear 

 from the diagrams (p. 28), of the sentence lengths respect- 

 ively from the First Book of the Polity, and a corresponding 

 portion (first 700 periods) from the Idea of a University. As 

 we descend to popular literature, the sentence of maximum 

 frequency grows shorter and shorter, reaches approximately 

 in Macaulay the oral length, and later passes considerably 

 below. For it is evident that literary purveyors of the Fire- 

 side Companion order would hardly succeed in working off 

 such enormous editions if the style they write in were not 

 less ' heavy ' than ordinary talk. The readers of such litera- 

 ture are either boys not yet equal to the sentence weight 



363 



