^{page 707 note 1} Publications of the Modern Language Association, xix, 2.

^{page 707 note 1} The word was suggested to me, not by Horace's bonus dormitat Homerus, but by the lines in Coleridge's Ancient Mariner:

Although the term is not as felicitous as I could wish, it will at any rate suggest the distinctive pattern of the rhythm.

^{page 707 note 1} Good illustrations are the long whistle of surprise and spontaneous cheering at foot-ball games. The researches of Martens (Über das Verhalten von Vokalen und Diphthongen in gesprochenen Worten, Zeitschrift f. Biologie, vol. xxv, p. 295) and others show that isolated words and vowels are frequently pronounced in this way, that is, with circumflex glide. But all of the characteristics of the phenomenon cannot be accounted for by this hypothesis. As I suggested in a preceding paper, it seems likely that the speaker's expectation of a reply, and the hearer's response, have played some part in the shaping of the rhythm. If we might conceive of the earliest form of speech, or the precursor of speech, as a long ululation naturally rising in pitch and force with the rising emotion of the speaker (or ululator),—a view for which, in my opinion, much is to be said,—the earliest articulation of such an undifferentiated stream of utterance might well be caused by the response of a fellow-being. The response would check the ululation and make a significant break in it. After the break the cry would be expressive of a different mood, and with the relaxation of tension would naturally descend in pitch or force to the close.

The upward movement, if this hypothesis have any warrant, would then be connected with a state of tension, expectation and suspense, the downward movement with relaxation, discharge of nervous tension, completion of the impulse which led to the call, and so forth.

I am confirmed in this hypothesis by some phenomena of modern speech. Consider, for example, the case of a nurse calling to a child. The nurse lifts her voice in a shrill crescendo that mounts steadily in pitch through perhaps an octave. If now she suddenly discovers that the child is at her elbow, she breaks off abruptly and in some phrase such as “Oh, there you are,” descends to the tonic note.

Illiterate conversation is usually of this type. The speaker begins the sentence excitedly, his voice mounting in pitch and increasing in rapidity with his eagerness to convey his idea. But midway in his progress if he sees that his hearers know what he is driving at and guess what is coming next, his speech trails away into an incoherent muttering. Very likely he closes the sentence with such a phrase as “You know what I mean,” glad to escape the labor of rounding his period.

A similar phenomenon, as Mr. E. E. Hale has noted in his My Double and How He Undid Me, may be observed in the conversation of cultivated persons at a crowded reception.

^{page 707 note 1} Some highly elaborate systems of symbolism, such as that of A. J. Ellis, have been devised for this purpose.

^{page 707 note 1} On Style in Literature, Contemporary Review, vol. 47, p. 554.

^{page 707 note 2} Part iii, p. 929.

^{page 707 note 3} The test may profitably be applied also to adults, some of the most eminent poets being like children in this respect, as the following passages will show: “He [Mr. C. K. Paul] confirmed on Tennyson's own authority, the well-known story of his having, on that celebrated voyage to Copenhagen with Sir Donald Currie, unconsciously beat time to one of his own poems, which he was mouthing forth, upon the shoulder of the Empress of all the Russias !” (Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff, Notes from a Diary.) “While Poe was in Richmond some of his friends got up a reading for his benefit, and I heard him read the ‘Raven’ and some other poems before a small audience in one of the parlors of the Exchange Hotel. In spite of my admiration of Poe I was not an uncritical listener, and I have retained the impression that he did not read very well. His voice was pleasant enough, but he emphasized the rhythm unduly—a failing common, I believe, to poets endowed with a keen sense of the music of their own verse.” (B. L. Gildersleeve, in J. A. Harrison's A Group of Poets and their Haunts.)

^{page 707 note 1} Cf. on this subject the article A Phonetic Theory of English Prosody by Jas. Lecky, in Proceedings of the English Philological Society, Dec. 19, 1884.

^{page 707 note 1} A different opinion is implied in the italicised words of the following (from A. J. Ellis's article Accent and Emphasis in Transactions of the Philological Society, 1873–74, p. 132): “‘Even speaking,’ which is cultivated by modern actors, consists in delivering verse without any variety of pitch due to its construction. This is reducing the intonation of verse to the intonation of prose, and leaving the distinction solely to their individual fixed and free periodicities of force.” But to my ear ‘even speaking’ damages prose far more than it damages poetry. Examples of prose pronounced without change of pitch may be found in calls for trains in large railway stations, in the rapid reading of proof to a copy-holder in newspaper offices, and in the cicada-like drone of legislative reading-clerks.

^{page 707 note 1} This conception is not new, as the following passages will show; but it has been applied heretofore, I believe, almost exclusively to the periodic sentence.

^{page 707 note 1} To construct a simple apparatus for tracing speech-glides, stretch a violin-string over a strip of board about twenty inches long, supporting the string at each end by means of triangular bridges about one-fourth inch high. Tune the string to E and mark on the board under it the intervals of the musical scale in tones, half-tones, and quarter-tones. “With such an instrument, by sliding the left forefinger up and down the string, plucking the latter meanwhile with the right, one may follow quite accurately the most intricate movements of the voice, provided, of course, that one possesses a sensitive ear. The movements of the left hand may be recorded by any one of several devices used for this purpose in psychological laboratories.

^{page 707 note 2} There are writings, both in verse and in prose, which lend themselves so readily to routine scansion that they can hardly be read naturally in any other way. In verse Mother Goose, Tusser's Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, and the New England Primer, in prose the works of Gibbon and Samuel Johnson, furnish abundant examples. Of Johnson's Rambler, Hazlitt (On the Prose Style of Poets) writes as follows:

“There is a tune in it, a mechanical recurrence of the same rise and fall in the clauses of his sentences, independent of any reference to the meaning of the text, or progress or inflection of the sense. There is the alternate roll of his cumbrous cargo of words: his periods complete their revolutions at certain stated intervals, let the matter be longer or shorter, rough or smooth, round or square, different or the same.”

^{page 707 note 1} This type seems to be hinted at in the following passages from Dionysius, De Compositions Verborum: “In Thucydides there is a passage in the speech delivered in the public assembly of the Plataeans which has a graceful arrangement and is full of pathos. It runs. But change the arrangement and dispose the clauses in this manner:. Do the same grace and the same pathos still remain, when the clauses are arranged in this way? No one would assert it.”

^{page 707 note 1} A third type in which the medial pause is lacking altogether, should perhaps be added, but I am not sure that it may not resolve itself ultimately into one of the other types. If it exists, it occurs but rarely.

^{page 707 note 1} Rhetoricians who delight in correcting the prose of distinguished writers, sometimes display a singular obtuseness to the music of the rhythm. The following is a case in point. The author of a book entitled Errors in English Composition, selects for correction the following passage from an article by Mr. John Morley in the Fortnightly Review. Rhythmically considered the passage consists of a suspensive arc followed by a pathetic:

“On the whole it may be said that the change from anonymous to signed articles | has followed the course of most changes. It has not led to one-half either of the evils or of the advantages | that its advocates and its opponents foretold.” The author's quarrel is with the second sentence. On the ground that it is not sufficiently clear, he causes it to read as follows: “It has not led to one-half either of the evils foretold by its opponents | or of the advantages foretold by its advocates.” But if he has made the sentence clearer he has at the same time destroyed the original rhythm. He has changed the arc from the pathetic type to the suspensive.