When his imagination wells up, it overflows in ornament ; when his heart is touched, it thrills along his verse. - NEWMAN: Literature.

The power of French literature is in its prose writers; the MATTHEW power of English literature is in its poets. ARNOLD: The Literary Influence of Academies.

46. Here the sentence is cast in halves. This, technically speaking, is the balanced sentence, as distinguished from such sentences as contain balance incidentally. It is a natural means of heightening contrasts. Where the effect of correspondence is heightened by repetition, the balance approaches epigram:

The party whose principles afforded him no guarantee would be attached to him by interest: the party whose interests he attacked would be restrained from insurrection by principle. MACAULAY: History of England.

To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely. - BURKE: Reflections on the Revolution in France.

It was dangerous to trust the sincerity of Augustus: to seem to distrust it was still more dangerous. GIBBON : Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

47. The last example has the inverted balance called by the Greeks chiasmus. It is hardly necessary to point out that the English sentence is not flexible to such forms. Even simple balance easily conveys in English an impression of artificiality hardly felt in the more flexible Greek and Latin. For this reason, and on account of the obvious monotony of a series of balanced sentences, the form has in English a limited use. But, though limited, its use is very distinct and very great. Pithy summaries, especially such as ap

proach epigram, are much heightened by the balance; and, in general, it is an admirable mould for emphatic compound sentences.

48. In sum, the principle of emphasis, applied to sentences, generally means in revising so to transpose a sentence as to put at the end that word which is most important both for the force of the sentence itself and for connection with the next sentence. Whatever form thus makes the main word stand out is for that place a good form; and conversely every good sentence form period, climax, balance is good, not in itself, but in so far as it suits a particular place (§ 28).

CHAPTER II

EXPOSITION

I. SCOPE

49. Exposition includes all kinds of lucid explanation; but its object is always to make a given audience understand a given subject. Thus it succeeds only if it is quite clear. It should usually be interesting, too, but clear it must be. An expositor is, for the time and the subject, a teacher. He has taken the bearings of his subject and his audience. Gauging his limits of time also, he makes such division and definition as can within those limits be readily comprehended and remembered. Thus his synthesis is based on painstaking analysis, and leads, if may be, to one main point, which is the conclusion.

50. The object of exposition is always the essence, the gist, the underlying principle. In this is its difference from description. Description suggests, stimulates the imagination by the specific and the concrete, presents always the individual; exposition explains, uses the specific and concrete only to analyze their significance, seeks always some generalization. Kipling's story of "007" describes a locomotive; to expound one would be to show how the principle of the pump is applied to traction. What does this subject mean? asks the expositor. What is it in its essence, its scope, its import, its difference from such and such other things to

which it has some likeness? How shall I make it stand out clearly for itself?

52. Again, the mood of exposition is dispassionate, unprejudiced, uncontroversial. In this is its difference from argument. Argument, of course, cannot go on without exposition, but exposition can go on without argument. Equally of course exposition may be a cover for argument; that is, argument may be carried on, throughout or in part, in the form of exposition. This is rather trick than sound art; but it is not objectionable on the score of mingling the two kinds, since the two kinds cannot be sharply distinguished. It remains true, however, that exposition free from argument, whether in an essay ostensibly expository or in that subsidiary exposition which is necessary in persuasion (§§ 3, 136), commands the greater respect. Moreover, in developing a faculty of criticism it is most useful to study pure exposition, rigidly excluding argument; in a word, to set forth what is, without turning aside to what should be.

53. This distinction from the other kinds of writing with which it is often combined does not imply that exposition must be bare, cold, impersonal. Bare, cold, impersonal, it may be, indeed, and still be worthy, as in a text-book of physics; but it need not be, and in such expository essays as most of us write it should not be. For a listless reader will not take pains to understand; and, on the other side, the significance of a subject will be the more readily found by the writer for whom that significance has some real interest. So, in detail, the abundance of example and illustration which makes Macaulay's essays popular is a direct means to clearness. Else the same means would not be used so

freely by Huxley also, and by Tyndall, and proverbially by the most effective teachers and preachers. In this and in other ways the transpiring of the writer's personality makes the exposition better. The only caution necessary is not to forget the prime object, which is to reach significant generalizations and to reach them clearly.

54. Thus the exposition which, besides being readiest to hand, is most obviously instructive and interesting is exposition based on personal experience. For this everybody of any observation has at least a small fund. Whether it be of racing sloops or of beetles or of electric traction or of local politics or of lumbering, almost every intelligent man has some special knowledge accumulated by a special interest. Within this field he

can expound freely without book. But it is not the only field open to originality. Exposition based on reading may be just as original and otherwise just as profitable to the writer as exposition based on personal experience. In either case the material is not usually new. Only the very few expound what they themselves have discovered or invented. Discovery, invention, are rare; exposition is necessarily common. Exposition, therefore, deals commonly with material already known, even with material already explored and classified. Yet though its facts are not new, its result may be original. Original, indeed, it is whenever a writer gives to facts, however often they may have been presented, his own grouping and interpretation.

II. AIM

55. This kind of writing is at once directly educative in college and directly useful outside. Originality of