Well, my notion was that we ought to follow mother nature to the utmost, and to link together the parts of speech according to her promptings. For example, I thought I must place nouns before verbs: the former, you see, indicate the substance, the latter the accident, and in the nature of things the substance takes precedence of its accidents! Thus we find in Homer: —
The hero to me chant thou, Song-queen, the resourceful man;
and
The Wrath sing, Goddess, thou;
and
and other lines of the same kind, where the nouns lead the way and the verbs follow. The principle is attractive, but I came to the conclusion that it was not sound. At any rate, a reader might confront me with other instances in the same poet where the arrangement is the opposite of this, and yet the lines are no less beautiful and attractive. What are the instances in point?
Hear me, thou Child of the Aegis-bearer, unwearied Power;
and
Tell to me, Muses, now in Olympian halls that abide;
and
Remember thy father, Achilles, thou godlike glorious man.
In these lines the verbs are in the front rank, and the nouns stationed behind them. Yet no one would impugn the arrangement of the words as unpleasant.
Moreover, I imagined it was better to place verbs in front of adverbs, since in the nature of things what acts or is acted upon takes precedence of those auxiliaries, modal, local, temporal, and the like, which we call adverbs. I relied on the following as examples: —
Smote them on this side and on that, and arose the ghastly groan;
Fell she backward-reeling, and gasped her spirit away;
Reeled he backward: the cup from his hand-grasp fell to the floor.
In all these cases the adverbs are placed after the verbs. This principle, like the other, is attractive; but it is equally unsound. For here are passages in the same poet expressed in the opposite way:
Clusterwise hover they ever above the flowers of spring;
To-day shall Eileithyia the Queen of Travail bring
A man to the light.
Well, are the lines at all inferior because the verbs are placed after the adverbs? No one can say so.
Once more, I imagined that I ought always most scrupulously to observe the principle that things earlier in time should be inserted earlier in the sentence. The following are examples: —
They drew back the beasts’ necks first, then severed the throats and flayed;
and
Clangeth the horn, loud singeth the sinew, and leapeth the shaft;
and
The ball by the princess was tossed thereafter to one of her girls;
But it missed the maid, and was lost in the river’s eddying swirls.
“Certainly,” a reader might reply,— “if it were not for the fact that there are plenty of other lines not arranged in this order of yours, and yet as fine as those you have quoted; as
And he smote it, upstrained to the stroke, with an oak-billet cloven apart.
Surely the arms must be raised before the blow is dealt! And further: —
He struck as he stood hard by, and the axe through the sinews shore
Of the neck.
Surely a man who is about to drive his axe into a bull’s sinews should take his stand near it first!”
Still further: I imagined it the correct thing to put my substantives before my adjectives, appellatives before substantives, pronouns before appellatives; and with verbs, to be very careful that primary should precede secondary forms, and indicatives infinitives, — and so on. But trial invariably wrecked these views and revealed their utter worthlessness. At one time charm and beauty of composition did result from these and similar collocations, — at other times from collocations not of this sort but the opposite. And so for these reasons I abandoned all such speculations as the above. Nor is it for any serious value it possesses that I recall this mental process now. I have cited those manuals on dialectic not because I think it necessary to have them, but in order to prevent anyone from supposing that they contain anything of real service for the present inquiry, and from regarding it as important to study them. It is easy to be inveigled by their titles, which suggest some affinity with the subject; or by the reputation of their compilers.
I will now revert to the original proposition, from which I have strayed into these digressions. It was that the ancients (poets and historians, philosophers and rhetoricians) were greatly preoccupied with this branch of inquiry. They never thought that words, clauses, or periods should be combined at haphazard. They had rules and principles of their own; and it was by following these that they composed so well. What these principles were, I shall try to explain so far as I can; stating, not all, but just the most essential, of those that I have been able to investigate.