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Title: About Punctuation
Date of first publication: 1924
Author: Dorothy M. Richardson (1873-1957)
Date first posted: July 14, 2018
Date last updated: July 14, 2018
Faded Page eBook #20180778

This eBook was produced by: Jens Sadowski
& the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net




                           ABOUT PUNCTUATION


                         By Dorothy Richardson

Only to patient reading will come forth the charm concealed in ancient
manuscripts. Deep interest there must be, or sheer necessity, to keep
eye and brain at their task of scanning a text that moves along
unbroken, save by an occasional full-stop. But the reader who persists
finds presently that his task is growing easier. He is winning
familiarity with the writer's style, and is able to punctuate
unconsciously as he goes.... It is at this point that he begins to be
aware of the charm that has been sacrificed by the systematic separation
of phrases. He finds himself _listening_. Reading through the ear as
well as through the eye. And while in any way of reading the ear plays
its part, unless it is most cunningly attacked it co-operates, in our
modern way, scarcely at all. It is left behind. For as light is swifter
than sound so is the eye swifter than the ear. But in the slow,
attentive reading demanded by unpunctuated texts, the faculty of hearing
has its chance, is enhanced until the text _speaks_ itself. And it is of
this enhancement that the strange lost charm is born. Quite modest
matter, read thus, can arouse and fuse the faculties of mind and heart.

Only the rarest of modern prose can thus arouse and affect. Only now and
again, to-day, is there any strict and vital relationship between the
reader and what he reads. Most of our reading is a superficial swift
gathering, as we loll on the borderland between inertia and attention,
of the matter of a text. An easy-going collaboration, with the reader's
share reduced to the minimum. So much the better, it may be said. Few
books, ancient or modern, are worth a whole self. Very few can call us
forth to yield all we are and suffer change. Yet it is not to be denied
that the machinery of punctuation and type, while lifting burdens from
reader and writer alike and perfectly serving the purposes of current
exchange, have also, on the whole, devitalized the act of reading; have
tended to make it less organic, more mechanical.

There is no discourtesy, since punctuation has come to be regarded as
invariable, in calling it part of the machinery of book production. An
invisible part. For so long as it conforms to rule punctuation is
invisible. After the school years it is invisible; its use, for most
people, as unconscious as the act of breathing. Most of us were taught
punctuation exactly as we were taught rule of three. Even if we were
given some sense of the time-value of the stop and its subdivisions, the
thing that came first and last, the fun of the game, was the
invariability of the rules. And so charming is convention, so
exhilarating a deliberate conformity to tradition, that it is easy to
forget that the sole aim of law is liberty; in this case, liberty to
express.

It is not very long since an English gentleman's punctuation was as
romantic as his spelling. The formal law was strictly observed only by
scholars. Not until lately have infringements, by the ordinary, been
regarded as signs of ill-breeding. And in high places there have always
been those who have honoured the rules in the breach, without rebuke.
Sterne, for example, joyously broke them all, and it has been accounted
unto him for righteousness. Beside him stands Rabelais, wielding form as
Pantaloon wields his bladder. Were they perhaps castigated for their
liberties by the forgotten orthodox of the period? Or is it that the
stickler for stereotyped punctuation makes his first appearance in our
own time? Why, in either case, have Mr. Wells's experiments, never going
further than a reinforcement of the full-stop and a free use of the
dash, been dragged into the market-place and lynched, while the
wholesale depredations of Sterne and Rabelais are merely affectionately
hugged? Is it because their rows and rows of dots, their stars, and
their paragraphs built of a single word are so very often a libidinous
digging of the reader's ribs? Because their stars wink? It is noteworthy
that so long as his dots were laughter Mr. Wells was not called over the
coals for mannerism. There was no trouble until those signs were used to
italicize an idea or drive home a point; until they became pauses for
reflection, by the reader. From that time onwards there have been,
amongst his opponents, those who take refuge in attack on his method.
Scorn of the dot and the dash has come forward to play its part in the
business of answering Mr. Wells. Sterne and Rabelais and the earlier
Wells, genially aware of the reader and with nothing to fear from him,
offer open hospitality on their pages, space, while their wit detonates,
for the responsive beat of the reader's own consciousness. The later
Wells, usually the prey of dismay, anger or despair, handles the
resources of the printed page almost exclusively as missiles, aimed full
at the intelligence alone.

Of the value of punctuation and, particularly, of its value as
pace-maker for the reader's creative consciousness, no one has had a
keener sense than Mr. Henry James. No one has more sternly, or more
cunningly, secured the collaboration of the reader. Along his prose not
even the most casual can succeed in going at top-speed. Short of the
casting off of burdens, the deep breath, the headlong plunge, the
sustained steady swimming, James gives nothing at all. To complete
renunciation he offers the recreative repose that is the result of
open-eyed concentration. As aesthetic exercise, with its peculiar joys
and edifications, the prose of James keeps its power, even for those in
utmost revolt against his vision, indefinitely. It is a spiritual
Swedish Drill. Gently, painlessly, without shock or weariness, as he
carries us unhasting, unresting, over his vast tracts of statement, we
learn to stretch attention to the utmost. And to the utmost James
tested, suspending from the one his wide loops, and from the other his
deep-hung garlands of expression, the strength of the comma and the
semi-colon. He never broke a rule. With him, punctuation, neither made,
nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding directly from its original
source in life, stands exactly where it was at its first discovery. His
text, for one familiar with it, might be reduced, without increase of
the attention it demands, to the state of the unpunctuated scripts of
old time. So rich and splendid is the fabric of sound he weaves upon the
appointed loom, that his prose, chanted to his punctuation, in an
unknown tongue, would serve as well as a mass--in D minor.

Yet even James, finding within bonds all the freedom he desired, did not
quite escape the police. Down upon almost his last written words came
the iron hand of Mr. Crosland, sternly, albeit most respectfully,
recommending a strait-jacket in the shape of full-stops to be
borrowed--from Mr. Bart Kennedy. Whose stops are shouts. A pleasant
jest. Relieving no doubt a long felt desire for the presence in Mr.
James of a little ginger. But Crosland is austere. Sternly, with no
intervals for laughter, he drags us headlong, breathless, belaboured,
from jest to jest with never a smile or pause. It is his essential
compactness that makes him a so masterly sonneteer. His sonnets gleam,
now like metalled ships, now like jewels. Prose, in his sense, might be
written like a sonnet. First the form, a well-balanced distribution of
stops for each paragraph, and then the text. An interesting experiment.

As interesting as that now on trial in a prose that is a conscious
protest against everything that has been done to date by the hand of
talent at work upon inspiration. But the dadaists, in so far as they are
paying to law the loud tribute of anarchy, are the counterparts of the
strictly orthodox.

Meanwhile, for those who stand between purists and rebels, the rules of
punctuation are neither sacred, nor execrable, nor quite absolute. No
waving of the tablets of the law has been able to arrest organic
adaptation. The test of irregularities is their effectiveness. Verbless
phrases flanked by full-stops, the use of _and_ at the beginning of a
sentence, and kindred effective irregularities, are safe servants, for
good, in the cause of the written word. And always there has been a
certain variability in the use of the comma. As the shortest breath of
punctuation it is allowed, without controversy, to wander a little.

Yet the importance of the comma cannot be exaggerated. It is the angel,
or the devil, amongst the stops. In prose, everything turns upon its
use. Misplaced, it destroys sense more readily than either of its
fellows. For while their wanderings are heavy-footed, either at once
obvious, or easily traceable, the comma plays its pranks unobtrusively.
Used discreetly, it clears meaning and sets both tone and pace. And it
possesses a charm denied to other stops. Innocence, punctuating at the
bidding of a prompting from within, has the comma for its darling.
Spontaneous commas are as delightful in their way as spontaneous
spelling; as delightful as the sharp breath drawn by a singing child in
the middle of a word.

Experiment with the comma, as distinct from recourse to its recognised
variability, is to be found, since the stereotyping of the rules, only
here and there and takes one form: its exclusion from sequences of
adjectives. This exclusion suggests an awareness of the power of the
comma as a holder-up, a desire to allow adjectives to converge, in the
mind of the reader, as swiftly as possible upon their object. But one
would expect to find, together with such awareness, discrimination. And,
so far as I know, the exclusion of the comma when it is practised at
all, is unvarying; the possibilities are missed as surely here, as they
are in conformity to the letter of the law.

The use of the comma, whether between phrases or in sequences of
adjectives, is best regulated by the consideration of its time-value.
If, for example, we read:--

   "Tom went singing at the top of his voice up the stairs at a
   run that ended suddenly on the landing in a collision with the
   sweep,"

we are brought sensibly nearer to sharing the incident than if we
read:--

   "Tom went, singing at the top of his voice, up the stairs, at
   a run that ended, suddenly, on the landing, in a collision
   with the sweep."

Conversely, if we read:--

   "Tom stupid with fatigue fearing the worst staggered without
   word or sign of greeting into the room,"

we are further off than in reading:--

   "Tom, stupid with fatigue, fearing the worst, staggered,
   without word or sign of greeting, into the room."

Even more obvious is the time-value of the comma in sequences of
adjectives:--

   "Suave low-toned question-begging excuses"

bears the same meaning as:--

   "Suave, low-toned, question-begging excuses."

But the second is preferable.

   "Huge soft bright pink roses."

may be written:--

   "Huge, soft, bright, pink roses."

But the first wins.

It is a good plan, in the handling of phrases, to beware of pauses when
appealing mainly to the eye, and to cherish them when appealing to
reflection. With sequences of single words, and particularly of
adjectives, when the values are concrete, reinforcing each other,
accumulating without modification or contradiction upon a single object
of sight, the comma is an obstruction. When the values are abstract,
qualifying each other and appealing to reflection, or to vision, or to
both vision and reflection at once, the comma is essential. If there is
a margin of uncertainty, any possibility of ambiguity or
misapprehension, it is best, no matter what is sacrificed of elasticity
or of swiftness, to load up with commas. Or the reader may pay tax. And
it is dangerous in these days of hurried readings to ask for the
re-scanning even of a single phrase.

But there is woe in store, unless he be a prince of proof-readers, for
the writer who varies his punctuation. The kindly hands that regulate
his spelling will regulate also his use of stops; and, since hands are
human, they will regulate irregularly. The result, when the author has
altered the alterations, also irregularly, sometimes reading punctuation
on to the page when it is not there--is chaos.




                          Transcriber's Notes


Published originally in Adelphi, 1 (Apr. 1924): 990-996.


[The end of _About Punctuation_ by Dorothy M. Richardson]