Greek and some other languages, used sometimes in sentences which in modern English would have an active verb with a reflexive object. Thus "The book sells well" seems to have come from a reflexive form "sells itself."

In the older English reflexives were commonly used when the actor was unknown, as "The door opens itself." Later the reflexive form was changed to the passive. Thus:

Collect yourself-be collected.
Prepare yourself-be prepared.

"I persuade myself" is much like "I let myself be per-
suaded" (middle voice). But "I persuade myself"
and "I am persuaded" also mean nearly the same
thing. "I am persuaded" may sometimes be a true
passive, though it usually has a merely intransitive
sense in which the subject is not thought of either as
representing an actor or one acted upon.

From the comparison of such sentences as the foregoing it will be seen that intransitive, reflexive, and passive verbs have close relations to each other. Historically passive verbs seem to have developed out of a kind of “middle voice" which was closely allied to the old reflexive forms. Latin has the remains of a kind of "middle voice" in the deponent verbs which unite a passive form with an active meaning. To the student of advanced grammar such comparisons of the English idioms with the constructions of other languages are most helpful.

1

Get is occasionally used as an auxiliary in English in such a way as to bring the activity of others to the front, as "You will get punished." "He got himself elected." Such expressions belong to colloquial idiom but are seldom met with in literary English. They might be thought of as a kind of “middle voice if" it were worth while to adopt such a classification in English. It is better, however, to avoid needless classification and keep our grammatical nomenclature more simple.

Progressive verb phrases belong mostly to the active voice of the verb; yet the idea of continuous action is not wholly foreign to the passive. To express this the older writers used an active form with a passive meaning, as, "The house is building," which was perhaps a modification of the more strictly grammatical form of old English, "The house is a-building." The apparent incongruity in such phrases is increased by the fact that they cannot be used with all verbs. We cannot say for instance, "The boy is whipping," with a passive meaning; although Bolingbroke once wrote, "The crime, which was committing, etc."

In recent times a new progressive passive phrase has come into use, such as "is being built," "is being done." The earliest known instance of the use of "is being built" is found in a letter by Southey dated 1795. But this form of phrase is open to other objections besides that of its recent origin. In the sentence "The house, being built of stone, is cold and damp," the phrase "being built" signifies that the house is "done built, rather than in a continuous building state. But the

chief objection that has been raised to "is being built" is that is is made an auxiliary to its own participle being. Outside the present and past tenses also, this construction never occurs. "The house had been being built for ten years" would be intolerable. In spite of these objections, however, "is being done" and other like phrases seem to be fairly good English and have evidently come to stay. They are displacing the older form "is building." Yet this is not obsolete and when it can be used without confusion, it is preferred by many writers as being less clumsy and more forcible, and also as having the sanction of long-continued and classic English usage. No new phrases like "is building," however seem likely to come into the language, while the other form is extending its use to other verbs as well.

Although the passive voice is no true inflection of English the passive verb phrases give an important variation to sentence forms. The conveniences of the passive voice are these: The agent may be unknown so that the active voice cannot be used except with an indefinite subject, as "Some one has broken the window"; that is, "The window has been broken." The passive voice also makes the object emphatic by putting it in a leading place. Sometimes the interest is entirely confined to the object, the agent being unimportant, as "The church was burned to the ground." Merely as an alternative form, also, the passive phrase sometimes gives a pleasing variety to sentence constructions.

XXII

MOOD

I have met with no satisfactory definition of Mood or Mode in Grammar and am unable to give one.-RAMSEY.

"Mood gives one the color of thought that the speaker desires to create. Sentences have moods because people have moods."

There are infinite shades of doubt and contingency, of hope, and fear.-WHITNEY.

Mood is the change in the simple assertive form of the verb to express degree of certainty or doubt. The indicative is really no mood at all. Moods are changes from the unmodified form of assertion.-BROWN AND DEGARMO.

The imperative and subjunctive have no forms not found in the indicative.-HARPER AND BURGESS.

The enumeration of the so-called compound tenses amongst the tenses proper is due to a confusion between logic and grammar, only slightly removed from the fiction which gave us the still lingering potential mood (I can write) or which might with equal correctness have given us an obligatory mood (I must write), a desiderative mood (I like to write), an obstinate mood (I am determined to write), etc.-STRONG, LOGEMAN, AND WHEELER.

Mood, or mode, as it is sometimes called, is the change of form in a verb to show different ways in which the assertion is made; that is, as expressing a fact, a possibility, a command, the condition of another event, etc. It is a property of the verb that must be recognized even

though it has so little of the inflectional character that in defining the term it is not easy to find clear illustrations that can show the real character of mood in English verbs. A comparison of the sentences "He was here," and "If he were here he would do it," gives an idea of difference between the indicative and subjunctive moods. Again, the sentences "Thou goest,' and "Go thou," illustrate a difference between the indicative and imperative moods.

وو

The subjunctive and imperative are not really distinct inflectional forms. They are, howver, modifications of the assertive form that require explanation. The verb be has more of mood than any other verb: yet even in this, the most important and irregular of all verbs, the modal inflection is slight.

The right classification of moods is by no means universally agreed upon. Some ancient grammarians reckoned as many as ten different moods. A few years ago five moods were usually named in English grammars, the indicative, potential, subjunctive, imperative, and infinitive moods. Some grammarians added a sixth mood, would and should being separated from other potential auxiliaries as the distinguishing marks of a "conditional mood." The optative mood, or "mood of wishing" has sometimes been recognized, "May you be happy." A few grammarians have carried the classification of moods further still; and elective, determinative, compulsive, obligatory, reguisitive and vocative are all names which have been applied to moods of verbs.