Strike-for the green graves of your sires, God—and your native land! Halleck: Marco Bozzaris. 3. Emphasis by prolongation of accented vowels. Words are given prominence by prolonging the vowel of the accented syllable. There is a suspension of voice on the sound, giving the effect of drawing out the tone. Compare the vowel length of the words "all" and "going" when emphasized and not emphasized in rendering the following sentence.1 Are you all going? Are you all going? Note in the subsequent quotation from Dickens's Christmas Carol the prolongation of vowels of the accented words : "How now!" said Scrooge, caustic and cold as ever. "What do you want with me?" "Much!"— Marley's voice, no doubt about it. "Who are you?" "Ask me who I was.' "Who were you then?" "In life I was your partner, Jacob Marley." "Can you "I can." "Do it, then." can you sit down?" 1 It is easy to overdo this form of emphasis and to run into a style of speech in which prolonged vowels are more evident than the thought spoken. This mannerism is sometimes heard in exhortation when the speaker abandons himself to ardent, emotional appeal. It has been burlesqued in A Georgia Sermon. "After commenting upon that portion of Genesis descriptive of the flood, the speaker' warmed up' suddenly and broke out in the following strains: 'Yes, my brethren, the heavens of the windows was opened-ah, and the floods of the g-r-e-a-t deep kivered the waters-ah, and there was Shem, and there was Ham, and there was Japheth-ah, a-l-1-a-gwine into the ārk-ah." (Anonymous. See Cumnock's Choice Readings, p. 456. 1896 edition.) 18. Value of the study of emphasis Exercises in the various methods of emphasis, explained and illustrated in the foregoing pages, are valuable means of clarifying the thought and of training the mind and voice to work together., Careless, vague thinking will be evident in carelessly placed emphasis, or in monotonous speech unrelieved by significant emphasis of any kind. On the other hand, definite, well-placed emphasis is positive evidence of attention and understanding. Good expression does not come by chance. The study of emphasis is useful also as a means of overcoming certain mannerisms and faulty habits. It often happens that persons who speak or read with evident understanding and with well placed emphasis, are, nevertheless, tedious to listen to, because of the habitual use of but one or two forms of emphasis to the exclusion of all others. It may be that all important words are emphasized by the fall of the voice through about the same range of the scale in each inflection, or that words are given prominence by vocal force alone. The frequent or long-continued repetition of any particular modulation of the voice, which tends to a dead sameness of speech, is tiresome and taxing to the listener. In spirited, normal utterance, all modulations are combined to give words saliency. It is this variety that gives life to words and helps to keep alive the listener's interest. Another difficulty encountered by the plodding or overcareful reader over-careful so far as words are concerned is that of attempting to give every word a place of importance.1 1 Emphasis is regarded by many readers as the all important thing; but it is really the least important. Any untrained voice can emphasize. The difficult thing to do well is the opposite of emphasis - the slighting of certain Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue. But a little consideration will make apparent a great difference between this style of speech and that of ordinary, direct conversation. In conversation relatively few words are emphasized. The act of thinking is simple, the purpose of speech is clear, and the thought of a phrase is frequently centered in but one word, the word which is the point of strongest contact between the thought and the mind of the listener. Simplify the emphasis in the following sentences: — Who overcomes By force hath overcome but half his foe. Milton: Paradise Lost. Cowards die many times before their deaths; This was the noblest Roman of them all. Ibid.: V, V. The voice all moods of passion can express Lloyd. subordinate parts of discourse. Whatever is sufficiently implied, or should be taken for granted, or has been anticipated, and, in short, all the outstanding relations of the main movement of thought and feeling, require to be slighted in expression, in order that they may not unduly reduce the prominence and distinction of the main movement. Only the well trained voice can manage properly the background of what is presented; and if the background is properly managed, the foreground will generally have the requisite distinctness. When a reader endeavors to make everything tell, he makes nothing tell. Ambitious reading often defeats its own end. (Corson: The Aims of Literary Study, p. 123. Copyright, 1894, by The Macmillan Company. Used with the kind permission of the publishers.) PROBLEMS IN EMPHASIS The selections for practice should be studied with reference to each of the forms of emphasis. Train the ear by trying to distinguish between the emphasis by force, inflec- tion, change of pitch, and prolonging of the accented vowel. Which predominates in reading a given sentence? Explain why you emphasize certain words and not others in reading any of the selections. Try shifting emphasis from one word to another, and note whether the sense of the passage is changed or obscured. Can you bring out the same meaning by emphasizing different words in a line? 1. General problems 1. We should do our utmost to encourage the Beautiful, for the Useful encourages itself. 2. Attention is the mother of memory. Goethe. Samuel Johnson. 3. The ball no question makes of Ayes and Noes, But Right or Left as strikes the player goes. Fitzgerald: Rubáiyát. 4. All things were held in common, and what one had was another's. Longfellow: Evangeline. 5. Did ye not hear it? — No; 't was but the wind, And nearer, clearer, deadlier than before! Arm! Arm! it is—it is. the cannon's opening roar! 6. The dry land Earth, and the great receptacle Of congregated waters he called Seas. Milton: Paradise Lost, VII. 7. She bore a mind that envy could not but call fair. Shakespeare: Twelfth Night, Ir, i, 30. 8. One calls the square round, 'tother the round square. 9. Hamlet. Horatio, or I do forget myself. Browning. Horatio. The same, my lord, and your poor servant ever. - a tear, 10. He gave to misery – all he had. He gained from Heaven 't was all he wished a friend. Gray: Elegy in a Country Churchyard. 11. 12. The first of all English games is making money. That is an all-absorbing game; and we knock each other down oftener in playing at that, than at foot-ball, or any other roughest sport; and it is absolutely without purpose; no one who engages heartily in that game ever knows why. Ask a great money-maker what he wants to do with his money- he never knows. He does n't make it to do anything with it. He gets it only that he may get it. "What will you make of what you have got?" you ask. "Well, I'll get more," he says. Just as, at cricket, you get more runs. There's no use in the runs, but to get more of them than other people is the game. And there's no use in the money, but to have more of it than other people is the game. Ruskin: Work. I could be well mov'd, if I were as you; If I could pray to move, prayers would move me: Shakespeare: Julius Cæsar, III, i. 1 Note how the meaning of this line is made clear by means of inflection and change of pitch on 'change" and by added force on that." 66 |