Printers and Punctuation
By LORD DUNSANY
THERE will always be an interest taken in the technique of any art ; and, so long as we do not try to make a mystery of
it or exalt it above its humble place, that is as it should be.
I mention its humble place by way of reminder ; for there is a tendency nowadays, especially in dramatic critiques, to place technique above inspiration ; and if this custom spreads we shall have the diamond-cutters of Amsterdam valuing their tools more highly than the diamonds, with the result that, so long as they cut them in accordance with the rules of their craft, they will cease to care whether they cut diamond or glass, and then soon cease to know. And, having given this necessary warning, I will proceed to write about a technique myself, or rather, a very humble branch of the technique of prose, the little matter of punctuation. Now, although tech- nique is not a thing about which to prate mysteriously, as though it were itself the art, yet it is a thing that every worker must have ready to hand. The carpenter does not lend his tools to the gardener. But go through the little store of commas and semi-colons, and here and there a colon, with which a writer of prose has to fashion his sentence, and you will find that several of his commas have been borrowed by the printer. They have been borrowed to decorate the shrines of certain sacred words, which no printer ever permits to be jostled by the propinquity of any common word, but rails them off upon either side with commas. How these words became sacred I do not know, and to enquire into the reason for the sacredness of any sacred thing is usually to get lost in the mists of the past. It is like holly and mistletoe in England, or cows in India : they merely are sacred, and you must leave it at that. The most sacred words to printers are Perhaps, Of course, Too, Indeed and Moreover. None of these words ever appears without its little shrine of commas.
Most adverbs are also sacred, but not so sacred as the five great words I have mentioned. Now the ritual of the printer might be no mom the concern of the writer than the Hindu's habit of decking his altars with marigolds, were it not for the fact that no sentence can have more than a certain number of commas. Three or four commas in a line become an eyesore, which means that the supply of them for each sentence is limited ; so that when the printer takes a couple here and a couple there to decorate his sacred words, or protect them from vulgar contacts, he is borrowing from the author's little store. If the Hindu takes marigolds from my garden, then his ritual does concern me.
Here is a sentence of English prose, punctuated as I would punctuate it. "Moreover Jones, who, as indeed you probably know, is of course Welsh, is perhaps coming too, but unfortu- _nately alone." And that is about as many commas as, I think, the sentence will stand. But., by the rules of the printers, it would be printed thus: " Mineover, Jones, who, as, indeed, you, probably, know, is, of course, Welsh, is, perhaps, coming, too, hut, unfortunately, alone."
Commas may also be likened to the timbers of a scaffolding from which to build a sentence, and where anyone runs off with bits of it to put them to trivial uses, the building of the sentence must suffer.
The principal use of commas in this building seems to be to mark off relative clauses, and clauses beginning with." if '7 and "though," for which grammarians probably have a name, or indeed any clause that stands by itself ; and the purpose of their use is clearness.
The semi-colon is a great convenience, and most long sen- tences are the better for being divided by one at that point at which division is usually obvious, to distinguish what may be called the watershed of the sentence from all the other little landmarks around' it. The semi-colon will be found to be particularly convenient if it be regarded as a kind of bigger and better comma. Obviously the less one wastes one's commas as trimmirikafer words like indeed," the less strain one has to put on one's semi-colons. For long I used to think that commas were wasted by being scattered amongst adject- ives, wherever more than one adjective is used, but I did not like to go against what seethed universal custom ; until one day I noticed that Swinburne, in his line :• 7.
"Out of the golden remote wild West, where the sea without shore is," uses not a single comma among all those adjectives. Then I saw that my opinion in this matter, instead of going against that of all other writers, had the support of one of the greatest of them, and I have never since wasted my commas where their use has always seemed to me to be unnecessary.
As regards the colon, I am inclined to accept what I take to be the general use of it ; that is to say, when a self- supporting sentence, with a verb and noun of its own, has so close a connexion with the sentence before it that they are separated by no full-stop, then I think that a colon is demanded. As for the invariable use of a colon before any remark in inverted commas, I see no objection to the custom : I thinks comma does. just as well, but it really does not matter ; and, if I write commas here and a printer prints colons, I leave thein in the proofs just as he printed them. Sometimes he leaves some of my commas and puts in some of his colons : I Wive that too, for the idol of consistency should not be over- worshipped; and, where a thing does not matter, what is there to be consistent about ?
One very curious thing about colons and semi-colons is that there are men who have actually a hatred of one or the other. Either of these useful little things is an astonishing thing to detest, but the fact remains that people dodetest them. There was once a publisher's reader that went right 'through a book of mine, taking out every single colon. By the time I had put them all back in the proofs I had little time for otber corrections. Obviously if you banish either colons or semi- colons from your sentences the structure of these sentences must be Weakened, and still more so if the commas have been wasted in the manner that I have mentioned.
No suggestion that I have made about punctuation must be taken as being intended to be a rule that is binding for anyone, even myself. It is rather against the tyranny of rules that I am writing. For rules, that are such valuable guides to us, can be, when they are silly ones, more harmfully obstructive than any living man.
One other use the builder of a sentence can put punctuation to ; and this is contrary to every rule : he can, in case of great necessity, use it to mark rhythm. I have used it this way myself, where the mere sense would make it certain that the sentence would be read in a way that was devoid of all rhythm, and I have used a comma or semi-colon so as to give the sentence a chance of being read rightly. Why rhythm should be as important as sense, or perhaps more so, I am 'unable to tell you, for these things lie too deep.
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