Put into simple sentences, it would be like this: The [220] dance was at an end. Ichabod was attracted to a knot of folks. The folks were older. They sat at the end of the piazza. Old Van Tassel was with them. They were smoking, etc.
In such sentences, nothing is emphatic; it is all alike. In Irving’s sentences, where ideas are reduced to clause, phrase, even a word, there is no question about what is important and what is unimportant. He has secured an exquisite emphasis by a discriminating subdual of subordinate ideas.
This brings up the sentences by Kipling already quoted on page [201]. The author has used three independent sentences. They can be written as one, thus: The reason of her wandering was simple enough; for Coppy, in a tone of too-hastily-assumed authority, had told her over night that she must not ride out by the river, and she had gone to prove her own spirit and teach Coppy a lesson.
There is a reason, however, why Kipling wished that last sentence to stand alone. Subordinated as it is here rewritten, it does not half express the spiteful independence she assumed to teach Coppy a lesson. It needs the independent construction. Just as surely as Kipling is right in putting the reasons into two sharp, independent sentences, is Irving right when he puts the reason in the following sentence into a subordinate clause. It is not important enough to deserve a sentence all by itself.
“He was, moreover, esteemed by the women as a man of great erudition, for he had read several books quite through, and was a perfect master of Cotton Mather’s ‘History of New England Witchcraft,’ in which, by the way, he most firmly and potently believed.”
In the following sentence the effect of subordination is unmistakable:—
[221] “He had a name in the village for brutally misusing the ass; yet it is certain that he shed a tear which made a clean mark down one cheek.”
Now read it again:—
“He had a name in the village for brutally misusing the ass; yet it is certain that he shed a tear, and the tear made a clean mark down one cheek.”
The last clause has burst away from its former submission, and in its independence has made the most important announcement of the sentence,—the witty climax. Emphasis is, to a large degree, a matter of position, but position cannot emancipate any clause from the thralldom of subordination. To emphasize one idea, subordinate ancillary ideas; make them take their proper rank in the sentence. Reduce them to a clause or to a phrase; and if a word justly expresses the relative importance of the thought, reduce its expression to a single word.