CHAPTER VI

PAUSE AND POWER

The true business of the literary artist is to plait or weave
his meaning, involving it around itself; so that each sentence,
by successive phrases, shall first come into a kind of knot, and
then, after a moment of suspended meaning, solve and clear
itself.

--GEORGE SAINTSBURY, on _English Prose Style_, in _Miscellaneous
Essays_.


... pause ... has a distinctive value, expressed in silence; in
other words, while the voice is waiting, the music of the
movement is going on ... To manage it, with its delicacies and
compensations, requires that same fineness of ear on which we
must depend for all faultless prose rhythm. When there is no
compensation, when the pause is inadvertent ... there is a sense
of jolting and lack, as if some pin or fastening had fallen out.

--JOHN FRANKLIN GENUNG, _The Working Principles of Rhetoric_.


Pause, in public speech, is not mere silence--it is silence made
designedly eloquent.

When a man says: "I-uh-it is with profound-ah-pleasure that-er-I have