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CHAPTER IV

ANALYSIS

SUPPOSE that the president of a railroad asked you to report on the feasibility of a proposed line through a range of hills; or that you found it necessary to prove to an overconservative farmer that he should erect a hollow-tile silo at once; or that your duty as chairman of the town playground committee led you to examine an empty lot for its possibilities; or that, as an expert in finance, you were trying to learn the cause of the deficit in a country club's accounts. In the first case you would examine the proposed route for its practicability, would estimate the grades to be reduced, would look into the question of drainage, would consider the possibility of landslides, would survey the quality of the road-bed: all with a view to making a complete report on the practicability of the route proposed. In the other cases you would determine the conditions in general that you confronted, would answer the questions: what is the value of a hollow-tile silo? why is this site suitable for a playground? what is wrong with the finances of this club? Such tasks as these occur in life all the time; in college they confront one whenever an inconsiderate instructor asks for a term paper on, say, "Conditions in New York that Made the Tweed Ring Possible," or "The Influence of the Great War on Dyestuffs," or "Tennyson's Early Training as an Influence on his Poetry," or some other subject. In every one of these cases the writer who attempts to answer the questions involved is writing analysis, for Analysis is the breaking up of a subject into its component parts, seeing of what it is composed.

In every such case you would wish, first of all, to tell the

truth. Of what use would your analysis be if you incorrectly estimated the drainage of the proposed railway route and the company had to expend thousands of dollars in fighting improper seepage? Unless the analysis was accurate, it would be useless or worse. But suppose that you told the truth about the site for the playground, its central position, its wealth of shade, its proper soil conditions, and yet forgot to take into account the sluggish, noisome stream that flowed on one side of the plot and bred disease? Your report would be valueless because it would be, in a vital point, quite lacking. In other words, it would be incomplete. For practical purposes it would therefore, of course, be untrue.

If you wish to write an analysis, then, your path is straight, and it leads between the two virtues of truth and thoroughness. Your catechism should be: Have I hugged my fact close and told the truth about it?, and, Have I really covered the ground?

The question of truth enters into every analysis; none may falsify. Completeness, on the other hand, is a more relative matter. In the report of a tariff commission it is essential; all the ground must be covered. In a thorough survey of Beethoven's music no sonata or quartette may be omitted. In determining the causes of an epidemic no clue is to be left unexamined until all possibilities have been exhausted. In the case of the term paper mentioned above, on the other hand, "Tennyson's Early Training as an Influence on his Poetry," not everything in his early life can be considered in anything short of a volume. In such a case you may well be puzzled what to do until you are suddenly cheered by the thought that your task is primarily one of interpretation, that what you are seeking is the spirit of the training. There would seem, therefore, to be various degrees of completeness in analysis. On the basis of completeness, then, we may divide analysis into the two classes of the Formal and the Informal.

The Two Classes of Analysis

Formal analysis is sometimes called logical analysis that is, complete, as in the report of a tariff commission because it continues its splitting into subheadings until the demands of the thought are entirely satisfied. Such thorough meeting of all demands might well occur in an analysis of trades-unions, or methods of heating houses, or such subjects. Informal analysis, on the other hand, which is sometimes called literary analysis, does not attempt to be so thorough, but aims rather at giving the core of the subject, at making the spirit of it clear to the reader. For example, Mr. P. E. More in an essay on Tennyson, which is primarily an informal analysis, makes one main point, that "Tennyson was the Victorian Age." This he divides into three headings: (1) Tennyson was humanly loved by the great Victorians; (2) Tennyson was the poet of compromise; (3) Tennyson was the poet of insight. Now in these three points Mr. More has not said all that he could say, in fact he has omitted many things that from some angle would be important, but he has said those things truthfully that are needed for a proper interpretation of the subject, for a sufficient illumination of it, for showing its spirit. It is, therefore, a piece of informal analysis.

The two examples which follow illustrate formal and informal analysis, the first one classifying rock drills thoroughly, and the second very informally discussing some odds against Shakespeare.

Hammer drills may be classed under several heads, as follows: (1) Those mounted on a cradle like a piston drill and fed forward by a screw; (2) those used and held in the hand; and (3) those used and mounted on an air-fed arrangement. The last two

classes are often interchangeable.

Mr. Leyner, though now making drills of the latter classes, was the pioneer of the large 3-inch diameter piston machine to be

worked in competition with large piston drills. The smaller Leyner Rock Terrier drill was brought out for stopping and driving; it could not, apparently, compete with machines of other classes.

When the drills are thus divided we have:

1. Cradle drills - Leyner, Leyner Rock Terrier, Stephens Imperial hammer drills and the Kimber.

Gordon drill and the large

2. Drills used only with air feed sizes of the Murphy, Little Wonder, and others.

Murphy,

3. Drills used held in the hand or with air feed Flottman, Cleveland, Little Wonder, Shaw, Hardy Nipper, Sinclair, Sullivan, Little Jap, Little Imp, Traylor, and others. Again, they may be divided into those that are valveless, with the differential piston or hammer itself acting as a valve. The Murphy, Sinclair, Little Wonder, Shaw, Little Imp, Leyner Rock Terrier, and Kimber drills belong to this class. The large Leyner drill is worked by a spool valve resembling that of the Slugger drill; the Flottman by a ball valve; the Little Jap by an axial valve; the Gordon drill, by a spool valve set at one end of the cylinder at right angles to it; the Waugh and Sullivan drills by spool valves set in the same axial line as the cylinder; the Hardy Nipper, and the Stephens Imperial hammer drills by an air-moved slide-valve set midway on the side of the cylinder; the Cleveland by a spool set towards the rear of the cylinder.

They may again be divided into those drills in which the piston hammer delivers its blow on the end of the steel itself. A collar is placed on the drill to prevent its entering the cylinder. The other class has an anvil block or striking pin. This anvil block fits into the end of the cylinder between the piston and the steel. It receives and transmits the blow, and also prevents the drill end from entering the cylinder.1

Powerful among the enemies of Shakespeare are the commentator and the elocutionist; the commentator because, not knowing Shakespeare's language, he sharpens his faculties to examine propositions advanced by an eminent lecturer from the Midlands, in

1 Eustace M. Weston: Rock Drills. By courtesy of the publishers, McGraw-Hill Publishing Company. Copyright.

stead of sensitizing his artistic faculty to receive the impression of moods and inflexions of being conveyed by word-music; the elocutionist because he is a born fool, in which capacity, observing with pain that poets have a weakness for imparting to their dramatic dialog a quality which he describes and deplores as "sing-song," he devotes his life to the art of breaking up verse in such a way as to make it sound like insanely pompous prose. The effect of this on Shakespeare's earlier verse, which is full of the naïve delight of pure oscillation, to be enjoyed as an Italian enjoys a barcarolle, or a child a swing, or a baby a rocking-cradle, is destructively stupid. In the later plays, where the barcarolle measure has evolved into much more varied and complex rhythms, it does not matter so much, since the work is no longer simple enough for a fool to pick to pieces. But in every play from Love's Labour's Lost to Henry V, the elocutionist meddles simply as a murderer, and ought to be dealt with as such without benefit of clergy. To our young people studying for the stage I say, with all solemnity, learn how to pronounce the English alphabet clearly and beautifully from some person who is at once an artist and a phonetic expert. And then leave blank verse patiently alone until you have experienced emotion deep enough to crave for poetic expression, at which point verse will seem an absolutely natural and real form of speech to you. Meanwhile, if any pedant, with an uncultivated heart and a theoretic ear, proposes to teach you to recite, send instantly for the police.1

Analyses are to be divided also upon the basis of whether the subject is an individual or a group of individuals, that is, whether the subject is, for example, the quality of patriotism, which is to be analyzed into its components, or, in the second place, shade trees, which are to be grouped into the classes which together constitute such trees. Of these two kinds of analysis we call the first Partition and the second Classification. The logical process is the same in the two cases, in that it divides the subject; the difference lies in the fact that in the first case the subject is always single,

1 George Bernard Shaw: Dramatic Opinions and Essays. Archibald Constable & Co., Ltd., London, publishers.

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