Before taking in these physical facts one receives
an impression of benignity and amenity not often conveyed, even by the
most distinguished. And, taking advantage of this amiability, I asked if
certain words just used should be followed by a dash, and even boldly
added: "Are you not famous, Mr. James, for the use of dashes?"
"Dash my fame!" he impatiently replied. "And remember, please, that
dogmatizing about punctuation is exactly as foolish as dogmatizing about
any other form of communication with the reader. All such forms depend
on the kind of thing one is doing and the kind of effect one intends to
produce. Dashes, it seems almost platitudinous to say, have their
particular representative virtue, their quickening force, and, to put it
roughly, strike both the familiar and the emphatic note, when those are
the notes required, with a felicity beyond either the comma or the
semicolon; though indeed a fine sense for the semicolon, like any sort
of sense at all for the pluperfect tense and the subjunctive mood, on
which the whole perspective in a sentence may depend, seems anything but
common. Does nobody ever notice the calculated use by French writers of
a short series of suggestive points in the current of their prose? I
confess to a certain shame for my not employing frankly that shade of
indication, a finer shade still than the dash.
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