is murdered in a single sudden sentence:
"The long, skewerlike dagger flashed and fell." But, later on in the
story, it takes the hero a whole paragraph, containing no less than
three hundred words, to mount the four-and-twenty steps to the first
floor of the house. In the following passage from "The Masque of the
Red Death," notice how much of the effect is due to imitative movement
in the narrative:--

"But from a certain nameless awe with which the mad assumptions of the
mummer had inspired the whole party there were found none who put
forth hand to seize him; so that, unimpeded, he passed within a yard
of the Prince's person; and, while the vast assembly, as if with one
impulse, shrank from the centres of the rooms to the walls, he made
his way uninterruptedly, but with the same solemn and measured step
which had distinguished him from the first, through the blue chamber
to the purple--through the purple to the green--through the green to
the orange--through this again to the white--and even thence to the
violet, ere a decided movement had been made to arrest him. It was
then, however, that the Prince Prospero, maddening with rage and the
shame of his own momentary cowardice, rushed hurriedly through the six
chambers, while none followed him on account of a deadly terror that
had seized upon all." The spectre and the Prince pass successively
through the same series of rooms; but it takes the former fifty-one
words to cover the distance, whereas it takes the latter only six.

In every story that is artistically fashioned, the methods of emphasis
enumerated in this chapter will be found to be continually applied.
Its essential features will be rendered prominent by position
(terminal or initial), by pause, by proportion (direct or inverse), by
iteration or parallelism, by antithesis, by climax, by surprise, by
suspense, by imitative movement, or by a combination of any or all of
these. The necessity of emphasis is ever present; the means of
emphasis are simple; and any writer of narrative who knows his art
will endeavor to employ them always to the best advantage.

REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. What reasons account for the importance of the principle of
emphasis in art?

2. Imagine a fictitious event of sufficient complexity; select the one
detail that seems to be the most essential; and then write eleven
distinct themes, narrating this same incident, and emphasizing this
detail successively, 1. By Terminal Po