On Diagramming Sentences -- The Book Page -- June 13, 2022

From Literary Hub today:

Opening one of her most popular, Under Two Flags, at random, this is the first sentence I saw:

Cigarette said not a word, but she took out of some vine-leaves a cold, hard lump of ice, and held it to him; the delicious coolness and freshness in that parching noontide heat stilled the convulsion; his eyes thanked her, though his lips could not; he lay panting, exhausted, but relieved; and she—thoughtfully for her—slid herself down on the floor and began singing low and sweetly as a fairy might sing on the raft of a water-lily leaf.

I didn’t love it. At the same time, she was original! I’d never seen a sentence before with four semicolons and two em-dashes. I wished I were still in Advanced Grammar in college. We brought in sentences to diagram on the board and tried to outdo one another with structural complexity.

I loved it but Ada's Calhoun's assertion bothered me. I assume Ada Calhoun is a serious reader and has "read everything."

If so, how could she say she had never seen a sentence before with four semicolons and two em-dashes?

Well, color me embarrassed. Ada is correct, and I was very, very wrong. LOL.

I would have thought Henry James would have out-ouided Ms Ouida but I was wrong. This Henry James passage has four semicolons but no em-dashes.

The house had a name and a history; the old gentleman taking his tea would have been delighted to tell you these things: how it had been built under Edward the Sixth, had offered a night’s hospitality to the great Elizabeth (whose august person had extended itself upon a huge, magnificent and terribly angular bed which still formed the principal honour of the sleeping apartments), had been a good deal bruised and defaced in Cromwell’s wars, and then, under the Restoration, repaired and much enlarged; and how, finally, after having been remodelled and disfigured in the eighteenth century, it had passed into the careful keeping of a shrewd American banker, who had bought it originally because (owing to circumstances too complicated to set forth) it was offered at a great bargain: bought it with much grumbling at its ugliness, its antiquity, its incommodity, and who now, at the end of twenty years, had become conscious of a real aesthetic passion for it, so that he knew all its points and would tell you just where to stand to see them in combination and just the hour when the shadows of its various protuberances—which fell so softly upon the warm, weary brickwork—were of the right measure. 

That single sentence was the longest sentence in any of Henry James' novels. A single paragraph would run for pages.