ABSTRACT
IMPERATIVE 815 himself anything but the man for a crisis" (Gissing), and the use of a perfect imperative in "Soyez bon, pitoyable, intelligent, ayez souffert mille morts: vous ne sentirez pas la douleur de votre ami qui a mal aux dents" (Rolland). Note also the imperative in the middle of a dependent clause, e.g. "Darwin tells us how little curly worms, only give them time enough, will cover with earth even the larger kind of stones (Birrell) I an Alpine A\Tdanche; which once stir it, will spread (Carlyle) I I thought that, take them all round, I had never seen their equals (Butler).l
This use of what might be called the imaginary imperative Z helps us to explain the fact that some imperatives have become prepositions or conjunctions, e.g. When you feel that, bar accidents, the worst is over (Quiller-Couch) I I am not in the habit of beating women at any time, let alone at a lunch-party (Hope) I Suppose he were to come, what then 1 Dan. Sret han kom, hvad sa. 1
remark that obtrudes itself is that the treatment of this subject has been needlessly complicated by those writers who speak of combinations with auxiliary verbs, e.g. may he come I he may come I if he should come I he would come, as if they were subjunctives of the verb come, or subjunctive equivalents. Scholars would hardly have used these expressions if they had had only the English language to deal with, for it is merely the fact that such combinations in some cases serve to translate simple subjunctives in German or Latin that suggests the use of such terms, exactly as people will call to the boy a dative case. It is equally wrong to speak of bless in God bless you as an optative, while the same form in if he bless you. is called a subjunctive; we should use the term' optative' only where the language concerned has a separate form, as is the case in Greek-but there, of course, the optative is not exclusively an " optative" in the sense just alluded to, i.e. a mood of wish, but has other meanings as well. A precise terminology is a conditio sine qua non if one wants to understand grammatical facts. a
