and watch the punkah beat the dead air. So, at ten o'clock of the night, I set my walking-stick on end in the middle of the garden, and waited to see how it would fall. It pointed directly down the moonlit road that leads to the City of Dreadful Night. The sound of its fall disturbed a hare. She limped from her form and ran across to a disused Mahomedan burial-ground, where the jawless skulls and rough-butted shank-bones, heartlessly exposed by the July rains, glimmered like mother o' pearl on the rain-channelled soil. The heated air and the heavy earth had driven the very dead upward for coolness' sake. The hare limped on; snuffed curiously at a fragment of a smoke-stained lamp-shard, and died out, in the shadow of a clump of tamarisk trees.

70. Indirect Description. A method of artistic. description that remains to be noted is that in which the writer aims to present a picture, not directly by means of an enumeration of details, but indirectly through the medium of the effect which the object produces upon the observer. This method is sometimes called description by effect though a better name is, perhaps, indirect description. Here details are wholly, or almost wholly, suppressed and the feelings or emotions of the observer dwelt upon in such a way as to induce sympathetic emotions in the reader, thus enabling his imagination to produce the desired picture.

A good illustration of this method may be seen in Fielding's description of the acting of Garrick in Tom Jones, where Partridge is made to exhibit real terror in consequence of the simulated terror of the actor. The following passages, also, illustrate the method:

Outside countless jackals howled incessantly, and as I listened for the first time to that which was to be my lullaby for so many months, I could scarcely believe that I heard the voices of four-footed beasts. It was as though hundreds of ill-fed, ill-housed, half-human babies were weeping and wailing in dismal misery. One could almost believe that the graves had opened, and that the hapless infants of the past were bemoaning their sufferings once more. Is it because the jackal robs the graves of the dead that his note is so weird and ghoul-like? 1

At the beginning, while gazing south, east, west, to the rim of the world, all laughed, shouted, interchanged the quick delight of new impressions! every face was radiant. Now all look serious; none speak. The first physical joy of finding oneself on this point in violet air, exalted above the hills, soon yields to other emotions inspired by the mighty vision and the colossal peace of the heights. Dominating all, I think, is the consciousness of the awful antiquity of what one is looking upon; such a sensation, perhaps, as of old found utterance in that tremendous question of the Book of Job!— “Wast thou brought forth before the hills?" And the blue multitude of the peaks, the perpetual congregation of the morns, seem to chorus in the vast resplendence, telling of Nature's eternal youth, and the passionless permanence of that about us and beyond us and beneath, - until something like the fullness of a great grief begins to weigh at the heart. For all this astonishment of beauty, all this majesty of light and form and

color, will surely endure, marvellous as now, - after we

shall have lain down to sleep where no dreams come, and may never arise from the dust of our rest to look upon it.2

2 View from the summit of Mont Pelée; Lafcadio Hearn, Two Years in the French West Indies, p. 293.

71. Vividness in description. In descriptive writing, especially of the artistic kind, vividness is an essential quality. Here, it must be remembered, the aim is to make the reader see things without giving him anything in the way of visual stimulus. His imagination must be left to do the work of picture forming without any assistance from the senses. Obviously, he is at a great disadvantage as compared with the writer. He cannot hope to have as clear an impression of the object described as the writer himself had, for he has not the object before him. He is trying to see the thing at second hand, as it were, and that he may get a clear impression of it, his imagination must be stimulated by all the devices at the writer's command.

One of the devices most frequently used for the sake of vividness is the comparison of the object to be described to something obviously very familiar to the reader. In descriptions of landscapes, this often takes the form of a sketch or outline which follows the lines of some well-known figure. Thoreau, for example, compares Cape Cod to a bare and bended

arm:

Cape Cod is the bared and bended arm of Massachusetts! the shoulder is at Buzzard's Bay; the elbow, or crazy-bone, at Cape Mallebarre; the wrist at Truro; and the sandy fist at Provincetown, behind which the State stands on her guard, with her back to the Green Mountains, and her feet planted on the floor of the ocean, like an athlete protecting her Bay, - boxing with northeast storms, and, ever and anon, heaving

- ready to

up her Atlantic adversary from the lap of earth, thrust forward her other fist, which keeps guard the while upon her breast at Cape Ann.1

In like manner, Stevenson compares the Bay of Monterey to a bent fishing-hook:

The Bay of Monterey has been compared by no less a person than General Sherman to a bent fishing-hook; and the comparison, if less important than the march through Georgia, still shows the eye of a soldier for topography. Santa Cruz sits exposed at the shank; the mouth of the Salinas river is at the middle of the bend; and Monterey itself is cozily ensconced beside the barb. Thus the ancient capital of California faces across the bay, while the Pacific Ocean, though hidden by low hills and forest, bombards her left flank and rear with never-dying surf. In front of the town, the long line of seabeach trends north and northwest, and then westward to enclose the bay.2

To contrast one thing with another is also a device frequently used for the attainment of vividness. For example:

Rosamund and Mary had been talking faster than their male friends. They did not think of sitting down, but stood at the toilette-table near the window while Rosamund took off her hat, adjusted her veil, and applied little touches of her finger-tips to her hair hair of infantine fairness, neither flaxen nor yellow. Mary Garth seemed all the plainer standing at an angle between the two nymphs the one in the glass, and the one out of it, who looked at each other with eyes of heavenly blue, deep enough to hold the most exquisite mean1 Cape Cod.

2 Across the Plains.

ings an ingenious beholder could put into them, and deep enough to hide the meanings of the owner if these should happen to be less exquisite. Only a few children in Middlemarch looked blonde by the side of Rosamund, and the slim figure displayed by her riding-habit had delicate undulations. In fact, most men in Middlemarch, except her brothers, held that Miss Vincy was the best girl in the world, and some called her an angel. Mary Garth, on the contrary, had the aspect of an ordinary sinner! she was brown; her curly dark hair was rough and stubborn; her stature was low; and it would not be true to declare, in satisfactory antithesis, that she had all the virtues.1

Whatever device to secure vividness the descriptive writer uses, however, he will need to be particular as to the choice of his words. The word that most nearly corresponds to the thing, that best brings out what is characteristic in it, is the word to be used; and the writer must make it his business, if possible, to find that word. Vague, inexact, or inappropriate diction is fatal to effectiveness in description. The expressive verb, the apt figure, the picturesque epithet, these are the things that count.

Note the suggestiveness of the italicized words and phrases in the following:

The design upon that fan represented only the white rushing burst of one great wave on a beach, and sea-birds shooting in exultation through the blue overhead. But to behold it was worth all the trouble of the journey. It was a glory of light, a thunder of motion, a triumph of sea-wind, all in one.1 1 George Eliot, Middlemarch.

1 Lafcadio Hearn, Out of the East, pp. 1, 2.