ment. The good man, he was now getting old, towards sixty perhaps; and gave you the idea of a life that had been full of sufferings; a life heavy-laden, half-vanquished, still swimming painfully in seas of manifold physical and other bewilderment. Brow and head were round, and of massive weight, but the face was flabby and irresolute. The deep eyes, of a light hazel, were as full of sorrow as of inspiration; confused pain looked mildly from them, as in a kind of mild astonishThe whole figure and air, good and amiable otherwise, might be called flabby and irresolute; expressive of weakness under possibility of strength. He hung loosely on his limbs, with knees bent, and stooping attitude; in walking, he rather shuffled than decisively stept; and a lady once remarked, he could never fix which side of the garden walk would suit him best, but continually shifted, in corkscrew fashion, and kept trying both. A heavy-laden, high-aspiring and surely muchsuffering man. His voice, naturally soft and good, had contracted itself into a plaintive snuffle and sing-song; he spoke as if preaching, you would have said, preaching earnestly and also hopelessly the weightiest things.1 - EXERCISES 1. Analyze Stevenson's descriptive method in An Inland Voyage, taking into account (a) selection and grouping of details, (b) ways of indicating the point of view, (c) movement, and (d) vividness. 2. Cite a passage from some narrative where the descriptive method is used for the purpose of reviewing a series of events. SUGGESTED SUBJECTS FOR THEMES 1. A village loafer. 2. A twilight scene. 3. Birds that stay with us all winter. 1 Carlyle's picture of Coleridge: Life of Sterling. 4. A busy street. 5. A country post-office at mail-time. 6. An accident. 7. A runaway. 8. School days. 9. A ramble through the woods. 10. A fire. II. The pleasures of gardening. 12. Hobbies. 13. A peep at the moon through a telescope. 14. A Roman house. 15. Midsummer on a prairie farm. 16. Ranching in the West. 17. A California fruit farm. 18. An apple orchard in blossom. 19. A balloon ascension. 20. A street scene from the top of a modern sky-scraper. 21. Newspaper cartoons. 22. A typical newsboy. 23. A visit to the slums. 24. A trip to the mountains. 25. A winter trip to Cuba. 26. My favorite poem. 27. The treatment of nature in Bryant's poetry. 28. A study of the character of Richard III in Shake speare's play of the same name. 29. The descriptive element in Hawthorne's Marble Faun. 30. The humor of Charles Dickens. 31. The characterization in Tennyson's Idylls of the King. 32. Poe's use of description in the short story as compared with that of Hawthorne. CHAPTER VIII NARRATION 72. Definition. - Broadly speaking, narration may be defined as that kind of composition in which the main purpose is to recount a series of events. Ordinarily, this recounting is done in such a way as to make of the series of events recorded a definite unit having a distinct beginning and a distinct conclusion. In chronicling, however, or narration of the crudest kind, this is not always so. Here, little or no effort is made to relate the events to each other. The interest is expected to be centered in the events themselves, and not in any connected series. Each event is mentioned for its own sake, and no one would lose much of its value were it detached from the others. A passage from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle will illustrate the point: 851. In this year Ceorl the alderman with the men of Devonshire fought against the heathen at Wicganborough, and there slew a great many and obtained the victory. In this same year King Aethelstan and Earl Ealchere defeated a great army at Sandwich in Kent, and captured nine ships and put the others to flight. This was the first year that the heathen remained (in England) over winter. In this same year also, there came to the mouth of the Thames 350 ships, and they stormed Canterbury and London, and put to flight Beorhtwulf, king of the Mercians, with his army. Then went they south into Surrey, and at Actea King Aethelwulf and his son Aethelbald with the army of the West Saxons fought against them and obtained the victory; and in that battle there was the greatest slaughter among the heathen invaders of which we have ever heard unto this day. Narration of this kind is crude in the extreme, so crude, indeed, that it is scarcely to be regarded as narration at all. It centers the interest not in the whole, but in the parts; and it makes no attempt to unify the parts. In narration proper, however, the events are always unified, and the main interest is centered in the whole rather than in the parts. That is to say, the incidents or events enter into the narration, not merely because they possess an interest in and for themselves, but because they have a bearing upon other incidents or events mentioned in the series and upon the central idea which the whole is to embody. The difference between narration of this kind and mere chronicling will become evident if one compares, for example, the following fable with the extract from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle given above: The frogs, living an easy, free sort of life among the lakes and ponds, once prayed Jupiter to send them a king. Jupiter, being then in a merry mood, threw them a log, saying as he did so, "There, then, is a king for you." Awed by the splash, the frogs watched their king in fear and trembling, till at last, encouraged by his stillness, one more daring than the rest jumped upon the shoulder of his monarch. Soon, many others followed his example, and made merry on the back of their unresisting king. Speedily tiring of such a torpid ruler, they again petitioned Jupiter, and asked him to send them something more like a king. This time he sent them a stork, who tossed them about and gobbled them up without mercy. They lost no time, therefore, in beseeching the god to give them again their former state. "No, no," replied he; "a king that did you no harm did not please you. Make the best of the one you have, or you may chance to get a worse one in his place." 73. Relation to other forms of composition. Narration, like description, is seldom found pure and simple. It may, in fact, be used with all other kinds of composition; but its most usual accompaniment is description. It might, indeed, almost be regarded as dependent upon description. Events must happen in some definite place and must concern some definite characters; and both places and characters are ordinarily presented to the reader by means of description. Hence, whenever the writer finds it necessary to drop his story and dwell upon the scenes wherein the events take place or upon the characters concerned in the action, description must be brought in as an aid to narration. Narration is, of course, extremely common. It may, indeed, be said to be, as Stevenson remarks, "the typical mood of literature." No other form is older, and no other form is more often used. No other form, moreover, has such a hold upon man's interest. For some reason or other, we are more interested in what men do than in what they say or |