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characteristics, but as unique objects, and by individual characteristics. In this respect description is the contrast to exposition, as will be more fully explained later. The significance of this distinction here is, that description, as soon as the object's class is named, leaves thought of this, and seeks to give the traits, not wherein the object is like others, but wherein it is different, wherein it is individually impressive.

3. The range of objects amenable to description is so great as to include not only objects of sense, as persons and things, which are adapted to portrayal, but spiritual objects, as for instance character, states of mind, and the like, which contain little or no pictorial suggestiveness. This fact makes it important, especially in the case of the latter class of objects, to know what style or treatment is most realizable, most like portrayal.

In following out the requirements of this definition we encounter difficulties of a peculiar kind, which make it necessary in description to rely not only on its intrinsic principles, but equally on various accessories of description. To these two subjects the chapter is mainly devoted.

I. THE UNDERLYING PRINCIPLES.

The distinguishing principles of description rise from its analogy to the picturing idea. A picture produces its effect as a whole, and produces it at once. Toward a like end description aims, so far as its somewhat intractable material will allow. Accordingly its theme, or working-idea, is not formulated but diffused through the course and details of the whole 1; its logical framework, or plan, appears as little like a framework, as much like a vital unity, as possible; its texture of amplification works to a homogeneous scale and colorscheme, in the effort after a self-consistent sum of impression. 1 For the descriptive theme, see above, p. 426.

Thus from beginning to end the construction lines of the composition, though present, are hidden and unobtrusive, being fused, as it were, in the glow and spirit of the portrayal.

I.

Problems of Material and Handling. The difficulties of description are such as rise from making some beautiful thing out of unplastic material and with an unwieldy working-tool. The working-tool is language, employed to do what more naturally belongs to the brush or the chisel. The material is just the multitude of parts and details that we are aware of in contemplating any object. In the object as observed all these, great and small, are in perfect union and relation; but when it comes to making a word-picture, they have to be taken up one by one and so named or insinuated as to create a realizable image in the reader's imagination.' It is evident that to do this efficiently requires no small skill; it is in fact one of the acknowledged triumphs of literature. Two of the hardest problems that confront us in this kind of work may here be mentioned.

1. The Problem of Selection. This problem presents difficulty on two sides. On the one hand, the number of details belonging to any object, all seeming to clamor for recognition, is very great. On the other hand, to enumerate more than a very limited number crowds and confuses, not vivifies, the portrayal. It is as imperative, then, that the writer omit or suppress details as that he express them; he must know what aids the life of his picture, what clogs and stifles it. As regards copiousness of selection, then, a safe rule is,

1 "Marble, paint, and language, the pen, the needle, and the brush, all have their grossnesses, their ineffable impotences, their hours, if I may so express myself, of insubordination. It is the work and it is a great part of the delight of any artist to contend with these unruly tools, and now by brute energy, now by witty expedient, to drive and coax them to effect his will," - STEVENSON, A Note on Realism, Works, Vol. xxii, p. 270.

choose the smallest number of details that will adequately present your design; but see that they make up in importance and character-giving quality for what they sacrifice in number. To this end they should be chosen with reference to their power on the imagination; if you cannot tell the whole, tell that most outstanding and distinctive thing which is likeliest to make the reader think the whole.

2. The Problem of Total Effect. This problem rises from the fact that the describing must take time, must give details of the object in succession, while the object itself, being at rest, must produce its impression all at once. This is the disadvantage of language as a picturing medium; it has to go on continually to new things, and yet the things it has left must, for the integrity of the picture, remain as vivid as ever.1

To meet this difficulty, it is essential that the description be modelled on a well-marked basis of structure; there must be, so worded as to concentrate attention, a core or framework of description, to which, as he goes along, the reader's memory and imagination may continually refer, thus building a body of details around it. In this way the character or scheme of the portrayal may give interrelation to the details, so that they may be realized together.

1 "How do we obtain a clear idea of a thing in space? First we observe its separate parts, then the union of these parts, and finally the whole. Our senses perform these various operations with such amazing rapidity as to make them seem but one. This rapidity is absolutely essential to our obtaining an idea of the whole, which is nothing more than the result of the conception of the parts and of their connection with each other. Suppose now that the poet should lead us in proper order from one part of the object to the other; suppose he should succeed in making the connection of these parts perfectly clear to us; how much time will he have consumed?

"The details, which the eye takes in at a glance, he enumerates slowly one by one, and it often happens that, by the time he has brought us to the last, we have forgotten the first. Yet from these details we are to form a picture. When we look at an object the various parts are always present to the eye. It can run over them again and again. The ear, however, loses the details it has heard, unless memory retain them. And if they be so retained, what pains and effort it costs to recall their impressions in the proper order and with even the moderate degree of rapidity necessary to the obtaining of a tolerable idea of the whole."— LESSING, Laocoon, p. 102.

Mechanism of Description.

II.

However disguised, and however variously proportioned, there must be a mechanical element, a matter-of-fact structure, underlying any portrayal; it must be there, to work its purpose and be felt, whether the reader consciously analyzes it or not. The following are its cardinal stages.

Before the description

1. Determining the Point of View. is begun, the writer must have determined in his mind from what point the object is to be contemplated; and to this imagined point he must hold throughout, or at least not shift it without due warning. On this point of view depends the scale of the description. A river fifteen rods away would not have been described as "like a silver thread running through the landscape," if the writer had been mindful where he was standing. The distance, near or remote, regulates the number and minuteness of details, the masses of color, shading, and the like; the relative position to the object regulates its shape and perspective, and in general the impression it makes. The whole composition is articulated and balanced by the point of view.

EXAMPLES. 1. The description of the continent of Europe, quoted from Ruskin on pp. 168, 169, above, is very careful in its choice of point of view. The writer wishes first to describe very general features of scenery, mountain ranges, and vegetation, such features as a bird would see; so, having mentioned the stork and swallow, he says: "Let us, for a moment, try to raise ourselves even above the level of their flight, and imagine the Mediterranean lying beneath us like an irregular lake," etc. Turn to the description, and see what kind and scale of details this point of view makes visible. Having thus traversed the continent from south to north, he then proposes a nearer point of view: “And having once traversed in thought this gradation of the zoned iris of the earth in all its material vastness, let us go down nearer to it, and watch the parallel change in the belt of animal life," etc. This enables him to describe the animals, the men, and the works of men, as he is in imagination near enough to see the more particular details.

2. In the following, Stevenson 1 chooses not only a point of literal view, but a time in his life and a time in the season of the year, to describe a certain river. Observe how each point influences the description:

"I have named, among many rivers that make music in my memory, that dirty Water of Leith. Often and often I desire to look upon it again ; and the choice of a point of view is easy to me. It should be at a certain water-door, embowered in shrubbery. The river is there dammed back for the service of the flour-mill just below, so that it lies deep and darkling, and the sand slopes into brown obscurity with a glint of gold; and it has but newly been recruited by the borrowings of the snuff-mill just above, and these, tumbling merrily in, shake the pool to its black heart, fill it with drowsy eddies, and set the curded froth of many other mills solemnly steering to and fro upon the surface. Or so it was when I was young; for change, and the masons, and the pruning-knife, have been busy; and if I could hope to repeat a cherished experience, it must be on many and impossible conditions. I must choose, as well as the point of view, a certain moment in my growth, so that the scale may be exaggerated, and the trees on the steep opposite side may seem to climb to heaven, and the sand by the water-door, where I am standing, seem as low as Styx. And I must choose the season also, so that the valley may be brimmed like a cup with sunshine and the songs of birds; - and the year of grace, so that when I turn to leave the riverside I may find the old manse and its inhabitants unchanged."

It is not always necessary that the point of view be explicitly mentioned. What is of more importance than the mention, is that the details should be so graduated to one point of view that the reader may instinctively feel his position with reference to the object. It is, after all, in this medium of portrayal, not a point of view but a point of thought, from which, according to the data supplied, the reader has to imagine a self-consistent picture.

NOTE. - In the following, notice how the whole impression, with its scale and appearance of details, is determined by the observer's position, assumed casually as a point of view:

"The little square that surrounds it [the cathedral of Chartres] is deplorably narrow, and you flatten your back against the opposite houses in the

1 Memories and Portraits, Works, Vol. xiii, p. 241.

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