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recalls, not by a labored history. The only resource for them is to work for brevity, and to work in the concrete and visible, - which is virtually another way of saying portrayal without detail.1

II.

ACCESSORIES OF DESCRIPTION.

In spite of all care in selection and grouping, description remains the kind of discourse most liable to be tedious, on account of the difficulty of managing a multitude of loosely connected details. Some ways of subduing this intractable material we have just noticed. The same need of subdual it is that gives importance to the accessories of description, which, though auxiliary, belong to the essential working-tools of the art.

Continuing the analogy of the painting art, we may say that while the mechanism of description supplies the drawing, the perspective, the composition, the accessories of description are resorted to for that coloring in which reside the life and finish of the work. We may classify these accessories under three somewhat comprehensive heads.

I.

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Avails of Imaginative Diction. That descriptive language is heightened language, because imagination is in it grasping spontaneously after all the picturing power of which language is capable, has been abundantly intimated in the part of our book relating to diction." The presence of this imaginative

1 "A few words will often paint the precise state of emotion as faithfully as the most voluminous essay; and in this department condensation and brevity are to be carefully studied. Conduct us to the cavern, light the torch, and startle and awe us by what you reveal, but if you keep us all day in the cavern, the effect is lost, and our only feeling is that of impatience and desire to get away.”. BULWER-LYTTON,

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On Art in Fiction, Pamphlets and Sketches, p. 343.

2 For elevated diction and its motive, see p. 140, above; for approach of prose to poetry, p. 163; for the imaginative type of prose diction, p. 168; for descriptive terms as aid to vigorous condensation, p. 296.

element, in fact, produces a type of prose distinctly approaching, in word and imagery, to poetry. Of this, however, nothing further need be said here; except to mention and exemplify some of the practical ways in which peculiarities of diction may aid the mechanism of description.

Graphic Uses of Figures. Figurative language has of course its beautifying uses as it works in with the general heightened tissue of description; but more deeply than this, as the word graphic is here used to express, it renders practical support to the drawing and body of the portrayal. Let us trace this in

a few prominent cases.

1. Simile is especially a practical figure; it is much employed in making the nucleus of description, to give an outline for succeeding amplification; also where the description stops with the nucleus.

EXAMPLES. -I. The following similes (here italicized) illustrate Carlyle's care in constructing a realizable basis for an extended description of a country:

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Schlesien, what we call Silesia, lies in elliptic shape, spread on the top of Europe, partly girt with mountains, like the crown or crest to that part of the Earth;-highest table-land of Germany or of the Cisalpine Countries; and sending rivers into all the seas. . . . It leans sloping, as we hinted, to the East and to the North; a long curved buttress of mountains ('Riesengebirge, Giant Mountains,' is their best-known name in foreign countries) holding it up on the South and West sides. This Giant-Mountain Range. shapes itself like a bill-hook (or elliptically, as was said): handle and hook together may be some 200 miles in length. pretty Ellipsis, or irregular Oval, on the summit of the European Continent; like the palm of a left-hand well stretched-out, with the Riesengebirge for thumb!' said a certain Herr to me, stretching out his arm in that fashion towards the northwest. Palm, well stretched-out, measuring 250 miles; and the cross-way 100."1

...

A very

2. The following, from the description of Rab, condenses the successive qualities into a series of comparisons: "He was brindled and grey, like Rubislaw granite; his hair short, hard, and close, like a lion's; his body

1 CARLYLE, Frederick the Great, Vol. iv, pp. 1-3.

thick-set like a little bull -a sort of compressed Hercules of a dog."1 The comparisons are partly literal, partly figurative.

2. Metaphor and personification are valuable for the suggested action and human interest that they impart to an object or scene otherwise inert. The need of such enlivening is inherent in descriptive objects, a part of their native untowardness.2

EXAMPLE. In the following, which describes the taking away of a long venerated bell, the ascribing of life to the bell intensifies the description to a poignant pathos:

"And there before our eyes, obeying the order of the Commissioners, the workmen were taking that bell away forever-because the Comtat was a part of France again, and the power of the Popes over Avignon was gone!

"In the dead silence we could hear the clicking of pincers and the tapping of hammers and the grating of files; and then a single sharp sweet clang which must have come when the bell, cut loose from its fastenings, was lifted away. Having it thus free from the setting where it had rested for so long a while, the workmen brought it to the battlements; and in plain sight of all of us, down the whole great depth of the Palace walls, lowered it by a cord to the ground. And the poor little bell, glittering like a jewel in the sunshine, tinkled faintly and mournfully at every jar and jerk of the cord as though it knew that its end had come: now giving out, as it swayed and the clapper struck within, a sweet clear sound; and again, as it jarred against the wall, a sound so harsh and so sad that to hear it cut one's heart. All the way down those great walls it uttered thus its sad little plaint; until we seemed to feel as though it were a child some one was hurting; as though it were a living soul. And I know that the pain that was in my heart was in the hearts of all that crowd. The silence, save for the mourning of the bell, was so deep that one could have heard the flight of a butterfly—and through it, now and then, would come from some one a growling whisper: 'Liberty and the Rights of Man are all very well, but they might have left our little bell alone!' " 8

1 BROWN, Rab and his Friends, in Spare Hours, Vol. i, p. 30. There is a very interesting analysis of this description, BURTON, Yale Lectures, pp. 110-112.

2 See above, p. 479. The use of narrative action is closely akin to this in object; see below, p. 503.

8 GRAS, The Reds of the Midi, p. 76.

3. Antithesis, in its broader sense of contrast between situations or between appearance and reality, is valuable for accentuating what is distinctive or centrally significant in a complex object of description.' It is an effective instrument in portraying such objects as character and scenes of mental or moral significance, being a means of both pointedness and interpretation.

EXAMPLES.. The antithetic nucleus or basis for Green's description of Queen Elizabeth's character has already been given on p. 484.

The following owes its depth of pathos and moral sentiment entirely to its contrasted scenes: "There was a certain elderly gentleman who lived in a court of the Temple, and was a great judge and lover of port wine. Every day, he dined at his club and drank his bottle or two of port wine, and every night came home to the Temple and went to bed in his lonely chambers. This had gone on many years without variation, when one night he had a fit on coming home, and fell and cut his head deep, but partly recovered and groped about in the dark to find the door. When he was afterwards discovered, dead, it was clearly established by the marks of his hands about the room that he must have done so. Now, this chanced on the night of Christmas Eve, and over him lived a young fellow who had sisters and young country-friends, and who gave them a little party that night, in the course of which they played at Blindman's Buff. They played that game, for their greater sport, by the light of the fire only; and once when they were all quietly rustling and stealing about, and the blindman was trying to pick out the prettiest sister (for which I am far from blaming him), somebody cried, ‘Hark! The man below must be playing Blindman's Buff by himself to-night!' They listened, and they heard sounds of some one falling about and stumbling against furniture, and they all laughed at the conceit, and went on with their play, more light-hearted and merry than ever. Thus, those two so different games of life and death were played out together, blindfold, in the two sets of chambers." 2

4. Hyperbole is used, often in a humorous vein, to make some one quality strike the reader's realizing power before all others. It rouses in a vivid manner the spirit in which the object is to be most truly viewed.3

1 For antithesis in general, see above, p. 271; in exposition, p. 566, below.

2 DICKENS, Uncommercial Traveller, p. 203.

3 For hyperbole in general, see above, p. 99.

EXAMPLES. The following sets off the object partly by hyperbole, partly by simile: "Just so,' said the notary, pulling out his old watch, which was two inches thick and looked like a Dutch man-of-war." 1

Macaulay's description of Nares's work on Burleigh is conceived in the spirit of hyperbole. Here is a passage from it: " Compared with the labor of reading through these volumes, all other labor, the labor of thieves on the treadmill, of children in factories, of negroes in sugar plantations, is an agreeable recreation. . . . It is not merely in bulk, but in specific gravity also, that these memoirs exceed all other human compositions. On every subject which the professor discusses, he produces three times as many pages as another man; and one of his pages is as tedious as another man's three." 2

Various Utilizations of Poetic Traits. The fact that the information conveyed by description is information to be imagined, gives to its language something at once of the elevated tone of poetry and of the utilitarian tone of prose. Hence the poetic traits that appear in a portrayal are as practical as they are ornate; their elegance is their utility.3

1. Epithet, with its point and its pervading vigor of trope, is perhaps the most common and serviceable means of condensing a whole picture, or scene, or spiritual trait, into a word. It is better than pages of inventory description in cases where vividness of conception is needed.*

EXAMPLES. Epithet is Ruskin's prevailing means of describing natural scenery; see the quotation from him on p. 168, with the remark succeeding. It is also Carlyle's principal resource in the personal portrayals of which he is an acknowledged master. In 1839 he wrote to Emerson the following description of Daniel Webster :

"Not many days ago I saw at breakfast the notablest of all your Notabilities, Daniel Webster. He is a magnificent specimen; you might say to all the world, This is your Yankee Englishman, such limbs we make in Yankeeland! As a Logic-fencer, Advocate, or Parliamentary Hercules, one would incline to back him at first sight against all the extant world.

1 BALZAC.

2 MACAULAY, Burleigh and his Times, Essays, Vol. iii, p. 2.
3 See this fact exemplified above, p. 111.

4 For classes and uses of epithet, see above, pp. 147–151.

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