EXAMPLES. -I. Of nature colored by the describer's mind. Tennyson's Maud, which is meant to be a portrayal of a morbid mind, may be read throughout as a masterly work of subjective description. This is the way, in the first stanza, that a certain ravine is described :

"I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood,

Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath,
The red-ribb'd ledges drip with a silent horror of blood,
And Echo there, whatever is ask'd her, answers 'Death.'"

In Hamlet occurs an interesting example of resistance to the tendency to make description subjective. Hamlet is determined to see things as they

are, not as colored by his disordered mind: "I have of late- but wherefore I know not lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.'

"1

2. Of nature in sympathy with human action. Of the great sin which caused the loss of Paradise, Milton thus describes the accompaniments in

nature:

"Earth trembled from her entrails, as again

In pangs, and Nature gave a second groan;

Sky loured, and, muttering thunder, some sad drops
Wept at completing of the mortal Sin
Original." 2

III.

Aid from Narrative Movement.- Description is so closely allied to narration that the two are very spontaneously used as accessories of each other. Some forms of discourse there are, indeed, wherein narrative and descriptive elements are so blended and balanced that it is difficult to determine which has the predominance.

It is a natural tendency, when an object is vividly conceived, to endow it with life and motion. We see this in personification and in allegory. We see it also in numerous

1 SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet, Act ii, Scene 2.

2 MILTON, Paradise Lost, Book ix, ll. 1000-1004.

narrative touches, such as trope-words involving action, verbs of motion used to portray objects at rest, and the like; which things, of which every lively description is full, serve to invigorate the scene more than the reader is aware.

ILLUSTRATION. Observe how the words here italicized, which are at once personification (or at least animization) and verbs of action, enliven the description in the following:

"So till the dusk that follow'd evensong

Rode on the two, reviler and reviled;

Then after one long slope was mounted, saw,
Bowl-shaped, thro' tops of many thousand pines
A gloomy-gladed hollow slowly sink

To westward - in the deeps whereof a mere,
Round as the red eye of an Eagle-owl,
Under the half-dead sunset glared." 1

Apart from these minor narrative suggestions there are two classes of descriptive objects wherein narrative movement becomes necessary.

1. Time-Conditioned Portrayal. Something of narrative character in description is compelled by the element of time entering in. The description of a storm, for instance, or of a sunrise, must recognize the changes of aspect during the continuance of the scene; and thus the portrayal, released from the awkward limitation of an inert object,2 assumes at once the movement of story. A battle may be treated either descriptively or narratively; that is, the principle of treatment may lie predominantly in the picturing of scenes or in the development of action; but in either case there must necessarily be large recourse to the other literary type.

EXAMPLE. — The following description is introduced into an oration to give point to some truths in astronomy:

"I had occasion, a few weeks since, to take the early train from Providence to Boston; and for this purpose rose at two o'clock in the morning. Everything around was wrapt in darkness and hushed in silence, broken

1 TENNYSON, Gareth and Lynette, 11. 773-780.

2 See the second problem of material and handling, p. 480, above.

only by what seemed at that hour the unearthly clank and rush of the train. It was a mild, serene, midsummer's night, — the sky was without a cloud, — the winds were whist. The moon, then in the last quarter, had just risen, and the stars shone with a spectral lustre but little affected by her presence. Jupiter, two hours high, was the herald of the day; the Pleiades, just above the horizon, shed their sweet influence in the east; Lyra sparkled near the zenith; Andromeda veiled her newly-discovered glories from the naked eye in the south; the steady pointers, far beneath the pole, looked meekly up from the depths of the north to their sovereign.

"Such was the glorious spectacle as I entered the train. As we proceeded, the timid approach of twilight became more perceptible; the intense blue of the sky began to soften; the smaller stars, like little children, went first to rest; the sister-beams of the Pleiades soon melted together; but the bright constellations of the west and north remained unchanged. Steadily the wondrous transfiguration went on. Hands of angels, hidden from mortal eyes, shifted the scenery of the heavens; the glories of night dissolved into the glories of the dawn. The blue sky now turned more softly gray; the great watch-stars shut up their holy eyes; the east began to kindle. Faint streaks of purple soon blushed along the sky; the whole celestial concave was filled with the inflowing tides of the morning light, which came pouring down from above in one great ocean of radiance; till at length, as we reached the Blue Hills, a flash of purple fire blazed out from above the horizon, and turned the dewy tear-drops of flower and leaf into rubies and diamonds. In a few seconds, the everlasting gates of the morning were thrown wide open, and the lord of day, arrayed in glories too severe for the gaze of man, began his state.” 1

As to battle-scenes, Stephen Crane, in The Red Badge of Courage, is prevailingly descriptive, lending interest more to the scene than to the result. Captain Charles King, whose description of Pickett's charge at Gettysburg 2 Lord Wolesley, Lord William Beresford, and General Fitzwygram agreed to call "the most perfect picture of a battle-scene in the English language," treats his subject more as a plotted narrative.

2. Panoramic Portrayal. The element of comprehensiveness in a scene may also compel the use of narrative movement; as in an extended landscape, or tract of country, whose features of interest cannot all be seen from one point of view. In such a case the description, which becomes virtually the

1 EVERETT, Orations and Speeches, Vol. iii, p. 457.

2 KING, Between the Lines, pp. 268–282,

account of a journey, is regulated by what is called "the traveller's point of view"; that is, the describer is represented as going from one point to another and portraying successive aspects.

EXAMPLES. -1. In his description of the river Oxus, at the end of Sohrab and Rustum, Matthew Arnold, instead of postulating a traveller to follow its course, personifies the river itself.

2. The following shows how naturally the reader adjusts his point of view, and thus follows the fortunes of the portrayal like those of a story: — "Just on the brow of the hill, where I paused to look before me, the series of stone pillars came abruptly to an end; and only a little below, a sort of track appeared and began to go down a breakneck slope, turning like a corkscrew as it went. It led into a valley between falling hills, stubbly with rocks like a reaped field of corn, and floored further down with green meadows. I followed the track with precipitation; the steepness of the slope, the continual agile turning of the line of descent, and the old unwearied hope of finding something new in a new country, all conspired to lend me wings. Yet a little lower and a stream began, collecting itself together out of many fountains, and soon making a glad noise among the hills. Sometimes it would cross the track in a bit of waterfall, with a pool, in which Modestine refreshed her feet.

"The whole descent is like a dream to me, so rapidly was it accomplished. I had scarcely left the summit ere the valley had closed round my path, and the sun beat upon me, walking in a stagnant lowland atmosphere. The track became a road, and went up and down in easy undulations. I passed cabin after cabin, but all seemed deserted; and I saw not a human creature, nor heard any sound except that of the stream." 1 Etc.

III. DESCRIPTION IN LITERATURE.

In the body of literature description occupies a place of its own, which needs to be accounted for by a few words of explanation.

I.

General Status and Value.

While to a greater or less extent description pervades all the great forms of literature, and

1 STEVENSON, Travels with a Donkey, Works, Vol. xii, p. 230.

does much in aid of the other literary types, comparatively
little is made of it as a form by itself. In its more elaborate
and picturesque work, it is to be found mostly in passages or
sections of productions mainly narrative or oratorical.
this fact is no indication of slight esteem for it; rather the
contrary. It is often regarded and estimated as if it were a
jewel in a setting; pointed out and quoted by readers and
critics, and by writers worked up with most painstaking care.
On the whole, no more delicate indication of a writer's skill
and taste is afforded than by his management of description;
and so the general judgment regards the matter.1

One reason for this peculiar status of description in literature has already been repeatedly suggested: the wealth of detail in the object, the unhandiness of language in picturing it. Whatever is done with it, then, must be done quickly and strikingly, it cannot run into volumes, or even into chapters. Yet the very difficulty of the problem has such fascination for the born artist, and so calls out his powers, that his work, if it survives, is shrined among the treasures of literature.

1 The care and study of novelists in working up what is called "local color " for the scenes and atmosphere of their works have become almost a proverb. Of Scott's visit to the place where he was to lay the scene of Rokeby we have the following account: "The morning after he arrived he said, 'You have often given me materials for romance - now I want a good robber's cave and an old church of the right sort.' We rode out, and he found what he wanted in the ancient slate quarries of Brignal and the ruined Abbey of Eggleston. I observed him noting down even the peculiar little wild flowers and herbs that accidentally grew round and on the side of a bold crag near his intended cave of Guy Denzil; and could not help saying, that as he was not to be upon oath in his work, daisies, violets, and primroses would be as poetical as any of the humble plants he was examining. I laughed, in short, at his scrupulousness; but I understood him when he replied, 'that in nature herself no two scenes were exactly alike, and that whoever copied truly what was before his eyes, would possess the same variety in his descriptions, and exhibit apparently an imagination as boundless as the range of nature in the scenes he recorded; whereas whoever trusted to imagination, would soon find his own mind circumscribed, and contracted to a few favorite images, and the repetition of these would sooner or later produce that very monotony and barrenness which had always haunted descriptive poetry in the hands of any but the patient worshippers of truth.'” — - LOCKHART,

Life of Scott, Vol. iv, p. 20.

2 See above, pp. 479, 493.

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