II DESCRIPTION 1. NATURE AND PURPOSE OF DESCRIPTIVE WRITING DESCRIPTION may be defined simply as the portrayal of things by means of language. It is that kind of writing which aims to give the reader an idea of the appearance of things. It deals, therefore, with things as they appeal to the senses or to the imagination. Ordinarily when we speak of description we have in mind the portrayal of physical things, whether real or imaginary,—that is, persons, buildings, landscapes, and the like; but the term is also applied to the delineation of characters, mental states, and things of a like immaterial nature. Thus the second of the two following passages is no less a description than the first: On three sides of Edinburgh, the country slopes downward from the city, here to the sea, there to the fat farms of Haddington, there to the mineral fields of Linlithgow. On the south alone, it keeps rising until it not only outtops the Castle but looks down on Arthur's Seat. The character of the neighborhood is pretty strongly marked by a scarcity of hedges; by many stone walls of varying height; by a fair amount of timber, some of it well grown, but apt to be of a bushy, northern profile and poor in foliage; by here and there a little river, Esk or Leith or Almond, busily journeying to the bottom of its glen; and from almost every point by a peep of the sea or the hills. There is no lack of variety, and yet most of the elements are common to all parts; and the southern district is alone distinguished by considerable summits and a wide view.1 Dorothea by this time had turned cold again, and now threw herself back helplessly in her chair. She might have compared her experience at that moment to the vague, alarmed consciousness that her life was taking on a new form, that she was undergoing a metamorphosis in which memory would not adjust itself to the stirring of new organs. Everything was changed in its aspect: her husband's conduct, her own duteous feeling towards him, every struggle between them-and yet more, her whole relation to Will Ladislaw. Her world was in a state of convulsive change; the only thing she could say distinctly to herself was, that she must wait and think anew. One change terrified her as if it had been a sin; it was a violent shock of repulsion from her departed husband, who had had hidden thoughts, perhaps perverting everything she said and did. Then again she was conscious of another change which also made her tremulous; it was a sudden yearning of heart towards Will Ladislaw. It had never before entered her mind that he could, under any circumstances, be her lover: conceive the effect of the sudden revelation that another had thought of him in that light-that perhaps he himself had been conscious of such a possibility, and this with the hurrying, crowding vision of unfitting conditions, and questions not to be solved." Description is an extremely common form of writing, though it is seldom used alone. In books of 1 From Stevenson's Edinburgh. 2 From George Eliot's Middlemarch. travel-books which aim, as a rule, to give an impression of things seen-we may sometimes find examples of almost pure description; but even in such books there is, usually, a thread of story mingled with the description. Description and narration are, in fact, so closely related in aim and so helpful to each other that they are almost always used together. Description furnishes the setting for narration, without which it would be but a bare record of events; narration, in its turn, gives life and activity to description, without which it would soon become weari some. It is worth while, perhaps, to remind the beginner here that description of the kind we have been talking about must not be confused with scientific or expository description. In the latter, the aim is to give information not to portray. Description proper, however, is pictorial. To a certain extent, the writer here seeks to produce by means of words what the painter produces by means of lines and colors-an illusion. That is, he seeks to conjure up in the mind of the reader an image of the thing described. Hence his appeal is to the imagination rather than to the understanding. In the following passage, for example, the purpose of the writer is obviously pictorial; that is, he aims to stimulate the imagination of the reader in such a way as to enable him to form a mental picture of the scene described: Immediately underneath upon the south, you command the yards of the High School, and the towers and courts of the new jail-a large place, castellated to the extent of folly, standing by itself on the edge of a steep cliff, and often joyfully hailed by tourists as the Castle. In the one, you may perhaps see female prisoners taking exercise like a string of nuns; in the other, schoolboys running at play and their shadows keeping step with them. From the bottom of the valley, a gigantic chimney rises almost to the level of the eye, a taller and shapelier edifice than Nelson's Monument. Look a little further, and there is Holyrood Palace, with its Gothic frontal and ruined abbey, and the red sentry pacing smartly to and fro before the door like a mechanical figure in a panorama. By way of an outpost, you can single out the little peak-roofed lodge, over which Rizzio's murderers made their escape and where Queen Mary herself, according to gossip, bathed in white wine to entertain her loveliness. Behind and overhead, lie the Queen's Park, from Muschat's Cairn to Dumbiedykes, St. Margaret's Loch, and the long wall of Salisbury Crags; and thence, by knoll and rocky bulwark and precipitous slope, the eye rises to the top of Arthur's Seat, a hill for magnitude, a mountain in virtue of its bold design. This upon your left. Upon the right, the roofs and spires of the Old Town climb one above another to where the citadel prints its broad bulk and jagged crown of bastions on the western sky.-Perhaps it is now one in the afternoon; and at the same instant of time, a ball rises to the summit of Nelson's flagstaff close at hand, and, far away, a puff of smoke followed by a report bursts from the halfmoon battery at the Castle. This is the time-gun by which people set their watches, as far as the seacoast or in hill farms upon the Pentlands.-To complete the view, the eye enfilades Princes Street, black with traffic, and has a broad look over the valley between the Old Town and the New; here, full of railway trains and stepped over by the high North Bridge upon its many columns, and there, green with trees and gardens.1 Description is thus a kind of portrayal. To a certain extent, as has been said, it aims to do what the painting does-produce in the mind an image of the thing represented, but to a certain extent only. Description does not seek to rival painting, to meet it on its own ground, so to speak. It would be impossible for the writer to produce precisely the same effect as the painter, even were he to try. The latter appeals to the imagination through the bodily eye, and presents a picture which can be grasped in its totality in a single moment of time. In this picture, there can be no progression in time, for it represents the artist's impression of the object at a given moment. The writer, on the other hand, appeals to the mind's eye only, and that through the medium of words, which, from their very nature, require an appreciable space of time to be taken in and fitted together. Hence a portrayal in words can never represent any precise impression of an object, for it cannot be rendered in a single moment of time. most that it can do is to suggest an impression, and leave to the imagination of the reader the definite form which that impression shall take. The writer, therefore, seldom tries to reproduce any one fixed impression, but dwells now on this, now on that aspect of the thing described, and so strings together a series of impressions, in which, besides suggestions of form and color, there may be other suggestions entirely 1 From Stevenson's Edinburgh. 1 The |