tranquil or grewsome, not necessarily as so in itself, but because he is. This kind of description Ruskin reprehends as a tendency to take liberties with nature, which tendency he calls the "pathetic fallacy." It is thus indicated in a recent poem : — "If winds have wailed and skies wept tears, To poet's vision dim, 'Twas that his own sobs filled his ears, His weeping blinded him." EXAMPLES OF SUBJECTIVE DESCRIPTION. — It is a touch of the subjective when, in representing a man as rolling a bowlder down a mountain side in order thereby to crush his enemy, Charles Egbert Craddock says of the sound, "The echoes rang with a scream of terror." The following bit of subjective description occurs in one of Carlyle's letters: "The Scaur water, the clearest I ever saw except one, came brawling down, the voice of it like a lamentation among the winds, answering me as the voice of a brother wanderer and lamenter, wanderer like me through a certain portion of eternity and infinite space. Poor brook! yet it was nothing but drops of water. My thought alone gave it an individuality. It was I that was the wanderer, far older and stronger and greater than the Scaur, or any river or mountain, or earth, planet, or thing." : In Shakespeare's "Hamlet" occurs an interesting example of resistance to the tendency to make description subjective. Hamlet is determined to describe things as they are, in spite of their guise to his disordered mind: "I have of late but wherefore I know not-lost all my mirth, foregone 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." Narration. Description is so closely allied to narration that the two are very extensively used as accessories of each other. Indeed, there are some forms of discourse wherein narrative and descriptive elements are so evenly 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. The employment of narration as an accessory to description belongs to the same tendency. 1. And it is shown in almost every description, first of all, by narrative touches, such as verbs of motion used to portray objects at rest, the action involved in figurative description, and the like; devices which, belonging intrinsically to the recounting of events, serve to enliven the scene more than the reader is aware. EXAMPLE. - Observe how the italicized words, which are at once metaphor and verbs of action, enliven the description in the following, from Tenny son: "So till the dusk that follow'd evensong Rode on the two, reviler and reviled; Then after one long slope was mounted, saw, To westward-in the deeps whereof a mere, Under the half-dead sunset glared." 2. Something of narrative character in description is often 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 is also a kind of story. A battle may be treated 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 a large admixture of the other form of discourse. EXAMPLE. — The following, from one of Edward Everett's orations, shows what magnificence of language may be lent by a master to a very common subject: # “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. Every thing around was wrapt in darkness and hushed in silence, broken 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 her 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 hori zon, 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." 3. The element of comprehensiveness in a scene may also compel the use of narrative resources; as in a panoramic landscape, whose features of interest cannot all be seen from one point of view. In such a case the description 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; and the effect is both descriptive and narrative. "The EXAMPLE (quoted from McElroy's "Structure of English Prose"). plan has been successfully pursued by M. Taine in his Tour through the Pyre nees: "The carriage leaves Eaux Bonnes at dawn. The sun is scarcely yet risen, and is still hidden by the mountains. Pale rays begin to color the mosses on the western declivity. These mosses, bathed in dew, seem as if awakening under the first caress of the day. Rosy hues, of an inexpressible softness, rest on the summits, then steal down along the slopes. One could never have believed that these gaunt old creatures were capable of an expression so timid and so tender. The light broadens, heaven expands, the air is filled with joy and life. A bald peak in the midst of the rest, and darker than they, stands out in an aureole of flame. All at once, between two serrate points, like a dazzling arrow, streams the first ray of the sun.' "Subsequent sections describe the country beyond Pau, and the towns of Coarraze, Lestelle with its chapel, Saint Pé, and Lourdes. Here and there appears a thread of narrative, like the first sentence in the paragraph quoted; but oftener the mere mention of a new place keeps up the sense of movement." V. Exactions of the Object.Of the objects, material and spiritual, with which description deals, some, as has been intimated, contain a suggestion of structure in the natural arrangement of their parts, while in treating others the plan has to be constructed according to the writer's logical sense. Further, some objects require a greater dependence on accessories of description than others. A rough classification of objects may here be made, according to these natural exactions. 1. The easiest task for the descriptive invention, perhaps, is furnished by those objects in which description consists essentially of an enumeration of parts. Such objects comprise: objects in space, such as buildings, towns, scenery, works of art and mechanism; personal portraiture; and objects related to time, such as natural phenomena, weather, and the like. In all these, when the description is of any length, the imagination ranges naturally from point to point, either according to the simple contiguity of parts to each other, or according to the dynamic impression they make on the describer. Accessories may be employed, but they are secondary; the multiplicity of details requires that the basis of treatment, even if the treatment is dynamic, be a definitely conceived and natural plan. The leading aim is to let the order of treatment, as far as may be, be determined by the object itself, in its natural suggestiveness. NOTE.—This has been abundantly illustrated in the extended descriptions already cited; as for instance, in the description of Chartres cathedral, on page 332, and in the description of Starved Rock, on page 334. 2. Next in difficulty to the foregoing are those objects in which the description consists in the recounting and portrayal of qual ities. Such objects comprise: character, individual and collective; national conditions and traits; scientific accounts of natural phenomena and characteristics, and the like. In all these the plan has to be made rather than found; and its clearness and completeness depend therefore on the writer's logical and classifying powers. Accessories are secondary, as in the foregoing; and the necessity of a strongly marked order is even more imperative. NOTE.- An example has been given in the plan of the description of Queen Elizabeth's character, on page 333. Another example, which has been called 'one of the great delineations of history," is Motley's description of the character of William the Silent, in the first volume of his "Rise of the Dutch Republic." A famous example of description of a nation's condition, and masterly in its way, is the third chapter of Macaulay's "History of England," which portrays the state of England at the time his history opens. 3. The most difficult, and least adapted to description, are those objects which appeal not to the reader's sense-perception but to his consciousness of his own inner experience. Such are mental states, mental processes, and emotions. Obviously these are hard to describe; because if the reader has no experience of, or susceptibility to, the state or emotion portrayed, any attempt by words to put him in possession of it is in vain. The author feels most vividly his own inner states, and to him they are profoundly significant; but to impart a feeling of them, with any approach to vividness, is quite another matter. And because it is so difficult, it is especially liable to be tedious. Of the management of such description, Bulwer-Lytton says,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 1 Bulwer-Lytton, " Pamphlets and Sketches," p. 343. |