and reflects that they indicate quarantine for yellow fever. It is
not, as a general thing, well to intersperse these mental comments. It
may properly be done in a case like this, because in reading, as in
seeing, the mind is likely to inquire what is the signification of the
yellow flags; and it is well to answer this question in order that the
reader’s attention do not wander in search of an answer. If this is
to be done, however, the physical appearance which gives rise to the
interrogation should be given first. To reverse the order is something
like giving first an answer and then the conundrum to which it belongs.
It is as bad as mixing metaphors to mingle physical and mental
characteristics. In a description of the volcano of Kilauea I found
this sentence:--
The combination of vivid red and green contrasted with the
deathlike quiet and grandeur of the crater.
It is not possible to contrast physical qualities like color with
emotional ones such as quiet and grandeur. It is like multiplying
pictures by potatoes.
Of effects used in Description the appeal to the sight is manifestly
by far the most effective. Indeed, it is to be questioned whether any
other is of use save in very rare instances. Of course the individual
temperament of the reader has much to do with this matter, and I am
perhaps influenced by the fact that while it is very easy for me to see
things in imagination it is rather difficult for me to hear them. There
is no question, however, that an appeal to the sense of hearing is with
the average reader less likely to be convincing than that to sight. It
seems to me also that the use of smell is less often successful than
either of the others, and yet Kipling has shown how effective this
may be if employed by a master. The mention of odors is more likely,
perhaps, to belong to description by suggestion than to description
simple and direct.
An important element in Description is movement. This consists in
showing the details of a picture as if the mind of the reader were
moving from one to another. It is secured by naming them as they would
be observed; by presenting them as they would successively become
apparent to some other person; or by exhibiting them in connection
with their effects. Perhaps I may be able to show this by three brief
pictures of a peasant girl.
1. She was a beautiful peasant girl, tall and slender, dressed in
the fashion of the country, and carrying in her hand a bunch of
scarlet poppies. Her snowy coif was pushed back, showing brown
cheeks, a mass of black hair, and bright, startled eyes.
2. Paul watched the tall, slender peasant come up the flowery
lane, twirling in her hand as she walked a handful of flaming red
poppies. He was sure that she had not noticed him, and he smiled
at the unconscious beauty of her brown face, clear eyes, and
black, wavy hair.
3. The artist’s gaze was suddenly arrested by a tall peasant girl,
who walked slowly up the lane. He stopped to watch her, attracted
by the grace of her slender figure, and noting appreciatively the
effect against her gray gown of the scarlet poppies which she was
twirling in her brown hands. As she drew nearer, and unconsciously
pushed back the snowy coif, an involuntary exclamation escaped his
lips at the brilliancy of the eyes which flashed out at him from
beneath her black, tumbled hair.
Such movement as there is in the first of these depends upon the
arrangement of the particulars in the order in which they would
naturally be perceived by the reader; in the second this order is
shown to be natural by presentation of the details as if they were
seen by a spectator; while in the third the effect is heightened by
the introduction of the emotions aroused in the mind of the artist by
the sight of the girl. Whether these examples make the fact clear or
not, there is no question that the last form is the most effective. It
is not always available, nor is it always appropriate; but when it is
possible it is more vivid and persuasive than any other method. There
is in it more suggestiveness, and hence there is more force.
As a practical example of the use of this method, this from Thomas
Hardy may serve:--
How very lovable her face was to him! There was nothing ethereal
about it; all was real vitality, real warmth, real incarnation.
Yet when all was thought and felt that could be thought and felt
about her features in general, it was her mouth which turned out
to be the magnetic pole thereof. Eyes almost as deep and speaking
he had seen before, and cheeks perhaps as fair; brows as arched, a
chin and throat almost as shapely; her mouth he had seen nothing
at all to equal on the face of the earth. To a young man with the
least fire in him, that little upward lift in the middle of her
top lip was distracting, infatuating, maddening. He had never
before seen a woman’s lips and teeth which forced upon his mind,
with such persistent iteration, the old Elizabethan simile of
roses filled with snow.--_Tess of the D’Urbervilles_, xxiv.
[Footnote 5: A pleasant if a little exaggerated illustration of the way
in which pictures are made up from materials in the mind is afforded by
this account of the vision of Rome which a boy conjured up in his mind:
“Rome!... I tried to imagine what it would be like when I got there.
The Coliseum I knew, of course, from a woodcut in the history-book; so
to begin with I plumped that down in the middle. The rest had to be
patched up from the little gray market-town where twice a year we went
to have our hair cut; hence, in the result, Vespasian’s amphitheatre
was approached by muddy little streets, wherein the Red Lion and the
Blue Boar, with Somebody’s Entire along their front, and “Commercial
Room” on their windows; the doctor’s house, of substantial red brick;
and the façade of the New Wesleyan Chapel, which we thought very fine,
were the chief architectural ornaments; while the Roman populace
pottered about in smocks and corduroys, twisting the tails of the Roman
calves and inviting each other to beer in musical Wessex.”--KENNETH
GRAHAM: _The Golden Age_.]
[Footnote 6: _Sic_.]
[Footnote 7: _Sic_.]
XV
DESCRIPTION CONTINUED
Description by Suggestion is perhaps not to be called Description in
the exact meaning of the word, but in so far as it is an attempt to
call up an image it is proper to consider it so. Even if it seem but an
attempt to induce in the mind the spirit of a scene, a character, or a
thing, it may still be treated as Description, since the main purpose
is to bring vividly to the thought of the reader the image of the thing
spoken of.
It has already been said that words can add no material image to those
in the mind, but must work by the rearrangement of what is already
there. If I read the account of a little rustic pond I call to mind
some sheet of water that I have seen. If I have lived in the South
the picture is likely to be that of a lakelet bordered by moss-hung
trees, while if my experiences have been confined to New England I
shall involuntarily think of northern foliage and scenery. I shall
in any case construct out of old images this new one. Now the mind
is best able to do this for itself if simply properly aroused and
guided instead of being too minutely directed. In direct description
the author adds particular to particular, bidding the reader put one
detail in place by the others. If a writer do this with sufficient
skill, he may succeed in inducing the consciousness of the reader to
follow him; but always he is leading and the other is being led. On
the other hand, when a suggestion is used the reader is aroused to
take, as it were, the initiative. When Dickens calls Mrs. Fezziwig “one
vast, substantial smile,” he stimulates the reader to picture the woman
for himself. Here the imagination of the one who reads takes the lead
instead of following. It goes by the path pointed out by the author,
but it goes by itself. The result is that freshness and clearness of
impression which belong only to what the mind does or seems to do
voluntarily.
This is perhaps making more of a show of psychology than the occasion
calls for or than my knowledge of that difficult science warrants; but
at least it may serve to emphasize once more the fact that whatever the
writer can induce the reader to do for himself is sure to be greatly
more effective than anything which the writer can do for him. Herein
lies the value of suggestive description. It arouses the mind to be
actively receptive. Another way of putting the same thing would perhaps
be to say that avowed description appeals more to the understanding,
while suggestion addresses itself more directly to the imagination.
The simplest form of any description is of course the epithet. This
in literal description is apt to be ineffective from its meagreness.
In suggestion it is often rich and satisfactory. When Homer speaks
of the “swift-footed Achilles,” he has not pictured the hero, yet he
conveys by the implication of the epithet an image which is not without
distinctness. The same is true of such Homeric phrases as “far-darting
Apollo,” “laughter-loving Aphrodite,” or “ox-eyed Juno.” In the same
way into a single simile may be condensed a description by suggestion
which could be given directly only by pages. To go to the “Iliad,”
again, take this example:--
As the gusts speed on, when shrill winds blow, on a day when dust
lies thickest on the roads, and the winds raise together a great
cloud of dust, even so their battle clashed together, and all
were fain of heart to slay each other in the press with the keen
bronze.--Lang’s _Iliad_, xiii.
There is here no direct picture, yet the mind sees the confused and
furious onslaught more clearly than if all its details were enumerated.
Lowell notes a happy instance of this sort of picturing by intimation
when he says of Chaucer:
Sometimes he describes amply by the merest hint, as where the
Friar, before setting himself down, drives away the cat. We know
without need of more words that he has chosen the snuggest corner.
Another remark which Lowell makes in this connection I cannot pass
without quoting:--
When Chaucer describes anything, it is commonly in one of those
simple and obvious epithets or qualities that are so easy to miss.
Is it a woman? He tells us that she is _fresh_; that she has
_glad_ eyes; that “every day her beauty newed.”
Notice the phrase, “those simple and obvious epithets or qualities that
are so easy to miss.” Whatever we may learn later, we all begin by
supposing that it is imperative for a writer to go far afield, and to
discover traits, epithets, and thoughts that nobody has used before.
Here as in all writing he succeeds best who most carefully confines
himself to just those traits, epithets, and thoughts which people have
used before, but who so uses them that they have new force. He must
feel so keenly whatever he writes that his words shall seem new because
of the conviction behind them; and the reader will find a continual
charm in this discovery, as it were, of the meaning of familiar terms.
In common practice it is seldom that either of the two sorts of
composition which I have named is used alone, and the most successful
method is that which happily unites them. No literature can go far
or effect much which does not call suggestion to its aid, and this
is perhaps more emphatically true in Description than in any other
division of composition. Description is really a kind of continued
comparison of the image which is in the mind of the writer with things
which the reader may be supposed to have seen. As in the use of
comparison in simile, suggestion is the most effective tool at the hand
of the craftsman. It might be added that the rules given for the use of
figures will be found, by one who takes the trouble to examine them, to
be practically and directly applicable to Description.
I have spoken carefully thus far as if Description had to do with
nothing save the picturing of the physical. There was perhaps danger
lest the word “picture” might seem forced if too soon applied to
things mental and intangible. Description, however, has as one of its
common and legitimate functions, perhaps as its highest office, the
picturing of conditions of mind, of states of emotion, of all sorts of
mental experiences. Its office is to call them up so vividly that the
reader shall realize and share them. Not that he shall feel them as
his own, but as if he saw them with the most intimate and sympathetic
comprehension of them. If the reader received the sorrow of King Lear
as his own, he would be in danger of going mad as King Lear went mad.
If he shared as a personal experience the love of Romeo for Juliet, no
other maid of actual flesh and blood would satisfy his devotion. It
is not as a personal but as an imaginative experience that one is to
enter into these passions. The description of an emotion is an endeavor
to give a picture of it in much the same sense that a picture of a
landscape is given. The reader does not in either case mistake the
mental impression for the actual thing, but in both instances he is
moved by the completeness and reality of the portrayal.
We come here very close to Narration, and to what has been said of the
description of physical things there is not much which need be added
to cover the case of immaterial things. The principles are much the
same in one effort as in the other. In the bringing up of emotions and
states of feeling it is more often wise to use the suggestive method.
The question is moreover one of greater subtilty and delicacy. In the
one case as in the other it is generally well to be governed by the
order in which the details of the reality would present themselves to
the inner sense. The natural is apt to be the most effective order. It
is well, too, to go from the near to the remote, from the likely to the
unlikely, from the simple to the complex.
It is perhaps not amiss to make here an especial point of the phrase
which has been used two or three times already in other connections:
Proceed generally from the physical to the mental. If without too
evident artifice the physical can be made the introduction to the
mental state, the impression is almost sure to be vivid. The picturing
of sensations is at once the most surely effective and the most richly
suggestive. Rudyard Kipling is a master of this. He constantly leads
the mind of the reader to emotions through description of a physical
sensation; and it is largely by his skill in this that he overcomes the
difficulty of dealing with themes and emotions which are so far from
the ordinary experience of an occidental audience. Stevenson is another
author who understood well the use of the physical. His wonderful
description of the flight through the heather in “Kidnapped” is one of
the most brilliant examples of this sort of writing in modern--indeed,
why should one not say in all?--literature.
In summing up, it seems to me just to say that he who would paint with
words must have not only the power of writing well, but he must also
possess three especial qualities. He must be able to perceive a general
effect; he must be able to analyze this general effect into the details
which produce it; and he must have the ability so to express these
particulars that their relative values shall be preserved. The reader
must first be given a broad idea of the thing, the scene, the person
to be pictured. This is no less true in a case where the object is to
fix the attention upon details than where the aim is to give a broad
impression. The mind does not, I believe, grasp the details until after
it has received the wider impression, and it is necessary to make the
latter the background of the former. A remark which is made by Fuseli
upon painting may be applied here. He observes that breadth is attained
not by the _o_mission of details, but by their _sub_mission. While it
is idle to catalogue, it is not needful to omit anything which is of
use in conveying the picture sought. As long as the details are made to
submit to the central thought, are kept clear and subordinate, there is
no call to suppress them.
Above everything must the writer of Description see clearly what he
wishes to picture, feel genuinely what he desires to communicate,
and confine himself to that which is seen and felt by him,--by him
alone out of all the persons who walk this earth. If it is with vague
sensations that he is dealing, they must yet be clear and real to him;
if it is with the emotions of imaginary persons, it is with their
emotions as these are felt by him. This is the most difficult task
in literary art; it is, too, when properly accomplished, the most
splendid triumph of literary skill.
XVI
NARRATION
The more fascinating any literary work, the more difficult it is to
write about it satisfactorily. The mention of the D’Artagnan Romances
brings up so vivid a suggestion of life and stir, of adventure and
fire, that any essay which discourses of these superb novels is almost
sure to seem tame by contrast. In the mere names of “Tom Jones,” “Henry
Esmond,” “The Scarlet Letter,” there is so much potency that simply
to use them as illustrations involves the danger of rendering dull
and opaque by contrast the surface of exposition in which they are
set like jewels. Even the specification of Narration as a division of
composition connotes so many pleasant sensations that he must be a
clever man who can deal with the technicalities of this sort of writing
without boring his readers.
It is to be remembered, however, that before “The Lesson in Anatomy”
could be painted Rembrandt had to learn how canvas is prepared and how
colors are mixed; that the Ninth Symphony could not be composed until
dry details of counterpoint and harmony had been mastered. It is apt
to seem to the inexperienced writer as if to study the technique of
art is to brush the bloom from the peach. He likes to feel that only
what is spontaneous can be fresh and vital; and he forgets that in
art spontaneity is impossible until the technical method has been so
perfectly mastered that the creative impulse is unhampered by inability
to express itself. It is not the untrained and the inexperienced who
are able to be naïve and fresh in art, but only the master to whom
technical excellence has become a second nature.
Having in a former talk declared Description to be the most difficult
sort of composition, I am tempted now to make a bull, and to declare
that Narration is more difficult still! Indeed, this would hardly be
extravagant, were it not that the natural, instinctive interest of
mankind in whatever is a story comes to the aid of him who writes a
narrative. Narration as it exists in practice, however, is hardly to
be considered alone. Of all varieties of composition, this is the one
which most comprehensively embraces all other forms. It demands all the
resources of the literary artist. Exposition, Argument, and Description
are all enlisted in the services of the story-teller; and are so
blended in the woof of his web that they can scarcely be disassociated
from the narrative itself.
A succession of events can be fully told only in words. Even when we
see a clever pantomime--as, for example, “L’Enfant Prodigue,” which
was extensively played in this country by a French company a year
or two ago,--we are forced to supply in our minds a sort of running
interpretation of the acts as they go on before us. Music may interpret
continuous emotions, but its inadequacy to tell a definite tale is
abundantly shown by that odd hybrid known as “programme music.”
Painting may give a succession of related themes, but between the
moments chosen for representation there are gaps which break the
continuity. To convey a complete and continuous account of events
there is no resource in all the arts but words. It naturally follows
that Narration is more intimately connected with actual life than any
other sort of writing. It is the events of life which move us, and the
history of these arouses the feelings as no expository or argumentative
page can arouse them.
It is hardly necessary to enumerate all the many forms which Narration
takes. Histories, biographies, plays, novels, romances, anecdotes,
epics, stories long and stories short, the account of a journey and
the folk-tale through which the fairies frisk fantastically, are
all included under this division. The tedious twaddle and sea-water
of “The Voyage of the Sunbeam,” and the quivering pages of “Les
Misérables,” the account of a fire or a burglary in the morning paper,
the anecdote over which a pair of drummers chuckle in a Western railway
car, and the delicate romances of Hawthorne,--beautiful and pure as
delicate frost-work seen by moonlight,--all these belong here, and
all these are but a part. It is manifestly impossible to take up
each variety separately, even were it at all worth while. We must be
content to concern ourselves with general principles. Fortunately it
is not difficult so to phrase these that they shall be applicable
to narratives of all sorts. So many so-called stories written by
inexperienced writers are merely memoranda for tales, undigested
and unarranged, that there is sufficient excuse for being somewhat
rudimentary in our treatment of the subject. While young authors
continue to give us the material for narratives instead of properly
formed and finished Narration there is at least the chance of doing
good.
The first requisite in setting out to tell a story is to have a story
to tell. It is true that not a few modern novels might be cited as
seeming to prove the opposite of this proposition. There is a recent
school of fiction in which the first principle seems to be that if one
is to attempt to tell a story he must above all things else be careful
not to have one in his remotest thought. The patron saint of such
writers seems to be the needy knife-grinder of Canning, with his
“Story! God bless you! I have none to tell, sir.”
The world in general, however, still holds logically to the old theory,
and believes that to have something to relate is essential in Narration.
It is not that the theme of a narrative need be elaborate. There are
many successful novels and stories with plots extremely simple. Not
one of Miss Wilkins’ New England idyls--those charming sublimations of
the homely--has complexity or intricacy of subject. The only point is
that the writer have in mind some definite and consecutive narrative,
with a beginning and an end, and that he tell it as a narrative, and
not as an Exposition or an Argument. The whole matter is well summed up
in the phrase of Anthony Trollope: “The writer, when he sits down to
commence his novel, should do so, not because he has to tell a story,
but because he has a story to tell.”
It would hardly do at this late day to insist, however, that the
object of a story shall be simply or even primarily the narration of
incident. It has been greatly the fashion during the last score of
years to subordinate incident to any one of several things. Many of
the greatest novelists of the present half-century have deliberately
subordinated events to the study of character. There are not a few
modern novels which can be adequately described only as emotional
dissecting-rooms. They display the most wonderful cleverness in
dismembering emotions,--too often without having a living figure or a
convincing incident from one cover to the other. It is but fair to add
that there are also fictions which seem to justify this method, whether
we like it or not.
For our sins, moreover, the malevolent deities that deal in literary
plagues have sent upon us that mongrel monstrosity, the novel with a
theory. The more harmless are in the form of simpering eccentricities,
or in the shape of childishly naïve whimsicalities; in the more hurtful
sort authors often highly gifted lavish their powers in support of
theories as generous in intention as they are mistaken and sentimental
when tried by the facts upon which they are founded. We have, too, the
theological novel, and the indecent novel, and more sorts than it is at
all worth while to mention, in all of which the telling of a story is
made the excuse for the exploiting of some view. Of these, however, we
shall have occasion to speak later in connection with the moral purpose
in fiction.