Description 2

Description is of two kinds. One may be called scientific or practical, and the other literary. The former has less value in literature. Description of this kind is scientific, or practical. In it definite measurements are used, plain words chosen, and only facts stated. In such Description sentences must be clear and brief.

Description practically of this kind is sometimes introduced into literature, as is shown by the following quotation from Prescott's "Conquest of Mexico ":

The primitive Aztecs. . . constructed rafts of reeds, rushes, and other fibrous materials, which, tightly knit together, formed a sufficient basis for the sediment that they drew up from the bottom of the lake. Gradually islands were formed two or three hundred feet in length, and three or four in depth, with a rich stimulated soil, on which the economical Indian raised his vegetables and flowers for the markets of Tenochtitlan.

replace this with something more recentmaybe from science fiction

II

The office of Description in literature is not merely to picture accurately, to photograph with words. Perhaps this is really only a secondary purpose. Of course this must be accomplished to a greater or less extent, but, primarily, literary Description must visualize so as to make the reader feel as though he himself were seeing the place described, were living through the experience recounted. It must vivify for him all that there is of light and shade, of color, of warmth, of nature, rather than merely give a picture in outline.

The painter of landscapes does not paint for the botanist and the geologist, but for the man who sees in order to feel. He does not paint things as they are, but as they seem. The veining of leaves and the pistils and stamens of flowers even in the immediate foreground he does not put in; even the leaves are seldom individual. The spectator does not see them. The impressionist, going to an extreme, strives for the impression of nature by caring nothing whatever for details and everything for light and shade. He works rapidly, he puts his colors on in splashes, he throws in plenty of yellow for sunshine and makes his shadows with blues and purples; but when done he has air that refreshes and sunshine that warms and clouds that are measureless in depth. Contrast the work of an impronssionist with that of a classicist of equal rank, and each time the impressionist will be nearer things as they seem.

From the painter the writer must learn to see essentials. To insert every detail is worse than valueless. Art must be suggestive. The reader wants nature as it seems, not as the botanist with his microscope finds that it really is. And to describe things as they seem the writer must omit all unnecessary details, and must insert, along with the general outline, the few significant details that give life and individuality.

Few people are able to tell the color of the eyes of their most intimate friends, and many cannot tell the shade of hair or even the shape of nose. They know the faces, not in details, but as wholes. So with a landscape -or a room that we know thoroughly, as we suppose; we are not able to recall its every particular detail; we know only its salient features combined into an effective whole. Think of a familiar view from an elevated point, even of a room in your home, and you find that you recall a combined whole made up of only a few of the numerous details. Analyze this whole, determine its salient outlines and its few individualizing details, and you have the material of a Description.

The first requisite of good Description, then, is stated in the art principle already considered, namely, to be suggestive, to make known more than is said. The items to be used are the essentials that will suggest to the imagination the combined whole, as it seems. Seizing these details, the imagination will easily fill in the less important features of the picture. To mention these unimportant items only burdens the reader with that which is mere weight.

a single picture hint has power to portray a person. It is the same principle that is used in picturing scenes and experiences, in describing. Catch a detail suggestive enough to kindle the imagination, and the picture is made. When asked how a family on whom she had been calling had their home furnished, a woman replied, "Oh, they have beautiful cabinet mantels, and the walls of their library are hidden with the modern patent book-shelves with sliding glass fronts. "

The answer at first seems no answer at all; then the hearer begins to feel what the house is like inside, and all at once his imagination fills in carpets, curtains, easy chairs, wallpaper, bric-a-brac, hangings, sideboard, and other comforts in harmony with such mantels and such a library. The answer is really a key to the art of Description.

Had the parlor floor been covered with a rag carpet and had the dining room contained only a deal table and machinemade chairs, the contrast would have been so great that it must have been mentioned.

Another similar bit of descriptive art work, but far better, is a sentence used in conversation by a well known literary man. Speaking of his early life he said, "Until I was of age I was accustomed in my Southern home to a silent butler and a mahogany sideboard. "

The kind of home it was, its furnishings, its perfect order, even something of the charmingly methodic character of its mistress, are all at once flashed before the enkindled imagination.

Such lightning-like strokes, it is true, are only incidental Description, but for ordinary use they are far more suggestive and infinitely more pleasing than longdrawn, elaborate picturing.

III

A brief quotation from James Russell Lowell's "Fireside Travels" well illustrates the power of three or four effective details to suggest a clear picture:

My first glimpse of Europe was the shore of Spain. Since we got into the Mediterranean we have been becalmed for some days within easy view of it. All along are fine mountains, brown all day, and with a bloom on them at sunset like that of a ripe plum. Here and there at their feet little white towns are sprinkled along the edge of the water, like the grains of rice dropped by the princess in the story. Sometimes we see larger buildings on the mountain slopes, probably convents. I sit and wonder whether the farther peaks may not be the Sierra Morena (the rusty saw) of Don Quixote. I resolve that they shall be, and am content.

After determining the exact details used by Mr. Lowell, notice how much of the power of the picture depends upon the color terms employed. Color suggestions are among the most powerful that appeal to the eye, and in all constructive work the learner should ever keep their value in mind. The figurative words bloom and sprinkled also help the suggestiveness of the details not a little, as does the simile drawn from the ever suggestive realm of legend. . The resolve of the author to believe that the farther peaks are associated with the charm of Don Quixote, suggests his mood and adds for the reader a flavor of association that helps to bring him into closer sympathy with the author; for both have pleasant memories of hours spent with the knight of La Mancha.

This Description shows the use of a few details to picture something seen at a great distance. Here is one showing a village seen from a near-by hill:

Below him lay Keyport Village, built about a rocky halfmoon of a harbor, its old wharves piled high with rotting oil barrels and flanked by empty warehouses, behind which crouched low, grayroofed cabins, squatting in a tangle of streets, with here and there a white church spire tipped with a restless weather-vane. Higher, on the hills, were nestled some old homesteads with sloping roofs and wide porches, and away up on the crest of the heights, overlooking the sea, stood the more costly structures with well-shaved lawns spotted with homesick trees from a warmer clime, their arms stretched appealingly toward the sea.

Here we are given not only the picture, but also the "atmosphere" of the town, —its decay, its poverty, its neglect—by old wharves, rotting oil barrels, and empty warehouses, all telling of a prosperity that vanished with the whale. The one-story cottages and the entire lack of right angles at the corners are pictured by crouched, squatting and a tangle of streets. These kindle the imagination, and through them it sees, it experiences, the whole town; while sloping roofs and wide porches, well-shaved lawns, and homesick trees (the adjective is strangely suggestive) give the touches necessary to make real the farmhouses and the summer homes of wealth.

What figurative expressions add to the suggestiveness of the details used in this Description?

Mr. Kenneth Grahame in "The Golden Age" tells what a lad saw after tramping through the woods and burrowing under a hedge:

Gone was the brambled waste, gone the flickering tangle of woodland. Instead, terrace after terrace of shaven sward, stoneedged, urn-cornered, stepped delicately down to where the stream, now tamed and educated, passed from one to another marble basin, in which on occasion gleams of red hinted at gold-fish in among the spreading water-lilies. The scene lay silent and slumbrous in the brooding noonday sun; the drowsy peacock squatted humped on the lawn, no fish leapt in the pools, nor bird declared himself from the environing hedges.

Determine what is suggested by each of the following words: flickering, stepped, tamed and educated, gleams, slumbrous, brooding, drowsy.

Another Description by James Russell Lowell gives, not a scene from a single viewpoint, but a general impression gathered during a ride of several hours:

From Palestrina to Cavi the road winds along a narrow valley, following the course of a stream which rustles rather than roars below. Large chestnut trees lean every way on the steep sides of the hills above us, and at every opening we could see great stretches of Campagna rolling away and away toward the bases of purple mountains streaked with snow. The sides of the road were drifted with heaps of wild hawthorn and honeysuckle in full bloom, and bubbling with innumerable nightingales that sang unseen. Overhead the sunny sky tinkled with larks, as if a frost in the air were breaking up and whirling away on the swollen currents of spring.

By means of a few hints Francis Parkman in "The Pioneers of France in the New World" reproduces an experience, a general impression, covering a number of weeks rather than only a few hours:

It was on the eighteenth of September [1608] that Pontgrave set sail, leaving Champlain with twenty-eight men to hold Quebec through the winter. Three weeks later, and shores and hills glowed with gay prognostics of approaching desolation, —the yellow and scarlet of the maples, the deep purple of the ash, the garnet hue of young oaks, the crimson of the tupelo at the water's edge, and the golden plumage of birch saplings in the fissures of the cliff. It was a short-lived beauty. The forest dropped its festal robes. Shrivelled and faded, they rustled to the earth. The crystal air and laughing sun of October passed away, and November sank upon the shivering waste, chill and somber as the tomb.

The coming on of morning in a small city is portrayed by Nathaniel Hawthorne in "The House of the Seven Gables":

The sunshine might now be seen stealing down the front of the opposite house, from the windows of which came a reflected gleam struggling through the boughs of the elm-tree, and enlightening the interior of the shop more distinctly than heretofore. The town appeared to be wakening up. A baker's cart had already rattled through the street, chasing away the latest vestige of night's sanctity with the jingle-jangle of its dissonant bells. A milkman was distributing the contents of his cans from door to door; and the harsh peal of a fisherman's conch-shell was heard far off, around the corner.

A cursory examination of the illustrations thus far given will show that the details made use of are familiar items known to practically every reader. But they are familiar items that are the striking and individualizing features of the picture that is being reproduced. Only the familiar, the usual, can stir the imagination, —often, to be sure, placed in the unusual setting; but a detail that does not belong to the familiar cannot have the associations which must be present in order to appeal feelingly to the great mass of readers.

Even in that which is most unfamiliar, details must be chosen that probably are within. the experience of most readers, and these must be so woven together that the suggested whole will stand out clear and complete for the eye of the imagination. Notice how this is done in Mr. Smith's Description of Venice in " Gondola Days ":

The arcades under the Library are full of people smoking and sipping coffee. How delicious the aroma and the pungent smell of tobacco! In the shadow of the Doges' Palace groups idle and talk—a little denser in spots where some artist has his easel up, or some pretty, dainty child is feeding the pigeons.

A moment more and you are in the Piazza of San Marco; the grand piazza of the Doges, with its thousands of square feet of white pavement blazing in the sun, framed on three sides by marble palaces, dominated by the noblest campanile on the globe, and enriched, glorified, made inexpressibly precious and unique by

that jewel in marble, in porphyry, in verd antique and bronze, that despair of architects of to-day, that delight of the artist of all time—the most sacred, the Church of San Marco.

In and out this great quadrangle whirl the pigeons, the pigeons of Dandolo, up into the soft clouds, the light flashing from their throats; sifting down in showers on gilded cross and rounded dome; clinging to intricate carvings, over and under the goldcrowned heads of saints in stone and bronze; across the baking plaza in flurries of gray and black; resting like a swarm of flies, only to startle, mass, and swirl again.

Here the real appeal to the imagination is made by the familiar appearing under unusual surroundings. In America people do not sit sipping coffee and smoking in the open air in public squares, nor are the easels of artists often seen in the streets and parks of great cities. "The white-paved square framed in marble palaces" and "a jewel in porphyry, " are of course the unfamiliar; but pavement and squares and frames and palaces and jewels are known, and with them go associations that enable the imagination to cope with even so unfamiliar a spectacle as the wonderful Square of St. Mark.

The pigeons are surely the known; but how strange flying thus in the most public place in the city! The sense of smell, also, is appealed to, in order to make this picture yet more vivid. The familiar aroma of coffee and the pungent smell of tobacco, both are full of suggestion, but at least one of them in what to us is a strangely unimagined place! And we are made to see the more clearly by an appeal to the sense of touch (the baking plaza). The imagination of the reader is here reached by every possible avenue, in order to compel him to appreciate adequately this wondrous picture.

St. Mark's Church is described, not formally, not in detail, not in many tiresome paragraphs. We are made to feel its beauty by incidental touches, while merely the pigeons seem to be the real subject of comment. Not a few visitors, indeed, get their most pleasant memories of St. Mark's through associations centered about the pigeons, and receive the most vivid impressions of its appearance while watching their flight. It is just such a confused picture that the traveller carries away with himmarble, and bronze, and mosaic, and pigeons, and gilded crosses, and crowned heads, and carvings!

As one reads any good Description, it may perhaps seem an easy matter to select the few details that are suggestive of the whole, —the few items necessary to picture a mountainous shore as seen from a vessel, a seaside village, the garden of a palace, a mountain road, the glory of autumn, the awakening of a village, the most beautiful view of a great city, the individuality of a geologic age.

The purpose of Description is to make the reader, in imagination, see and hear and smell and touch and taste just as the writer does during a particular experience, —to make him live again an experience of the writer. Therefore every possible expedient that will help toward the accomplishment of this purpose must be called into requisition. Sounds and odors are often more potent than things seen. Words of wide associations must be used. Feet and tons, any accurate measurements, are less suggestive than comparisons, Thousands of square feet of white pavement" is much more powerful with the imagination than is "white pavement 192 yards long and 61 yards wide on the east and 90 on the west. " So "colossal tree-ferns, " "tail as stout as a ship's mast, " "unwieldy length, " "wings like a schooner's mainsail, " and "with heads near the tree-tops" are much more suggestive than any exact terms of measurement could be, when describing the wonders of an age long past.

In like manner shape should be made known by comparison with the familiar. "A rocky half-moon of a harbor, " "a factory chimney of a lighthouse, " "like a huge motionless whale lay the island, " "a ledge like the back of a turtle, "— each of these vivifies the unknown by appealing to the known; for since childhood we have been familiar with the comparison used in each.

In brief, then, effective Description depends primarily upon only two things: First, the writer must select the few essential details—call them picturing hints, kindling hints, revealing details, anything you please—must select the few essential details that will arouse the imagination to an appreciation of the whole; and, second, he must choose words with wide associations in order to carry these hints to the reader. As a rule a figurative word will be stronger than a literal word. The right word must be discovered, however, even if the discovery of it necessitates the reading of Roget's " Thesaurus " or of an unabridged dictionary. A fairly good word is not good enough.

from Mrs. Browning's "Aurora Leigh"