heart. You remember some half a dozen things that have impressed you; they will make the right impression on the reader, for why try to make more of an impression on the reader than has been made on you? Sit down and try to describe your best friend; you will find that the main idea, and the best, is given in a few strokes.' If then we would describe, we must satisfy ourselves with giving an impression. So we want it to be the right impression, and the right impression we shall find it hard to give another unless we know what it is ourselves. So we do well to ask ourselves the question often, What is my impression of this street as I look down on it? of this view across the river as the sun sets? of that young woman I met last night? Ask yourselves these questions. Unless you can give some sort of answer to them, it is improbable that you will be able to give a good account to anybody else. The prevailing series of impressions will be found to differ very strikingly with different people and under I subjoin an interesting passage from Souriau: La Suggestion dans l'Art, pp. 209, 210. "Our little realistic writers, who run about the streets with notebook in hand, imagine that they have given a graphic description when they have noted down and mentioned everything that they have seen. Because their work is done from nature they imagine that it will give us the vivid impression of the reality. The chances are that they succeed in being merely obscure. Deceived as to the expressive power of the written phrases by the actual presence of their subject, one is unable to foresee the effect they will produce upon a reader who does not have the thing before his eyes and must reconstruct it on this information alone. 66 Nothing is gained by increasing the amount of information. In such a case, the more of explanation, the less of clearness. If you cannot make yourself understood in one sentence, you will much less be able to do so in a hundred. A complicated description makes too great a tax on the memory to be grasped, too great a demand on the imagination to be visualized; the reader will give up the effort." The treatment is followed farther very skillfully and suggestively. different circumstances. Here are several short descrip tions: "A wooden cross bleached by many storms surmounts the pinnacle of the Eggischhorn, and at the base of it I now take my place and scan the surrounding scene. Down from its birthplace in the mountains comes that noblest of ice-streams the Great Aletsch glacier. Its arms are thrown round the shoulders of the Jungfrau, while from the Monk and the Trugberg, the Gletscherhorn, the Breithorn, the Aletschhorn, and many another noble pile, the tributary snows descend and thicken into ice. The mountains are well protected by their wintry coats, and hence the quantity of débris upon the glacier is comparatively small; still, along it can be noticed dark longitudinal streaks, which are incipient moraines. Right and left from these longitudinal bands sweep finer curves, twisted here and there into complex windings, which mark the lamination of the subjacent ice. The glacier lies in a curved valley, the side towards which its convex curvature is turned is thrown into a state of strain, the ice breaks across the line of tension, a curious system of oblique glacier ravines being thus produced. From the snow-line, etc."-Tyndall: Hours of Exercise in the Alps, ch. vii. "The two men rose, and followed Rheinhardt out into the garden, and thence on to the road, which wound behind the stables and hayricks of the old farm. The sun was sinking, hidden behind a thick bank of grey clouds, and below them was a rift of open sky, white, luminous, lustrous, into which gradually emerged the lip of the sun, slowly working its way, a great rayless ball of brilliant. white, into this sea of white luminousness; the sky like a liquid, molten sun; the sun like a denser more lustrous sky, white upon white, metallic sheen upon metallic sheen, and all the while the clouds from whence the sun had descended grew dark, of bluish grey, and all the upper sky of strange darkness; not the darkness of cloud, for it seemed scarce covered with mist film, but a metallic darkness as of burnished steel."-Vernon Lee: Baldwin, p. 42. "It was a still summer evening in the slack between hay and harvest on the farm of Drumquhat. The Galloway moors rose in long purple ridges to the west. The sun had set, and in the hollows pools of mist were gathering, islanded with clumps of willow. The maister' had made his nightly rounds, and was now meditatively taking his smoke, leaning on the gate at the head of the loaning, and looking over a green cornfield, through the raw colour of which the first yellow was beginning to glimmer. From the village half a mile away he could hear the clink of the smith's anvil. There came into his mind a slow thought of the good crack going on there, and he erected himself as far as a habitual stoop would allow him, as if he proposed daunerin' over to the village to make one of the company in the heartsome 'smiddy.'” S. R. Crockett: The Stickit Minister, p. 114. "But the Col de la Faucille, on that day of 1835, opened to me in distinct vision the Holy Land of my future work and true home in this world. My eyes had been opened and my heart with them, to see and to possess royally such a kingdom! Far as the eye could reach--that land and its moving or pausing waters; Arve and his gates of Cluse, and his glacier fountains; Rhone, and the infinitude of his sapphire lake,-his peace beneath the narcissus meads of Vevay-his cruelty beneath the promontories of Sierre. And all that rose against and melted into the sky, of mountain and mountain snow, and all that living plain, burning with human gladness-studded with white homes, a milky way of star-dwellings cast across its sunlit blue."-Ruskin: Præterita, ch. ix. These descriptions are all four of some extent of country or something of the sort, but the different authors have had very different ideas in mind. Tyndall had the forms in mind, Vernon Lee the colors, Crockett the feelings aroused, and Ruskin the thoughts associated with the sight.' EXERCISES. These subjects are for short descriptions of perhaps 300 words. In each case-1-25-you should go and look at the place in question (of course these titles are only suggestive; you will select similar things which are familiar to you) and ask yourself : a. "What is there that makes this place itself? different from other [Elms, or Mills, or Crossings]?" b. What are the most striking characteristics to me? What impresses me most?" 'It hardly does as a class exercise, but it is worth while at other times than in class to try to think with what purpose you would render this or that. These are all things one can see; it is not so hard to note some of their distinctive features. The following subjects are somewhat harder. They are (or were), however, just as much particular things, though not material. 26. The British Constitution. 32. The Present State of the Eastern Question. 33. The Educational System of Japan. 34. The Empire of Charlemagne. 35. Athens in the time of Pericles. B. THE METHOD OF DESCRIPTION. 20. The Point of View. If we understand by this time what kind of thing Description is, what we may reasonably try to do when we describe, let us turn our attention to the way we should go about it. And first as to those Canons of Rhetoric that we considered in our study of Narration. If they are general principles, they will probably be of service to us here as well as elsewhere. The Canon of Unity comes first, and this we might pass by as a matter of course, except that in this case there is a special application. Suppose we are talking about some fine building-telling about it, for instance, as we saw it from the front. We don't want to put in anything that might appear if we looked at it from behind, at least not here. The town is beautiful in the moonlight; let us say nothing of the things that are to be seen only by daylight. So-and-so was a great statesman; just at present it is of no concern to us that he also translates Horace. Except for contrast or comparison. True: but for contrast or comparison something quite different might be as much to the point; contrast or comparison are no violations of the Canon of Unity. In other words, we probably have some Point of View. If we are talking of the façade of Amiens, or of Geneva |