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Another reason that may guide the describer is men's tendency to make practical demands. They are impatient of portrayals, however vivid or artistic, that stop with themselves; their unspoken demand is that a description shall contribute to explain or enforce or prove something. As long as it is an amplification, making some goal of thought more sightly, it is interesting; but let it exist for itself alone, and plain people will regard it as an unpractical trifling. This general demand, which is not unwholesome, is to be reckoned with by any one who seeks a status for his work in literature.

II.

Forms of which Description is the Basis. - The few forms that employ description as their prevailing type are, so to speak, frankly outspoken as to their limitations: they are for the most part either unrestrainedly æsthetic, appealing to the few who are their fit audience, or downright practical, appealing to the many who want plain unimaginative facts.

Descriptive Poetry. Poetry, as it rises so largely out of the imagination, is a more descriptive art than prose. Its imagery, its concreteness, its liberty to revel in beautiful forms undisturbed by utilitarian exactions, all contribute to make its picturing power a main feature. And it is largely for its world of imagery that readers go to poetry and value it.

In spite of this fact, however, works distinctly descriptive form a comparatively small class, even in poetry; though it should be noted that no class is choicer. The same prejudice against the non-utilizable seems to be encountered here as in prose; accordingly the imagery and description are valued mostly as they are concentrated into some sentiment, or lesson, or emotion, in which the poem's true significance resides. Hence the special field of description is in short lyric poems, where some image or suggestion of nature is

taken up and applied to some truth of life. A small and much-valued body of longer descriptive poems, also, are counted high among the stores of English literature.

EXAMPLES OF LONGER DESCRIPTIVE POEMS.— Thompson's Seasons and Castle of Indolence; Milton's L'Allegro and Il Penseroso; Keats's Endymion; Beattie's Minstrel; Burns's Cotter's Saturday Night; Goldsmith's Traveller and Deserted Village; Tennyson's Palace of Art, and Dream of Fair Women; Browning's Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came, and How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix.

Informative Treatises and Articles. - Description is employed with the purpose of imparting plain information, and with no attempt to shun what is statistical and inventory-like, in books and periodical articles whose object is to give an account of some building, work of art or mechanism, natural phenomenon, or country's resources. In such descriptions the pictorial element is little regarded: interest centres in dimensions, accurate details, statistics, and the like. Thoroughness and clearness are the predominating aims; the subject is supposed to contain its own interest, and not to need the vivifying power of language to create or heighten it. Such work may indeed profit by vigor and lightness of style, so far as these qualities do not interfere with its practical aim; but the practical aim must first be satisfied.

EXAMPLES. - Standard books of this kind are Wallace's Russia and Williams's The Middle Kingdom. In periodical literature may be mentioned the numerous articles continually appearing on some projected or completed public work, as the Congressional Library, the Sub-way in Boston, the Columbia University Buildings; as also papers on the resources of some state or district, art exhibitions, and the like. It is distinctively the class of useful literature.

Sketches of Travel and Observation. Intermediate in tone between the forms just named, and inclining sometimes to the purely literary, sometimes to the informative, is a valued body of books and sketches of travel and observation. In these

works description, while remaining the element for which the book or article exists, employs also narrative elements, in the shape of incidents and details of travel, popular traditions, and the like. The style aimed at is light, lively, conversational. The aim is to impart information in the guise of charm and amusement. It does not ordinarily seek minuteness of information; being occupied rather with the endeavor to sketch scenery, towns, customs, and national types, in an enjoyable and realistic manner.

EXAMPLES. Stevenson's Inland Voyage, Travels with a Donkey, and The Amateur Emigrant are good examples of the rather more literary treatment of this kind of material. Kinglake's Eothen is a brilliant book of Eastern travel. Borrow's The Bible in Spain is a noted book of this class; not purely descriptive. A rather thoughtful and philosophic example is Emerson's English Traits. Hawthorne's Our Old Home is lighter and more graceful. Of works less ambitiously literary may be mentioned Du Chaillu's The Land of the Midnight Sun, and the works of Mrs. Isabella Bird Bishop on Oriental travel.

CHAPTER XV.

NARRATION.

Of men's natural impulse, mentioned at the beginning of the last chapter, to report what they observe in the world around them, narration, the report of action, is by far the most prolific outcome. Its congenial subject makes it the most spontaneous of literary types. When we inquire what ordinary men, men of the street and of common life, are interested in and talk about, we find it invariably something involving action and its result, a race, a contest, a feat of bodily prowess, a casualty. When we ask what men are readiest to relate about themselves, we find it to be something that they have lived through, and that has become an event in their experience. Thus wellnigh everything in life comes to expression in story; and the story, narrative, is the form of literature that comes nearest to making itself.1

Very

It will not do to conclude from this, however, that narrative is the easiest to make or the least artistic when made. nearly the opposite is the truth. Of all the literary types narration demands perhaps the most finely adjusted art; but because the chief capability for it is supplied by natural invention, the art, while not less exacting, gets itself into form by

1" Our very speech is curiously historical. Most men, you may observe, speak only to narrate; not in imparting what they have thought, which indeed were often a very small matter, but in exhibiting what they have undergone or seen, which is a quite unlimited one, do talkers dilate. Cut us off from Narrative, how would the stream of conversation, even among the wisest, languish into detached handfuls, and among the foolish utterly evaporate! Thus, as we do nothing but enact History, we say little but recite it." - CARLYLE, On History, Essays, Vol. ii, p. 84.

2 See above, p. 390.

a kind of native instinct discovering its own laws of working. More must be allowed to nature in proportion as more is involved in art. The principles here traced, therefore, must, to an extent beyond the ordinary, wait upon those who are fit to apply them.

Definition of Narration. Narration is the recounting, in succession, of the particulars that together make up a transaction.

A brief analysis of this definition will reveal some of the special aims in making a narrative.

I. The word transaction, which designates the subject-matter of narration, implies not a mere agglomeration of particulars but a series, rounded and self-contained, with a character as a whole in which all the particulars share; nor does this series merely go on and stop but rather is shaped to a culmination in which the whole trend of significance comes to light and solution.

2. By the particulars that make up the transaction are meant not any and all the things that take place, but merely such as have affinities with each other in working toward the end in view. This implies rigid selection, and careful weighing of what are retained; it implies also that no particular exists for itself alone, but merely as part of a larger event.

3. These particulars are related in succession; that is to say, they have a movement, one growing out of another and preparing for a third, and all together making a chain which in its large result is remembered in the order of time. This gives the effect of the simplest associative law of thought, contiguity; but the masterliness of its art consists largely in giving the particulars a closer interrelation — of similarity, of cause and effect without seeming to do so; so that a succession apparently casual and artless becomes really a finely adjusted order of events.

1 See above, p. 443.

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