SECTION II.

ARTISTIC DESCRIPTION.

Where words serve no higher purpose than they do in scientific description, that is, where they serve only as means of identifying objects that are or are to

Aim and method of

artistic description.

be under the eye, they give useful information, indeed, but pretend to no higher excellence. The purpose of description not scientific is less to convey information (though it may do that incidentally) than to affect the imagination, to produce illusion, to give pleasure. The writer of a description of this kind, like the writer of a scientific description, should have his eye on the object that he is describing. He should not, however, dwell on details as such: he should not invite attention to this or that part, unless it is a characteristic part, a part that represents the whole. This kind of description, as distinguished in purpose from scientific description, may be called ARTISTIC; as distinguished in method, it may be called SUGGESTIVE.

Artistic description is exemplified in the following lines from Wordsworth's "Green Linnet":

"Amid yon tuft of hazel trees,

That twinkle to the gusty breeze,
Behold him perched in ecstasies,
Yet seeming still to hover;
There! where the flutter of his wings
Upon his back and body flings
Shadows and sunny glimmerings,
That cover him all over.

"My dazzled sight he oft deceives,
A Brother of the dancing leaves;
Then flits, and from the cottage-eaves

Pours forth his song in gushes."

Wordsworth, it will be observed, gives no particulars about the bird's dimensions, shape of beak, or variations of color, nothing by which it could be identified; he leaves a reader who has never seen a green linnet to imagine one by recalling some bird that he has seen and coloring it with the green of the hazel tree; he adds nothing to the reader's knowledge, but he associates with knowledge already possessed a poet's fancies and emotions. The value of the poem to each reader must depend on that reader's intelligence, imagination, and sympathy.

Every master of suggestive description recognizes the limits of his art and makes the most of its advantages. He does not undertake to show us the color or the form of a flower, as the painter does; but he enables us to feel its beauty, he clothes it with poetic associations.

"It is not," says Matthew Arnold, "Linnæus, or Cavendish, or Cuvier who gives us the true sense of animals, or water, or plants, who seizes their secret for us, who makes us participate in their life; it is Shakespeare, with his

'daffodils

That come before the swallow dares, and take

The winds of March with beauty;'

it is Wordsworth, with his

' voice... heard

In spring-time from the cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas

Among the farthest Hebrides;'

it is Keats, with his

'moving waters at their priestlike task

Of cold ablution round Earth's human shores;'

it is Chateaubriand, with his 'cîme indéterminée des forêts;' it is Senancour, with his mountain birch-tree: 'Cette écorce blanche, lisse et crevassée ; cette tige agreste; ces branches qui s'inclinent vers la terre ; la mobilité des feuilles, et tout cet. abandon, simplicité de la nature, attitude des déserts.' ” 1

1 Matthew Arnold: Essays in Criticism; Maurice de Guérin.

·

"In painting," says Burke, "we may represent any fine figure we please; but we never can give it those enlivening touches which it may receive from words. To represent an angel in a picture, you can only draw a beautiful young man winged: but what painting can furnish out any thing so grand as the addition of one word, the angel of the Lord?'... Now, as there is a mov. ing tone of voice, an impassioned countenance, an agitated gesture, which affect independently of the things about which they are exerted, so there are words, and certain dispositions of words, which being peculiarly devoted to passionate subjects, and always used by those who are under the influence of any passion, touch and move us more than those which far more clearly and distinctly express the subject-matter. We yield to sympathy what we refuse to description." 1

Emotion in

In saying that "we yield to sympathy what we refuse to description," Burke suggests a characteristic of descriptive writing already noted in connection with description. "The Green Linnet," the characteristic that communicates to the reader the writer's emotion in the presence of the object described. This communication of emotion may be made without distinct reference to its source in the objects observed, as it is in some modern English poetry and in many of the productions of the "symbolic" or "impressionist" school of writers in France. If, however, the end in view is nothing but the communication of feeling, language is not the appropriate means of expression. Vague emotion can be better expressed through songs without words than through songs with unmeaning words: for vague emotion the appropriate vehicle is music.

The problem for the writer is in what proportions to combine fancies and feelings with matters of fact. A writer who makes the matter-of-fact side of his descrip

1 Burke: On the Sublime and Beautiful, part v. sect. vii. This passage furnishes an example of skilful repetition similar to those on pages 150, 151.

tion prominent may be useful from the point of view of science, but he is not effective from the point of view of art. He may be intelligible to those who are in search of information, but he will not create interest: his work will have more accuracy than life. A writer who loses the sense of fact in a gush of emotion is disappointing to those who expect to find ideas behind words. may move his readers, but he will fail to provide "a local habitation" for the feeling he evokes.

He

Writers of artistic description sometimes undertake to transfer their emotions to inanimate objects by means of what Mr. Ruskin calls "the pathetic fallacy." The pathetic To explain this phrase, Mr. Ruskin quotes fallacy. and comments upon a couplet by Dr. Holmes:

"The spendthrift crocus, bursting through the mould
Naked and shivering, with his cup of gold.' 1

"This is very beautiful," says Mr. Ruskin, "and yet very untrue. The crocus is not a spendthrift, but a hardy plant; its yellow is not gold, but saffron. How is it that we enjoy so much the having it put into our heads that it is anything else than a plain crocus?

"It is an important question. For, throughout our past reasonings about art, we have always found that nothing could be good or useful, or ultimately pleasurable, which was untrue. But here is something pleasurable in written poetry which is nevertheless untrue. And what is more, if we think over our favourite poetry, we shall find it full of this kind of fallacy, and that we like it all the more for being so.

"It will appear also, on consideration of the matter, that this fallacy is of two principal kinds. Either, as in this case of the crocus, it is the fallacy of wilful fancy, which involves no real expectation that it will be believed; or else it is a fallacy caused by an excited state of the feelings, making us, for the time, more or less irrational. . . Thus, for instance, in Alton Locke,

▲ Oliver Wendell Holmes Spring.

"They rowed her in across the rolling foam-
The cruel, crawling foam.'

“The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl. The state of mind which attributes to it these characters of a living creature is one in which the reason is unhinged by grief. All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally character. ize as the Pathetic fallacy.'

"Now we are in the habit of considering this fallacy as eminently a character of poetical description, and the temper of mind in which we allow it, as one eminently poetical, because passionate. But I believe, if we look well into the matter, that we shall find the greatest poets do not often admit this kind of falseness, that it is only the second order of poets who much delight in it.

“Thus, when Dante describes the spirits falling from the bank of Acheron 'as dead leaves flutter from a bough,' he gives the most perfect image possible of their utter lightness, feebleness, passiveness, and scattering agony of despair, without, however, for an instant losing his own clear perception that these are souls, and those are leaves; he makes no confusion of one with the other. But when Coleridge speaks of

"The one red leaf, the last of its clan,

That dances as often as dance it can,'

he has a morbid, that is to say, a so far false, idea about the leaf: he fancies a life in it, and will, which there are not; confuses its powerlessness with choice, its fading death with merriment, and the wind that shakes it with music. Here, however, there is some beauty, even in the morbid passage; but take an instance in Homer and Pope. Without the knowledge of Ulysses, Elpenor, his youngest follower, has fallen from an upper chamber in the Circean palace, and has been left dead, unmissed by his leader or com panions, in the haste of their departure. They cross the sea to the Cimmerian land; and Ulysses summons the shades from Tartarus. The first which appears is that of the lost Elpenor. Ulysses, amazed, and in exactly the spirit of bitter and terrified lightness which is seen in Hamlet,1 addresses the spirit with the simple, startled words:

1 "Well said, old mole! can'st work i' the ground