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 omission of details, but by their submission. 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.
It has been remarked by Stevenson that in stories in which incident is made subordinate to character-drawing the interest is sure to be less vivid. He remarks: —
In character-studies the pleasure we take is critical; we watch, we approve, we smile at incongruities, we are moved to sudden heats of sympathy with courage, suffering, or virtue. But the characters are still themselves, they are not us; the more clearly they are depicted, the more widely do they stand away from us, the more imperiously do they thrust us back into our place as a spectator… It is not character but incident that woos us out of our reserve. Something happens as we desire it to happen to ourselves; some situation, that we have long dallied with in fancy, is realized in the story with enticing and appropriate details. Then we forget the characters; then we push the hero aside; then we plunge into the tale in our own person and bathe in fresh experience; and then, and then only, do we say that we have been reading a romance. —A Gossip on Romance.
All these considerations are of interest to the student, and they should all be taken into account when he is looking for a subject or when he is considering methods. As a matter of practical work, it is probably true that nobody goes to work to construct stories without having some theme, some dominating suggestion in mind. He will therefore form his plot or shape his subject according to this germinating thought, without for the moment taking theories much into account. Have a theme he must, and to my thinking the more objective this is the better. The more it deals with outward things and shows what is within through them; the more it has of incident and is concerned with the actualities of life; the more it has of broad realities as distinguished from the trivialities of existence, the more likely it is to succeed.
In the treatment of a theme, the first thing is to be sure that it is thoroughly known to the writer. I do not mean that it is necessary to know every detail. I do mean that what is known should be apprehended clearly; that there should be no doubt about the end and the beginning, whatever vagueness there may be about the minutiæ of the way from one to the other. It is especially important in story-writing that the author know his characters before he write about them. It is generally safe to compose half a dozen chapters before beginning a novel, chapters which are not to be used in the book at all, but which serve to make the author acquainted with the personages he is to deal with. If every young novelist would study the methods of Hawthorne in this respect it would be to his advantage. Any one who is at all accustomed to examining literature critically knows how almost universal it is that new authors show in the first third or quarter of their books that they are slowly becoming aware of the natures of the characters in their fiction. Often the middle of the work is reached before the writer has any clear or intimate knowledge of the men and women whom he is trying to picture.
I do not believe in hard and fast rules for the construction of stories. Methods of work must vary with individual temperaments. My own way of work naturally seems to me the most logical, but I realize that this is a question which each writer must decide for himself. Personally, I find it necessary to know the general course of a story, and above all to know the end, before I can begin it. Once these are clear and true in my mind, I deliberately consider the beginning. I say “deliberately consider” because the succeeding steps have so much the air of being involuntary. Once I have decided where to begin, I devote myself to the study of my characters. I walk the streets with them; they have a share in my waking and in my sleep. I know the general course of the history I am trying to tell, but the details I am content to learn slowly. The thing which I endeavor to do is to be sure of the character of those who are involved in this history. I am not without a feeling that an old fellow who sits in solitary state in the attic of my brain tells me the incidents of the narrative, but the acquaintance of the actors I must make for myself.
Not only must a story be known to the writer but it must for the time being at least be true to him. He must believe it as he writes; he must be completely possessed by a sense of the verity of what he is telling, or he cannot persuade the reader to accept it as real. It may seem to you that this is equivalent to saying that a novelist must be a good deal like the White Queen in “Through a Looking Glass,” who practiced until she was able to believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast. The difference is that the novelist does not have to practice. The characters become so vital in his mind, they act so independently and with so evident a will of their own, that it is impossible not to feel that their story is actual. Of course I do not mean that if the novelist were put on oath he would affirm that the tale is true; yet it seems to me that if I were called upon to swear that a story which I had written were not true, I should go about forever after with a humiliated sense that I had committed perjury.
I think it is the experience of every novelist that characters in a tale will often act apparently at their own good pleasure and in open defiance of the intention of the writer. They are not infrequently almost as independent of the will of the author of their being as the modern child is said to be independent of the will of the author of his. I have myself struggled to force characters to do a certain thing and have written and rewritten certain chapters in my effort to make them follow my wishes. I could set down the words which declared that they had done the thing which I desired, but I knew that I was lying and I was conscious that my characters knew that I knew it, so that of course there was nothing to do but to tear up the falsehood and tell the truth. The explanation of all this is, I suppose, that the superficial conclusions of the mind are corrected by the unconscious logic of the imagination. The characters of the personages in the story being what they are, the personages must inevitably behave in a certain way, and an underlying perception of this fundamental truth prevents an imaginative author from being able to treat his fictitious people as puppets.
The importance of knowing the end from the beginning is the same whether one is telling an anecdote or is writing a history, a romance, or a biography. It is necessary to discriminate clearly in regard to the climax of an anecdote, as it is to be sure of the climax of a novel. Everybody knows how the story which in the mouth of one man is racy and pointed becomes stupid and ineffective the moment it is told by another. I have to thank an English gentleman for having unconsciously furnished me with an example of the disadvantage of relating an anecdote with the wrong end first. He told in the smoking-room of a London hotel an incident which I dimly remembered as being in James Dodds’ “Biographical Study of Chalmers,” and I made a note of his version in order to compare the two. This is Dodds’ story: —
[Chalmers] was present at an evening party where a very accomplished lady was discoursing most eloquent music from the fashionable opera of the day. When she was at the overture and the recitatives he looked perplexed, as if listening to a medley of madness; but when she struck upon some lively and expressive airs, he turned with a look of great relief to the gentleman who was next to him: “Do you know, sir, I love these lucid intervals!”
This is the way in which the English gentleman told it: —
“I say, don’t you know, Dr. Chalmers called tunes lucid intervals. Wasn’t that deuced good? Lucid intervals, by Jove! He heard a lady sing, don’t you know, and that’s what he said. He didn’t mean all tunes of course; but she’d been playing things, you know, and putting in instrumental fal-lals and crazy things on the keys, and finally came to a song. I call that devilish witty, don’t you know!”
It is hardly necessary to give examples of this fault, and this seems absurd and extravagant. It came so providentially, however, at the very time when I was writing these lectures, that it was not to be resisted.
It is excellent practice for the student to write out stories or incidents which come under his observation, and good things which he hears said or told. There are few exercises in which it is more easily possible to interest an ordinary class in composition than work of this sort, and it may be made of a good deal of value. To be really of use it is necessary that the story be told and retold until it is in the best possible form that the student can compass. It should be done as carefully as if it were a great and complete narrative.
I said in another talk that I am not willing to concede that conversation is an art which comes by nature, and the justice of this must be especially felt by one who listens when story-telling is the order of the day. Those who succeed in telling a story well are those who have taken the trouble to learn how. It is a mistake to suppose that the carelessly spoken anecdote which is so felicitously put that it seems to be the thought of the moment has cost the narrator nothing. He has consciously labored to attain the art of telling things well; and while here as everywhere natural gifts count, the man who cultivates a small talent can generally outshine him who leaves a great talent to take care of itself.
I have perhaps spoken so as to give the impression that a story makes itself. I mean nothing of the sort. It is true that the first germ of a fiction is often caught in the mind as a plumy-winged seed of the wild clematis is caught in the cranny of a wall. Sometimes a chance word, the sight of a face in the crowd, a bit of information or talk, will become the suggestion from which a story will grow. It must be nurtured, however, if its growth is to be vigorous or symmetrical. It must be brooded over and watched; it must be nourished and tended. When a story is well formed in the mind and the characters are well defined, it will grow and develop spontaneously, but it must be given a good start first. In other words, the theme must be dwelt upon until it is so completely a part of the thought that the mind will carry it forward unconsciously, and the tale will seem to be going on of itself.
It is customary to say that all narrative has four elements: first, what happened, – the plot or story; second, what persons were concerned, – the characters; third, the situation, which is both in time and space, – in other words the when and the where; fourth, the central motive, – the thing of interest or significance for which the whole is told. These elements seem to me to be likely to come to the writer in the order in which I have named them. Sometimes he is aware of the central purpose first, especially in fiction written with a declared motive; but this does not appear to be the natural order in the case of fiction really imaginative. An author must of course have a comprehension of the central motive before he begins to write, but he deduces it from his plot rather than forms a plot to embody the idea. All this analysis is of more value in revision of work or in criticism than in actual composition. The writer who is really alive and interested in what he is doing thinks of his story as a story and as a transcript from life, not as a combination of four elements.
In this same line of criticism and revision it is well to note that Narration is necessarily specific, progressive, and cumulative. It is specific in that it deals with facts rather than with theories, with incidents rather than with deductions, with events rather than with reflections. It is progressive in that the interest must move forward, and the theme must advance with the incidents. A collection of incidents does not make a narrative any more than a pile of lumber makes a house. There must be a sequence of events related to each other by the tie of cause and effect. Narration is cumulative because this chain of cause and effect must lead to some conclusion, some climax, some end. Even in the relation of the most trifling anecdotes these three qualities are to be found, and in their perfection lies the secret of the greatest works of literature. The theorists who excuse inartistic and unsymmetrical fiction by the theory that a novel should be a piece cut out of life and having neither beginning or end, forget that that which is comely and fit, so long as it is part of the living tree-trunk, becomes an unsightly block when it is chopped out. It must be shaped and finished to be again beautiful. The story which has by relation been taken from its place in actual life must be worked and polished by art; it must become a whole in itself or it is forever an uncomely log, crudely disfiguring the landscape and fit only to be used as material for work or to feed the fire.