English: Composition and Literature. William Franklin Webster

the smoke ascended among the trees, impregnated with savory incense, not heavy, dull, and surfeiting, like the steam of cookery indoors, but sprightly and piquant. The smell of our feast was akin to the woodland odors with which it mingled.” (“Mosses from an Old Manse.”)

      Or this from Lowell?—

      “Under the yaller-pines I house,

      When sunshine makes ’em all sweet-scented,

      An’ hear among their furry boughs

      The baskin’ west wind purr contented,

      While ’way o’erhead, ez sweet an’ low

      Ez distant bells thet ring for meetin’,

      The wedged wil’ geese their bugles blow,

      Further an’ further South retreatin’.”4

      Or cut this from marble?—

      “O mother Ida, many-fountained Ida,

      Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die.

      For now the noonday quiet holds the hill;

      The grasshopper is silent in the grass;

      The lizard, with his shadow on the stone,

      Rests like a shadow, and the winds are dead.

      The purple flower droops; the golden bee

      Is lily-cradled; I alone awake.

      My eyes are full of tears, my heart of love,

      My heart is breaking, and my eyes are dim,

      And I am all aweary of my life.”5

      The painter cannot put sounds upon a canvas, nor can the sculptor carve from marble an odor or a taste. We use the other senses in determining qualities of objects; and words which describe effects produced by other senses beside sight are valuable in description. As Lowell says, “we may shut our eyes, but we cannot help knowing” a large number of beautiful things. Moreover, language suggests hidden ideas that the representative arts cannot so well do. The following from a “Song” by Lowell has in it suggestions which the picture could not present.

      “Violet! sweet violet!

      Thine eyes are full of tears;

      Are they wet

      Even yet

      With the thought of other years?

      Or with gladness are they full,

      For the night so beautiful,

      And longing for those far-off spheres?

      “Thy little heart, that hath with love

      Grown colored like the sky above,

      On which thou lookest ever,—

      Can it know

      All the woe

      Of hope for what returneth never,

      All the sorrow and the longing

      To these hearts of ours belonging?”

      Enumeration and Suggestion Description, like narration, has two large divisions: one simply to give information or instruction; the other to present a vivid picture. One is representative or enumerative; the other, suggestive. One may be illustrated by guide-books; the other by the descriptions of Stevenson or Ruskin. And in the most artistic fashion the two have been made to supplement each other in the following picture of “bright and beautiful Athens” by Cardinal Newman. From the first, to the sentence beginning “But what he would not think of,” there is simply an enumeration of features which a commercial agent might see; the rest is what the artistic soul of the lover of beauty saw there. One is enumeration; the other a gloriously suggestive picture.

      “A confined triangle, perhaps fifty miles its greatest length, and thirty its greatest breadth; two elevated rocky barriers, meeting at an angle; three prominent mountains, commanding the plain,—Parnes, Pentelicus, and Hymettus; an unsatisfactory soil; some streams, not always full;—such is about the report which the agent of a London company would have made of Attica. He would report that the climate was mild; the hills were limestone; there was plenty of good marble; more pasture land than at first survey might have been expected, sufficient, certainly, for sheep and goats; fisheries productive; silver mines once, but long since worked out; figs fair; oil first-rate; olives in profusion. But what he would not think of noting down was that that olive-tree was so choice in nature and so noble in shape that it excited a religious veneration; and that it took so kindly to the light soil as to expand into woods upon the open plain, and to climb up and fringe the hills. He would not think of writing word to his employers, how that clear air, of which I have spoken, brought out, yet blended and subdued, the colors on the marble, till they had a softness and harmony, for all their richness, which in a picture looks exaggerated, yet is after all within the truth. He would not tell how that same delicate and brilliant atmosphere freshened up the pale olive, till the olive forgot its monotony, and its cheek glowed like the arbutus or beech of the Umbrian hills. He would say nothing of the thyme and the thousand fragrant herbs which carpeted Hymettus; he would hear nothing of the hum of its bees; nor take account of the rare flavor of its honey, since Gaza and Minorca were sufficient for the English demand. He would look over the Ægean from the height he had ascended; he would follow with his eyes the chain of islands, which, starting from the Sunian headland, seemed to offer the fabled divinities of Attica, when they would visit their Ionian cousins, a sort of viaduct thereto across the sea; but that fancy would not occur to him, nor any admiration of the dark violet billows with their white edges down below; nor of those graceful, fan-like jets of silver upon the rocks, which slowly rise aloft like water spirits from the deep, then shiver, and break, and spread, and shroud themselves, and disappear in a soft mist of foam; nor of the gentle, incessant heaving and panting of the whole liquid plain; nor of the long waves, keeping steady time, like a line of soldiery as they resound upon the hollow shore,—he would not deign to notice the restless living element at all except to bless his stars that he was not upon it. Nor the distinct details, nor the refined coloring, nor the graceful outline and roseate golden hue of the jutting crags, nor the bold shadows cast from Otus or Laurium by the declining sun;—our agent of a mercantile firm would not value these matters even at a low figure. Rather, we must turn for the sympathy we seek to yon pilgrim student, come from a semi-barbarous land to that small corner of the earth, as to a shrine, where he might take his fill of gazing on those emblems and coruscations of invisible unoriginate perfection. It was the stranger from a remote province, from Britain or from Mauritania, who in a scene so different from that of his chilly, woody swamps, or of his fiery, choking sands, learned at once what a real University must be, by coming to understand the sort of country which was its suitable home.”6

       Enumerative Description. Enumerative description has one point of great difference from suggestive description. In the former everything is told; in the latter the description is as fortunate in what it omits as in what it includes. Were an architect to give specifications for the building of a house, every detail would have to be included; but after all the pages of careful enumeration the reader would know less of how it looked than after these few words from Irving. “A large, rickety wooden building stood in its place, with great gaping windows, some of them broken and mended with old hats and petticoats, and over the door was painted ‘The Union Hotel, by Jonathan Doolittle.’” So the manual training student uses five hundred words to describe in detail a box which would be thrown off with but a few words in a piece of literature. In enumerative description, one element is of as much importance as another; no special feature is made primary by the omission or subdual of other qualities. It has value in giving exact details of objects, as if for their construction, and in including an object in a class.

      Suggestive Description. Suggestive description, description the aim of which is not information, but the reproduction of a picture, is the

4

Biglow Papers, No. X.

5

Tennyson’s Œnone.

6

Historical Sketches, by Cardinal Newman.