A wet Sunday in a country inn !-whoever has had the luck to experience one can alone judge of my situation. The rain pattered against the casements; the bells tolled for church with a melancholy sound. I went to the windows in quest of something to amuse the eye; but it seemed as if I had been placed completely out of the reach of all amusement. The windows of my bedroom looked out among tiled roofs and stacks of chimneys, while those of my sitting-room commanded a full view of the stable-yard. I know of nothing more calculated to make a man sick of this world than a stableyard on a rainy day. The place was littered with wet straw that had been kicked about by travelers and stable-boys. In one corner was a stagnant pool of water, surrounding an island of muck; there were several halfdrowned fowls crowded together under a cart, among which was a miserable, crest-fallen cock, drenched out of all life and spirit; his drooping tail matted, as it were, into a single feather, along which the water trickled from his back; near the cart was a half-dozing cow, chewing the cud, and standing patiently to be rained on, with wreaths of vapor rising from her reeking hide; a walleyed horse, tired of the loneliness of the stable, was poking his spectral head out of a window, with the rain dripping on it from the eaves; an unhappy cur, chained to a dog-house hard by, uttered something every now and then, between a bark and a yelp; a drab of a kitchen wench tramped backwards and forwards through the yard in pattens, looking as sulky as the weather itself; everything in short was comfortless and forlorn, excepting a crew of hardened ducks, assembled like boon companions round a puddle, and making a riotous noise over their liquor.1

Of course, any such special mental state or mood, when once it is taken, must be consistently maintained. Yet there need be no violation of unity, if the mental point of view is varied in order to combine different impressions of the same person or place. A writer may want to contrast the beauty which a garden has for some artistic guest with the hopelessly forbidding look which it has for the boy who must weed it; or to set the irritating noisiness which a city street has for him in an hour of weariness over against the stimulating hum of busy life as it comes to him in an hour of eager strength. These changes in mental attitude may be made as the occasion suggests; but, like changes in the physical point of view, they must bring no confusion to the reader.

1 Irving, Bracebridge Hall.

B. SELECTION

1. Necessity of selection. The second step in the descriptive process is selection. Once the writer has a definite point of view, his next concern is to know what details he ought to put in and what he can well leave out in order to give his reader just as clear and vivid an image as possible. Of course, he cannot hope to include all the details of real life. It is plainly futile for him to try to mention every line on a man's face, every twig on a tree, every separate sound on a spring morning. Neither he nor any other artist can compete with life, for “Life goes before us, infinite in complication." The painter and the sculptor realize this and do not try to get photographic exactness in their work. The writer, too, must realize that to attempt cataloguing every possible detail would tend to eliminate all individuality and suggestiveness from his sketches. A mere inventory is never artistic, and description without selection is hopelessly tedious and confusing. Yet on the other hand it is possible that the details may be too meager, leaving the image in the reader's mind dim and indistinct. A great problem for every descriptive writer, therefore, is to find the right details, the ones that will be most useful in conveying his mental image to his reader.

2. Finding essential details. If his description is to be successful, he must, in the first place, find those details which will clearly individualize his object. Whether he intends merely to suggest an image or whether he aims at careful identification, there will always be many details which are utterly inconsequential for purposes of the description and comparatively few which have real power to characterize. For instance, in describing a man it does not help much to say that he is five feet ten inches in height, with brown hair, blue eyes, and a smooth face; there are thousands of men who can be pictured in this way. Again, in describing a particular student's room, the conventional pillows and pennants and photographs are far less important than a well-framed copy

of Whistler's Mother on the wall or a toothbrush on the floor under a chair. Only those details which seem to belong peculiarly to the object have the greatest descriptive value. These significant details, however, are not always easy to find. As we all know from everyday experience, it is sometimes difficult to say just what is distinctive about objects with which we have long been familiar, and even more difficult to catch the most characteristic points about objects which are new. We may be asked to describe our own house so that a friend can locate it, and be at a loss to make it stand out unmistakably among the other houses in the same neighborhood. We may know perfectly well the difference between oak and ash, between a robin's note and a cardinal's, between the taste of veal and chicken, and yet when we are asked just where the difference lies, we may be unable to make any specific reply. Still these simple matters of characterization, and far more difficult ones, too, can be mastered. It is not especially remarkable to come upon a blind man who can identify his friend's step on the sidewalk, or a housewife who can distinguish her visitors by the way they ring the doorbell. Occasionally we even find a man who can recognize a stone-mason by the gestures he makes when he speaks in a political meeting, or one who can tell a violinist from a cellist by the way he swings his arms when he walks. The essential in this skill seems to be not only a quick perception, but also the habit of clear and decisive gazing, for as Mr. Burroughs has said, "not by a first casual glance, but by a steady, deliberate aim of the eye, are the rare and characteristic things discovered." And back of all is the knowledge of what to look for. The naturalist, the painter, and the sculptor alike know just what gives individuality to the objects which they present. In like manner the writer, while he observes closely, must also know what to count most significant in his observations.

Yet in the selection of details the writer of effective description must consider more than their distinctiveness. He will naturally wish to stimulate attention and at the same time to

economize his reader's effort. This ideal cannot be attained without recognizing the fundamental part which memory plays in the communication of all sense impressions. Whenever we read a description, consciously or unconsciously we call up some image or images from our past experience as a means of visualizing the new object. "A spacious, old-fashioned house, painted in yellow and white"; "A sunburnt, pock-marked sailor, illlooking and raw-boned"; "The tops of the trees lying all speckled and furry under the moonlight"; -all these have meaning for us only as they are related to the images which are stored up in our minds. To succeed in conveying a mental image to others, then, a writer must get details which are at once highly suggestive and common to universal experience. Perhaps, as Carlyle said, it will be some slight and apparently accidental detail which he will choose "a light-gleam, which instantaneously excites the mind and urges it to complete the picture, and evolve the meaning thereof for itself." Or very probably he will find details which are important both for characterization and for suggestiveness. But in any case, by taking a familiar detail which stimulates the reader's imagination, he can give not only that single detail, but also many others which are associated with it in the reader's memory. Thus he can combine a maximum of vividness in his writing with a minimum of effort on the part of his reader.

Furthermore, the writer's dominant impression of the object or scene which he undertakes to present will influence him in the selection of details. We all know how the same woman will seem brisk and refreshingly independent to one painter, abrupt and haughty to another; and each portrays her according to his own conception. Similarly, a great city like New York affects various painters in various ways; to one the message of Manhattan is "I suffer," to another " I sing,” to another "I work," to a fourth "I dream"; and each one draws his scenes from the life of the great city to suit his own impression.1 In the same manner, a writer usually has some chief impression 1 Louis Baury, The Message of Manhattan, Bookman, Vol. 33, p. 592.

of what he perceives. It may be an impression of new spring greenness, of noisy confusion, of quaintness, of gray melancholy, of teasing sweetness, of solemn beauty; or it may be an impression produced by the special mental point of view held by the writer. But whatever it is, it affects his choice of details. Those are selected which will bring out this dominant effect. Indeed it is in this way that we get the writer's interpretation of his subject. And just as we value the painting over the photograph, because of its greater individuality, so ordinarily the description which shows the writer's personal feeling is to be preferred over the one which is colorless and matter-of-fact.

C. GROUPING

1. For prominence. How shall the details thus selected be arranged? The principle of emphasis, of course, requires that those details which are especially useful in conveying the image be made prominent by their position. They may be important because they have most power to individualize or because they attract immediate attention. In any case they should come in the initial sentence or else be massed at the end. Thus in the quotation from Poe on pages 307-308 we find the "principal feature " of the house named at once, and in the following from Mr. Sidney Colvin's Introduction to Stevenson's letters the writer holds back his friend's most striking feature until last:

Imagine all this [Stevenson's brilliance in company] helped by the most speaking of presences: a steady, penetrating fire in the brown, wide-set eyes, a compelling power and richness in the smile; courteous, waving gestures of the arms and long, nervous hands, a lit cigarette generally held between the fingers; continual rapid shiftings and pacings to and fro as he conversed : rapid, but not flurried nor awkward, for there was a grace in his attenuated but wellcarried figure, and his movements were light, deft, and full of spring. There was something for strangers, and even for friends, to get over in the queer garments which in youth it was his whim to wear the badge, as they always seemed to me, partly of a genuine carelessness, certainly of a genuine lack of cash (the little he had was always absolutely at the disposal of his friends), partly of a deliberate detachment from any particular social class