In the course of a story the writer will have occasion to describe persons and—roughly—things. Descriptive writing is descriptive writing, but the matters for consideration in describing a man or woman and a countryside are somewhat different, and will be taken up separately.
DESCRIPTION OF PERSONS
As I have stated in another place, the writer cannot gain much in capacity to express through the objective study of examples. He can only practice the art, seriously and intelligently. But Stevenson's brief story of an episode in the life of Master Francois Villon of Paris, poet, master of arts, and house-breaker, "A Lodging for the Night," so perfectly describes the persons involved that it calls for quotation. The object is not to display perfect use of epithet, rather to demonstrate the entire adequacy of brief and pungent description. Villon, after a short introduction, is discovered in a small house with "some of the thievish crew with whom he consorted."
"A great pile of living embers diffused a strong and ruddy glow from the arched chimney. Before this straddled Dom Nicholas, the Picardy monk, with his skirts tucked up and his fat legs bared to the comfortable warmth. His dilated shadow cut the room in half; and the firelight only escaped on either side of his broad person, and in a little pool between his outspread feet. His face had the beery, bruised appearance of the continual drinker's; it was covered with a network of congested veins, purple in ordinary circumstances, but now pale violet, for even with his back to the fire the cold pinched him on the other side. His cowl had half fallen back, and made a strange excrescence on either side of his bull neck. So he straddled, grumbling, and cut the room in half with the shadow of his portly frame.
"On the right, Villon and Guy Tabary were huddled together over a scrap of parchment; Villon making a ballade which he was to call the 'Ballade of Roast Fish,' and Tabary spluttering admiration at his shoulder. The poet was a rag of a man, dark, little, and lean, with hollow cheeks and thin black locks. He carried his four-and-twenty years with feverish animation. Greed had made folds about his eyes, evil smiles had puckered his mouth. The wolf and pig struggled together in his face. It was an eloquent, sharp, ugly, earthly countenance. His hands were small and prehensile, with fingers knotted like a cord; and they were continually flickering in front of him in violent and excessive pantomime. As for Tabary, a broad, complacent, admiring imbecility breathed from his squash nose and slobbering lips; he had become a thief, just as he might have become the most decent of burgesses, by the imperious chance that rules the lives of human geese and human donkeys.
"At the monk's other hand, Montigny and Thevenin Pensete played a game of chance. About the first there clung some flavor of good birth and training, as about a fallen angel; something long, lithe, and courtly in the person; something aquiline and darkling in the face. Thevenin, poor soul, was in great feather; he had done a good stroke of knavery that afternoon in the Faubourg St. Jacques, and all night he had been gaining from Montigny. A flat smile illuminated his face; his bald head shone rosily in a garland of red curls; his little protuberant stomach shook with silent chucklings as he swept in his gains."
The first thing to note about this fine descriptive fragment is that the persons are definitely placed in the room. The monk before the fire is the focal point; the others are placed in groups on his right and left hand. Two objects are achieved thereby; not only does the picture gain in definition, but it is given a closer relation to the story, which is partly concerned with what happens in the room. In other words, Stevenson describes his characters in relation to the story, and does not merely describe each one as he has occasion to name him, in isolation, and merely to give a reader a photograph with the name. Each is described in relation to the story and as he comes up in it.
The second thing to note is the extreme brevity and yet the complete adequacy of the description of each person. There is no itemizing of physical details; Stevenson has visualized not so much each man as the most striking characteristic of each man, and has used all resources of language to precipitate that characteristic in words. The result is impressive. A reader gains a clear and definite impression of the individual personality of each character, his spiritual nature as well as his physical aspect. The definition of the impression in each case results from the author's having described nothing possessed by any two in common. He has shown the unique quality of each person, which is all that is necessary.
This point of the technique of describing persons is nine-tenths of the whole technique. The fiction writer's proper aim is not so much to build up a physical picture of a character by itemizing the details of hair, complexion, stature, and so forth, as it is to reproduce the person's unique quality as an individual human being. Whether the character is an individual depends on the writer's creative genius, but whether he seems individual depends on his actions and the way he is described. Stevenson states Villon's salient physical characteristics, then remarks that the wolf and pig struggled together in his face, and a reader has the man, soul and body. The same method, though with less emphasis, is employed in picturing the others of the group.
A fundamental philosophical truth is that all knowledge is relative; we know things only in comparison with things previously encountered and classified. It follows that the difference between objects or persons is the ultimate factor that determines the character of each. The single unique quality of any character in a story is what the author must bring out in describing him if he is to have on paper the vivacity and distinction of the author's mental conception. In real life a reader meets many men and women; he does not take trouble to phrase the individual peculiarity of each, but he is acutely conscious of it. Each acquaintance stands for something unique and distinctive in his eyes, though he does not and perhaps could not state the essential difference from all others. And, in describing a person in his story, the writer must state that person's essential difference from all others, if the person is to have the reality of life for a reader, for the reader's only contact with the person is through the writer's words. In life, a reader will eliminate unconsciously from his mental representation of an acquaintance all qualities which the latter has in common with others, but verbal representation of a human being is shadowy enough at best, and in a story the writer himself must eliminate his characters' undistinctive qualities for the reader, or the persons will lack definition and concreteness.