—Sewall Ford: The Renunciation of Petruo ("Harper's").
EXERCISE
Notice the pictures on page 253. Can you determine from the picture anything about the character of the person? Just what feature in each helps you in this?
+Theme LXVIII.+—Describe some person known to most of the class.
(Do not name the person, but combine description and character sketching so that the class may be able to tell whom you mean.)
[Illustrations]
+135. Impression of a Description.+—Often the effectiveness of a description is determined more by the impression which it makes upon our feelings than by the vividness of the picture which it presents. Read the following description of the Battery in New York by Howells. Notice how the details which have been selected emphasize the "impression of forlornness." The sickly trees, the decrepit shade, the mangy grass plots, hungry-eyed and hollow children, the jaded women, silent and hopeless, the shameless houses, the hard-looking men, unite to give the one impression. Even the fresh blue water of the bay, which laughs and dances beyond, by its very contrast gives greater emphasis to the melancholy and forlorn appearance of the Battery.
All places that fashion has once loved and abandoned are very melancholy; but of all such places, I think the Battery is the most forlorn. Are there some sickly locust trees there that cast a tremulous and decrepit shade upon the mangy grass plots? I believe so, but I do not make sure; I am certain only of the mangy grass plots, or rather the spaces between the paths, thinly overgrown with some kind of refuse and opprobrious weed, a stunted and pauper vegetation proper solely to the New York Battery. At that hour of the summer morning when our friends, with the aimlessness of strangers who are waiting to do something else, saw the ancient promenade, a few scant and hungry-eyed little boys and girls were wandering over this weedy growth, not playing, but moving listlessly to and fro, fantastic in the wild inaptness of their costumes. One of these little creatures wore, with an odd, involuntary jauntiness, the cast-off best dress of some happier child, a gay little garment cut low in the neck and short in the sleeves, which gave her the grotesque effect of having been at a party the night before. Presently came two jaded women, a mother and a grandmother, that appeared, when they crawled out of their beds, to have put on only so much clothing as the law compelled. They abandoned themselves upon the green stuff, whatever it was, and, with their lean hands clasped outside their knees, sat and stared, silent and hopeless, at the eastern sky, at the heart of the terrible furnace, into which in those days the world seemed cast to be burnt up, while the child which the younger woman had brought with her feebly wailed unheeded at her side. On one side of the women were the shameless houses out of which they might have crept, and which somehow suggested riotous maritime dissipation; on the other side were those houses in which had once dwelt rich and famous folk, but which were now dropping down to the boarding-house scale through various unhomelike occupations to final dishonor and despair. Down nearer the water, and not far from the castle that was once a playhouse and is now the depot of emigration, stood certain express wagons, and about these lounged a few hard-looking men. Beyond laughed and danced the fresh blue water of the bay, dotted with sails and smokestacks.
—Howells: Their Wedding Journey.
The successive images of the preceding selection are clear enough, but they are bound together by a common purpose, which is the creation of a single impression. Often, however, a description may present, not a single impression, but a series of such impressions, to which a unity is given by the fact that they are all connected with one event, or occur at the same time, or in the same place. Such a series of impressions is illustrated in the following:—