ature of this sort is unusual. The principal function of description is to serve as an accessory to other forms of discourse.

Subordinate to narration as description usually is, however, we note, before leaving the consideration of these general relations, that description, for its own greater effectiveness, often takes the narrative form; the details of a scene, instead of being conceived of as mere data of form and space, become instinct with life, engage in action, progress on towards the completion of some occurrence. For example:

I was coming home from some place at the end of the world, about three o'clock of a black winter morning, and my way lay through a part of the town where there was literally nothing to be seen but lamps. Street after street, and all the folks asleep street after street, all lighted up as if for a procession and all as empty as a church till at last I got into that state of mind when a man listens and listens and begins to long for the sight of a policeman. All at once, I saw two figures: one a little man who was stumping along eastward at a good walk, and the other a girl of may be eight or ten who was running as hard as she was able down a cross street. Well, sir, the two ran into one another naturally enough at the corner; and then came the horrible part of the thing; for the man trampled calmly over the child's body and left her screaming on the ground. It sounds nothing to hear, but it was hellish to see. It was n't like a man; it was like some damned Juggernaut. I gave a view halloa, took to my heels, collared my gentleman, and brought him back to where was already quite a group about the screaming child. He was perfectly cool and made no resistance, but gave me one look, so ugly that it brought out the sweat on me like running. The people who had turned out were the girl's own family; and pretty soon the doctor, for whom she had been sent, put in an appearance. Well, the child was not much the worse, more frightened, according to the

Sawbones, and there you might have supposed would have been an end to it. But there was one curious circumstance. I had taken a loathing to my gentleman at first sight. So had the child's family, which was only natural. But the doctor's case was what struck me. He was the usual cut-and-dried apothecary, of no particular age and color, with a strong Edinburgh accent, and about as emotional as a bagpipe. Well, sir, he was like the rest of us; every time he looked at my prisoner I saw that Sawbones turn sick and white with the desire to kill him.1

In this passage it is not difficult to discover two wholly different rhetorical elements: on the one hand, the orderly arrangement of the narrator's experiences in the early morning, the sudden glimpse of the two figures, the collision, the capture, the arrival of the doctor, — all prosaic elements of the typical narrative; on the other hand, the impression left on the reader's imagination — the impression of the hellish brutality that characterized Hyde, that produced loathing and murderous hate in the beholder. Nor can there be any doubt that to create this impression of loathing was Stevenson's ultimate purpose. The episode has no value save as a picture of Hyde, disgusting, loathsome. To make his picture effective, the author elects to cast it into narrative form, but it is in essence description.

Another example of the same principle may be found in the famous chapter in Dickens's Tale of Two Cities, entitled "The Grindstone," where the gruesome picture of blood and frenzy is cast in the form of a detailed incident. Just as Muir found the mood of narration best suited to the clear exposition of how mountain lakes come into being, just as Erskine could make his proof more

1 Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. By permission of Charles Scribner's Sons.

convincing by throwing it into the form of chronicle, so Dickens, in developing the thought that the scene about the grindstone was a mad orgy of savagery and passion, conceived of the picture as a transaction and arranged the successive details as in narration. In function, therefore, the passage is narrative description.

How different in effect is the plain, straightforward manner of conventional description will appear in passages like the following, in which there is no suggestion of the progress of successive details as in an event: There lived in those days round the corner - in Bishopsgate Street Without one Brogley, sworn broker and appraiser, who kept a shop where every description of secondhand furniture was exhibited in the most uncomfortable aspect, and under circumstances and in combinations the most completely foreign to its purpose. Dozens of chairs hooked on to washing-stands, which with difficulty poised themselves on the shoulders of sideboards, which in their turn stood on the wrong side of dining-tables, gymnastic with their legs upward on the tops of other dining-tables, were among its most reasonable arrangements. A banquet array of dish-covers, wineglasses, and decanters was generally to be seen spread forth upon the bosom of a four-post bedstead, for the entertainment of such genial company as half a dozen pokers and a hall lamp. A set of window curtains, with no windows belonging to them, would be seen gracefully draping a barricade of chests of drawers, loaded with little jars from chemists' shops; while a homeless hearth-rug, severed from its natural companion the fireside, braved the shrewd east wind in its adversity, and trembled in melancholy accord with the shrill complainings of a cabinet piano, wasting away, a string a day, and faintly resounding to the noises of the street in its jangling and distracted brain. Of motionless clocks that never stirred a finger, and seemed as incapable of being successfully wound up as the pecuniary affairs of their former owners, there was always a great choice in Mr. Brogley's shop; and various looking

glasses, accidentally placed at compound interest of reflection and refraction, presented to the eye an eternal perspective of bankruptcy and ruin.1

IV. Summary

In summing up these general remarks on narration in its relations to the other forms of prose discourse, it is, perhaps, well to observe that one can overrate the importance of the distinctions between exposition, argumentation, description, and narration. It is not for a moment to be assumed that the great masters of prose deliberate with poised pen whether they are utilizing exposition or argument, whether their word-pictures are simple description or are shaded by the narrative method. Their problem is rather, What is the most effective method of presenting thought? A writer with a vivid power of visualization, a sense of concreteness, will choose to expound a theory or a process by means of a picture or through the medium of a story. Another, whose gifts are of the logical, abstract order, will set forth the same theory or process by orderly, clear, but unimaginative exposition. Yet both will write effectively. An exposition that would be suitable for the Scientific American would be out of place in St. Nicholas. Means, methods, must yield to ends.

On the other hand, there is sometimes a tendency towards the other extreme; a tendency to argue that these rhetorical distinctions have no ultimate value, that they are mere academic subtleties. This is, in its way, as fallacious as to overestimate their importance. The distinctions between methods are useful largely to the student and to the critic, it is true, but to them they certainly possess practical value. If definite character

1 Dickens's Dombey and Son.

istic advantages do belong to one form of discourse as compared with another, the student of literature can more judicially estimate the work of a literary master when he appreciates wherein the master utilizes the rhetorical opportunities that lie open to him. His criticism becomes more truly scientific and not merely a welter of impressions. Distinctions of method are not the mere wire-drawn subtleties of theory.